There’s a lot of confusion over just what SharePoint is, and what it can do. That is likely because it can do so many different things.
SharePoint is a platform for building intranets, extranets, project and departmental sites, and managing files and data. Web sites built within SharePoint can be used to collaborate organize, manage and collaboratively share and work with files and other data. While it predates Office 365, today SharePoint is the backbone upon which the collaborative online collection of productivity tools that is Office 365 and Teams function. SharePoint drives a lot of business productivity today; some 200 million users across an estimated 200,000 organizations use SharePoint, according to Microsoft.
More than 200 million users across an estimated 200,000 organizations use SharePoint.
Microsoft Corp.
There are several major components to SharePoint, and the platform can be used in a variety of ways. That’s one of the reason’s it’s so difficult to define. You can’t just say, “Oh, it’s a file management system,” because it does so much more than that. SharePoint is used to build document management systems, it’s true. But it’s also used to build intranets and extranets, host document repositories, manage access to sensitive documents and perform searches across vast amounts of structured data.
SharePoint search capabilities are powerful and customizable. In addition to having an enterprise-wide search enabled by default, You can build multiple custom search portals and lock search scope to specific sites and use refiners to get highly targeted results.
SharePoint provides impressive reporting capabilities. SharePoint can be used to pull in data from multiple different services and present them on a single dashboard or landing page, or compile Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to create “single pane of glass” reporting experiences. It does this through the use of its very powerful metadata and search capabilities. In fact, by employing metadata tagging, users can move away from linear file structures. Metadata and SharePoint’s powerful search capabilities can also be used to create custom search refiners for faster searches that yield more granular, accurate results.
SharePoint can also be used to automate a variety of steps in your business processes, notifying users when documents have been updated, moved or changed, for example. Version control, which preserves prior versions of documents, is a powerful benefit to saving documents and data in SharePoint lists.
Structuring your SharePoint environment to do all that and deliver the results you need, when and where you want them, requires expertise, and Wellington Street Consulting has it. We’ve been architecting SharePoint sites for more than a decade.
Today, SharePoint has a new face and a new role to play in the Office 365 world. It’s called Teams, and it adds exciting new layers of collaboration to what SharePoint can already do.As one of the core tools behind Microsoft’s suite of business productivity tools, there is no end to the many ways that in can be used to enrich, enhance and simplify your online experience. Follow our blog to learn about many of the awesome things SharePoint can do. Contact us today to find out how we can help put SharePoint to work for you.