SharePoint

There’s a lot of confusion over what SharePoint is, and what it can do.  That’s probably because it does so many things.

SharePoint is a platform for building intranets, extranets, projects, and departmental sites, and managing files and data. Users can build web sites within SharePoint and use them to collaborate, organize, manage, and share and work with files and other data.  SharePoint predates Office 365 and serves as the backbone for the entire collection of Office 365 productivity tools.  SharePoint drives a lot of business productivity today; some 200 million users across an estimated 200,000 organizations use SharePoint, according to Microsoft.

One of the reasons SharePoint is so difficult to define is that companies can use the varied components in a variety of ways, suited specifically to their needs.  You can’t just say, “Oh, it’s a document management system,” because it’s so much more than that today.  While it’s true that companies use SharePoint to build file stores, they also use the platform to build intranets and extranets, host document repositories, manage access to sensitive documents, and perform searches across vast amounts of structured data.

The recently added “modern SharePoint” is a modular method for adding and customizing specific capabilities for your system.  Hub sites, the central feature of this update, includes a lot of citing features. There’s so much there that we’ll devote a new post exploring the possibilities in the near future.

SharePoint search capabilities are powerful and customizable.  In addition to having an enterprise-wide search, SharePoint allows users to customize and refine searches to get highly targeted results.

SharePoint provides impressive reporting capabilities.  Users pull in data from multiple sources and present them on a single dashboard or landing page, or compile Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), to create “single pane of glass” reporting experiences.  In fact, by employing metadata tagging, users can move away from linear file structures.

Your team can use SharePoint to automate a variety of steps in your business processes, notifying users when documents have been updated, moved, or changed.  This system of version control, which preserves prior versions and keeps a record of revisions to documents, is a powerful benefit to saving documents and data in SharePoint lists.

Structuring your SharePoint environment to 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 and we have the knowledge of SharePoint and the ability to analyze your business that enables us to tailor each solution to your requirements.

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 ways your team can use the platform to enrich, enhance and simplify your online experience.