It's not always possible to compare rates of professional service firms to get an accurate total true cost. While our professional rates are similar to our competitors we typically deliver much faster and so are less expensive. This is based on our many years of experience and our library of premade solutions that we can draw upon for templates. Additionally, we go above-and-beyond to update our clients how time is being used, empower them with the information needed to be proactive, and that way time and value are respected by both parties.

After initial screen sharing session to demonstrate our solutions and discuss our expertise, we turn to your business goals, and to drafting a scope of work. It is common on many of our projects to have a fixed fee for a defined scope of deliverables, and a block of hours that is used in a discretionary manner for additional enhancements, problem-solving, or general consulting. As a general breakdown it's typically 70/30 for fixed fee and block of hours. In any situation we will work with your budget to break a project into phases that make sense for your business goals.

Yes we can, and our team has many years of experience building solutions that are shown in our products area. Our workflow designs emphasize process mapping. To be sure we have an accurate plan for the end goals, we factor in maintainability, flexibility, achieve the simplest solution possible.

It is very likely that we have something that will save you a great deal of time. We have frameworks for many common business process automation scenarios and they can be easily modified for similar workflows. Please see our software templates.

Upgrades and migrations are something that we do very routinely. We've literally done hundreds and some have been highly complex multi-tier farm merges. We know how to find third party code, unstable customizations, deprecated solutions, and to restore the health of a SQL database to ensure the success. We're especially proud of our ability in an upgrade to preserve a new version and old version independently, saving synchronization of data until the new farm has been verified and working soundly, so that the actual cutover carries no risk!

Business Intelligence and IT are no longer two separate fields, and we at Simple Portals know that. Technology is easy - corporate cultural change is more difficult. You need the best return on your investment and that means having the strategy for you and your people to use your work tools effectively. We have an established process for creating a strategic roadmap to determine what information or process bottlenecks map to SharePoint features, and a way to weight the effort of investment time versus ROI so that we can establish a strategic plan for continuous quality improvement and get more from your SharePoint.

If you have a SharePoint emergency we are always available to assist. Our experience with SharePoint means we can often get things stabilized and healthy even under critical circumstances. However for the long-term it is better to plan for at least quarterly preventive maintenance to keep your farm healthy, minimize emergencies, and create the greatest possible stability and performance. Downtime may be more expensive than maintenance! Please see our Managed SharePoint Services.

Yes. We often partner with other firms and have a successful track record of assisting IT professional service firms with our subject matter expertise in SharePoint. For ongoing engagements that provide lead generation we provide a courtesy rate.

We do not under any circumstances accept rebates or fees from the suggestion of any solutions to our clients as we feel that it is a conflict of interest. Microsoft Office 365 provides annual rebates, and many of the third-party vendors that we partner with provide us rebates - these are all credited back to our clients. You may rely on the fact that if we suggest something it's because we think it will be in your best interests.