"This is about people and relationships, so it's worth it to invest in UI design to make MySites more visually appealing and user-friendly," he says.

But all of this connecting and collaborating wouldn't mean much if Colliers hadn't also customized and refined SharePoint's enterprise search functionality.

To that end, Colliers IT team spent four months building a portal called "Our People" that employees worldwide now use to find each other. The key to Our People, says Sita, is how he and his developers, with help from Microsoft's product development group, customized SharePoint search to provide deeper contextual search results.

The employee profile pages fuel this search because they contain not just biographical information, but rich content such as what clients are affiliated with a person or what specific deals he or she has worked on.