Have you heard of it? - SharePoint Key Advantages

 
If you regularly use the Office suite you might have heard about the collaborative platform SharePoint. Some colleagues or employees may have told you that you should consider integrating it into your workplace but you never looked it up? Describing all of the possibilities of this work tool could keep us here all night but see below for our take on SharePoint’s key advantages.
 

#1 Takes Collaboration to a New Level

SharePoint facilitates collaboration between colleagues. It allows you to easily create a webpage to store shared documents, set up a task list, discussion forums and more. These Site pages can be customised so it could be a department intranet page or simply a group’s centralised sharing page to facilitate a particular project. Yes you could just have a shared folder on your shared network but would this have live discussion forums alongside it? How useful would it be to have a task time line right above the folder so the group are all aware of deadlines? SharePoint is the tool to facilitate this.

 

#2 Fast Seamless Searches

Have you ever had trouble recalling to exact name of a file or the exact location you saved it in? The search feature in SharePoint is excellent. It is fast and it searches all of your SharePoint site libraries, newsfeeds and OneDrive. So if you needed to quickly grab some information on the “Gala Dinner” then a search will throw up all of the files and posts mentioning it. Speed and completeness are the real advantage here.

 

#3 Document Management

Versioning is a very useful tool in SharePoint. It keeps a running version history of the documents a team is working on. We can see how a document is evolving and the user can restore an older version if required. Our team are often working together to build new courses with experts in different cities collaborating simultaneously on a document. If a colleague is out for a day then we don’t have to worry about which version is the latest – we can quickly find it in our shared library and pick up where they left off or review the work they added while you were editing a different section.

 

#4 User Friendly Customisation

Setting up a webpage for your team to share ideas, store documents and share a calendar on would have required the IT department in the past. Not many of us have the time or budget for that but SharePoint puts all of this at the fingertips and the end user. With a little coaching you can easily set up these Team Sites so the whole team can stay informed, work as a group and find what they need fast.

 

#5 Security

As always the question of data security when switching or introducing information sharing tools is a valid concern. SharePoint has build in permission administration tools so only individuals you have given permission to will be able to view the documents. Microsoft are clearly aware of the importance in todays world so rest assured data security is not compromised and you control who can access it. If you this has piqued your interest check out our SharePoint courses in a city near you!