SharePoint Online is the latest from the SharePoint Server family of products which started way back in 2001, and has since grown and matured over the years into a mature and highly extensible collaboration and communication platform. Originally starting as the server-based extension to Office, and now a core part of Office 365.
Part of the appeal has been the extensive feature set. SharePoint over the years has encompassed and supported a wide range of business needs including;
SharePoint Online has quickly become the go-to platform for online collaboration, with both internal and external users, it part because it works seamlessly with your Office applications. We have worked with clients to build everything from compliant Document Management systems to extranet portals, intranets, contract management solutions to name just a few. Think of SharePoint as the solution to your secure online presentation and collaboration needs to meet the most demanding scenarios.
To support SharePoint across a range of devices, Microsoft has re-written much of the front end of SharePoint Online to make sites and pages fully responsive sites. Which means you get the same great user experience no matter what device you are using, a mobile, tablet or laptop.
It isn’t just how SharePoint displays content that has changed, working with SharePoint is now much easier with a better set of tools for build pages. The drag and drop experience makes it easy to create attractive and highly functional sites and pages, with little training. It is now easier to create compelling sites, to meet the needs of the various users across your organisation.
Not only can it be used for your intranet, but it is also the perfect solution and is already used as an intranet by organisations across the globe with anywhere from ten to tens of thousands of users. Out of the box, many of the features and capabilities required to make a successful intranet are available to you including;
So everything is there for a great intranet. What makes SharePoint even better as your application of choice is the authoring experience is great. It is now one of the easiest tools to author and publish content to your business through the modern capability. You can create news articles or pages in a matter of minutes. Then integrating it with the other features of SharePoint and Office365 including OneDrive, Teams and PowerApps you are on the way to the perfect digital workplace.
Document Management is one of SharePoint’s strengths, it has all the features required to create and implement a fully compliant document management system. As part of the document management capabilities, you can create content types which are a logical grouping of documents with common properties. Document templates can be attached to each content type and the common properties can be used for tagging documents making them easier to find in the future. No more hunting through folders to find documents.
Another great feature of SharePoint for document management you can also leverage the capabilities of the associated application, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams. When you are ready to automate document creation, approvals and acceptance, this can all be done using Power Automate, part of Office365. OneDrive will also allow your employees to take their most needed content with them, working offline and keeping in sync as required, and even available on your mobile. This capability alone sets SharePoint apart from so many other systems.
Everything you do in Office, can be easily saved and managed in SharePoint, all natively, no customisations required. SharePoint Online can store all your document templates and make them available in Word and PowerPoint directly from the new menu, making it much easier to ensure everyone is using the correct templates.
SharePoint Online is part of the powerful application set that makes up Office 365. Applications like OneDrive, Teams, Delve, Lists and Project all use SharePoint deliver their functionality. This means when you need to integrate information or documents and ensure compliance across everything in Office 365, you can easily ensure your data is protected with a single set of rules.
This deep integration also means that when you want to build automation (Power Automate) you have connectors with SharePoint available out of the box. Or when you want to build a Form you can write this data into SharePoint easily with a few clicks. Then you can use Power BI to start building reports off this data, no need to learn how to build and structure a database when SharePoint can hold everything for your application.
SharePoint can be used to deliver everything you need to support your business from internal communications, document management, application building and collaboration. What feature you start with and how you can make that most of SharePoint is up to you. We can work with you and your users to build up requirements, design and deploy solutions, provide training and ongoing support.
It could be a question or something more. We are happy to discuss your needs whatever they may be.
