What is SharePoint and how can I use it?

It is not as common knowledge as many would expect of the facilities that Microsoft SharePoint can offer to a business. If used efficiently, it can strengthen how your business functions and manages documents and data. In simplest terms, SharePoint is a collaboration solution for file sharing and storage. Its strengths as a server work as an advantage because of its capabilities to be scaled up and down depending on its requirements. SharePoint can with ease hold any form of document in a cloud location that is required for a large project and collaborative work.

SharePoint works best when it is used for data and document sharing, it helps to create a productive fluid workplace for a workforce. It enables documents to be updated and amended with automatic saving made to the SharePoint location. This can help towards avoiding duplicates in documents that are being worked on. What comes with this increased productivity is the visibility of information and content across a certain aspect of a company. With SharePoint, you are able to create different permission levels for different areas of your SharePoint site for certain employees or teams depending on their relevance to files that need to be accessed.

SharePoint’s main attributes vary depending on what your requirements for using SharePoint are, below are some of its main features:

• External Sharing
• Content Management
• Team Sites
• Communication Sites
• Mobile Apps
• Automate
• Search Functions

SharePoint has the ability to grow in size, it can be customised on many different features of the storage solution. What you can customise can vary from the design of your SharePoint with logos, styles and colours to how you navigate around. Organisations regularly use SharePoint as a form of intranet, it can be used to send out company-wide information such as announcements and memos.

Sometimes confused with OneDrive, SharePoint works in a very similar ways, they are designed with not much differentiation. In most circumstances, OneDrive is a personal drive whereas SharePoint is used communally although, you are now able to get OneDrive for business. What splits them apart is SharePoint is used more as a tool for collaboration where multiple individuals are working on the same project files at the same time whereas OneDrive is more of a centralised storage location that can be accessed when required.   

Making the jump to using SharePoint can be daunting for some but what can be ensured is that your data and documents will be safe in migration to the new data storage point and can be backed up accordingly. If you are considering moving to SharePoint speak to one of KIG expert advisers today.