A recent study of 600 resellers revealed a "high demand" for a collaboration-software program called SharePoint. Intrigued (and unconvinced), I conducted my own informal and unscientific survey of 25 of my clients and asked them: 1) if they had ever heard of SharePoint; 2) what it actually does.

Results: About 20% of the small-business owners I spoke to had heard of the product, and approximately 0% could describe what it actually does.

I don't blame these guys. Even after 15 years in the technology business, I found myself at a loss to explain (let alone justify) these sorts of collaboration tools. Not that SharePoint is the only game in town: IBM ( IBM - news - people ), Oracle ( ORCL - news - people ), SAP ( SAP - news - people ), Sun Microsystems ( JAVA - news - people ) and others offer their own collaboration solutions.

Then I spoke to Nick Elders at the Community Reinvestment Fund USA, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that supplies capital to local community-development lenders who underwrite affordable housing, child care centers, community facilities and small businesses. Elders runs the information-technology operation, and his team--heck, the whole 40-person company--have been using SharePoint effectively for the past few years.

So what are they doing? "Lots," says Elders. "SharePoint is our main system for collaborating on just about everything that goes on in our company."

Take presentations. "Our executives give frequent, and often the same, presentations to audiences all across the country," says Elders. "Many of the slides include data about loans purchased, lending partners and families served, jobs created, etc." The problem is that the data is changing all the time. SharePoint handles that by storing a central library of presentations. Updates can be done by anyone with permission so that everyone has the most recent data. "Prior to leaving for trips, you'd often find executives asking for our latest and most up-to-date numbers for their slides," he adds. "We don't have this problem anymore."

Better yet, SharePoint's check-in/check-out functionality eliminates all the confusion regarding where the latest copy is and who made the last changes. "We've cut down on errors from using the wrong or outdated documents," crows Elders. There's easy searching too. "We've eliminated wasted hours searching for information due to the organization and structure of our system."

SharePoint also offers a ready-to-use internal intranet and customer-facing portal to boot. Now, employees and customers can view the same information, reducing time and money spent fielding more trivial questions from customers. As for integration, SharePoint plays nice with Elders' other in-house systems, avoiding duplicate data entry across all the company's databases. "SharePoint gave us tools so we could hook into our other systems and pass data back and forth," he says.

There's more. The company recently implemented a document-imaging solution tied to SharePoint. It uses an add-in to Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) Word that creates flip sheets for their loan file.

"Loan files can have as many as 30 documents," says Elders. "Before, we had to scan in everything separately and upload it." Now there's a bar code applied to each document that automatically routes the file to a SharePoint library, updates SharePoint's database for searching and attaches to the customer record--in a matter of seconds. Elders estimates this saves up to two hours of employee time per loan. "At 300 loans per year [up from 170 when the company went live with SharePoint in the summer of 2005], that's a tremendous amount of staff time!" he says.

SharePoint isn't cheap. About $100 per license, and $5,000 to $10,000 for the Office SharePoint Server Software. (Elders' nonprofit pays less.) Setting up SharePoint for customer access costs a bit more. Including the integration work, Elders' SharePoint installation cost roughly $60,000. Then there's the hundreds of hours of planning, development, testing and training. Over a third of the company's were involved in getting SharePoint up and running. "Implementing this system got us all working together," says Elders.

In trying times like these, that alone is worth a lot.

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