Successful SMBs facilitate collaborative effort. They connect internal sales, marketing, product development, finance, and human resource experts with outside consultants and partners to take advantage of the efficiencies and quality results that collaboration brings. As important as the people that collaborate, are the systems that facilitate their work. Productive collaboration environments make it easy to securely share information and ideas. They extend to any location to support mobile and remote workers. And as the backbone of collaborative efforts, they ensure high performance and availability.

This paper outlines the benefits and challenges of collaboration. It offers a guide to implementing an integrated collaboration environment based on Microsoft SharePoint and Dell servers with Intel processors that is designed for performance, availability, and the changing requirements of an SMB poised for growth.