What exactly is SharePoint?”
I get asked this question all the time when I’m talking to people about various IT tools and resources that can help improve collaboration and productivity.
They ask, “Is it an intranet? Is it a document management platform? Is it a collaboration tool?”
My answers to these common questions are, “yes, yes, and yes.”
To better understand how SharePoint might benefit your organisation, let’s look at a SharePoint implementation by Xavier Children’s Support Network.
Xavier Children’s Support Network loves SharePoint for several reasons:
- It offers better document control and document management.
- It promotes organisational collaboration and unity.
- It provides flexible, secure remote access.
- It is cost effective.
In this blog post, you will learn three areas in which SharePoint can enhance collaboration and boost productivity inside your organisation.
1. Better Document Management
Many of you have probably worked for an organisation at some point that has a shared drive for all staff where important company resources are stored. When someone needs to update a file, they’ll take it from the drive, make the changes and upload it back - hopefully.
In other organisations, there might not be a shared drive. You might have had to rely on sending and receiving emails with important documents included as attachments. This can be time consuming and can cause problems if you’re not working on the correct version of the file.
SharePoint’s document libraries and versioning capabilities eliminate the IT headaches in both scenarios.
Let’s take a look at how R & G Technologies uses SharePoint to store documents and access them in the cloud.
The above screenshot is an example of a document folder in SharePoint that holds PowerPoint slides for the R & G Technologies webinars. This folder is accessible by our sales and marketing teams via the cloud. So if my colleague Ross Beard prepares a slide deck and wants me to review it, he simply uploads it to the SharePoint folder where I can instantly open it up, make changes and save it - all in the cloud.
How does better document management eliminate collaboration nightmares and other productivity killers?
- Removes problems with version control -one file is constantly updated, eliminating issues with opening the incorrect version
- Reduces duplicate work -check-out and check-in functionality ensures only one person has the file open at a time
- Enables access on the go -access documents from home, at a client’s site or anywhere with an internet connection
- Edit the documents online -use Microsoft Office online to create and edit your documents and save them back onto the cloud
- Stop excessive internal email chains -collaborate on documents in the cloud instead of sending files via long, time-consuming email chains
- Easily share the documents - Sharable URLs make it easier to instantly share documents with colleagues and outside business contacts
2. Team Sites
Team sites can be set up based on your organisation’s projects, department or clients and host all important documents pertaining to that team in one simple spot. Let’s look at a team site that has been set up for R & G Technologies:
This team site is for the Tech Team. This team uses SharePoint to do the following:
- Keep all important documents in a central location
- Store relevant resources accessed on a regular basis
- Provide links to commonly used external websites and tools
- Stay in touch with each other using the Facebook-style newsfeed
- Share calendars to stay informed about what everyone is up to
How does a team site eliminate collaboration nightmares and other productivity killers?
- Helps your team stay organised - with all the information they need in one place, there’s no need to search through folders or emails
- Empowers your team and saves time - no need for constant, time-wasting emails, enabling your team to get on with their jobs faster
- Open communication and accountability - the newsfeed ensures everyone is on the same page and eliminates the possibility of “I didn’t see that email” excuses
3. Better Security Settings
Microsoft notes that when you “use fine-grained permissions extensively, you will spend more time managing the permissions, and users may experience slower performance when they try to access site content.” Selecting the right security settings for your organisation is a balance between the ease of administration and the requirement to control access to individual items.
At R & G Technologies, we focus on four security setting areas in SharePoint:
- Users should only have the permission levels or individual permissions they must have to perform their assigned tasks
- We use standard groups (such as Members, Visitors and Owners) and control permissions at the site level
- We use permission levels to assign individual permissions
- We have a governance plan and a ‘SharePoint champion’ who is accountable for the decisions concerning what types of information should be shared and deleted
How better security settings eliminate collaboration nightmares and other productivity killers:
- Reduces data loss - stops unauthorized people accessing, deleting or making edits to important files, saving you time and money
- Provides a better experience for users - by giving your team access to only the information they need, they are not overwhelmed and have a better ability to concentrate on their assigned tasks
Review your current systems
I challenge you to think differently about the ways your team currently works together. Do you have a lot of confusion on projects? Are there are a lot of long-winded internal chain emails? Do you have multiple versions of important documents that get mixed up?
These are all common scenarios we run into with clients. If you want to eliminate these IT headaches and streamline efficiencies to enable better collaboration and productivity, SharePoint might be the solution for you.