Microsoft SharePoint is an industry leading platform for quickly building web-based applications and internal websites. The primary benefit of SharePoint is that it provides faster and easier access to company information, tools and employees, so everyone within your organization can enjoy improved productivity.
With SharePoint you can: Build intranet sites and create pages, document libraries, and lists. Sync and store your files in the cloud so anyone can securely work with you. Manage your daily routine with workflows, forms, and lists.
It gives companies a way to automate business processes, track progress, and securely share information across departments (or even externally). Depending on a business, companies can use SharePoint as a document management system, collaboration software, intranet or extranet.
SharePoint offers smooth coordination of project-based collaboration. It ensures centralized storage of all project-related documents within the same workspace. SharePoint enables keeping version history for documents, as well as real-time collaboration and commenting.
Top 5 benefits to use SharePoint
1. SharePoint is the gateway to the digital workplace
Businesses consider SharePoint a one-stop shop for all enterprise content, as it provides employees a centralized place to locate any relevant information stored within the platform. Such information can include the following:
- Third-party links to benefits, banking, vendors and external portals;
- Important documents, such as HR policies, IT how-to guides and other digital files;
- Daily, monthly and other relevant reports
- Interactive forms for paid time off requests, production verification, IT service requests and more.
Businesses consider SharePoint a one-stop shop for all company content, as it provides employees a centralized place to locate any relevant information stored within the platform and the go-to place for your employees to interact and retrieve content necessary for their work.
2. SharePoint is still the best location to capture data from forms
Microsoft introduced PowerApps as an alternative to InfoPath, but users find it easier to interact with forms within SharePoint — especially since it does not require the installation of any additional apps like PowerApps does. It also offers the convenience of having the forms as webpages.
Some of the forms that many businesses rely on and use within SharePoint include:
- HR requests
- IT requests
- New employee hire forms
- Common documents that your staff need to share
3. It’s all about the search features
Companies continue to face challenges when organizing their digital files. They are generally scattered across network drives and server folders, so finding the right document quickly can be time-consuming and difficult.
But, with Microsoft SharePoint, employees can take advantage of SharePoint’s ability to index and tag files based on content. This search capability continues to be one of the biggest selling points of SharePoint. Users can locate any file that is stored in SharePoint by doing a keyword search and use different filters to narrow results based on dates, content types and authors.
4. There’s nowhere else to put all the legacy content
Even though Microsoft Office 365 offers features that replace some SharePoint functionalities, none of them addresses one of the key functions that SharePoint brings to the table.
Company announcements, important links, contact lists, HTML pages and a slew of other content can’t be put in any of the new apps or services that Microsoft has introduced. Many businesses find this makes SharePoint the only viable option for highlighting this information.
5. Only SharePoint has versioning functionality
Content versioning is another SharePoint functionality that many companies need. This feature enables business users to track multiple versions of documents, such as legal contracts, policies and other important business documents using SharePoint document libraries. So far, no other tool within the Office 365 suite offers anything similar to this.
