When you’re trying to run a business, one of the most important things you need to figure out is team collaboration. Your team needs to be able to communicate easily with other employees to find solutions and get work done. One great tool to help your team work together better is Office 365 SharePoint. Office 365 SharePoint, also known as SharePoint Online, is a system that allows your employees to share documents, contacts, and anything else they need to get their work done. Read on to learn more about this collaborative software and how it can transform your business.
What Is Office 365 SharePoint?
The Office 365 platform has been a powerful tool for businesses since its introduction in 2011.
The inclusion of SharePoint Online, the cloud-based version of Microsoft’s SharePoint Server, has provided users with significant functionality. More than 190 million people use SharePoint solutions for intranets, team sites, and content management today.
In essence, SharePoint is a tool to share documents and other materials. You can collaborate with your team and easily share files, data, news, and resources. You can also customize your personal site to suit your team’s needs and streamline your work process.
Easier External User Access
One of the biggest advantages of SharePoint Online is that it makes managing external user access much easier. Anyone who has a corporate email address can tie a Microsoft account to that address. Then you can share sites, folders, and individual documents with them even if they aren’t on your network. You can also create guest links that allow you to share documents with someone without giving them access to the files to edit them. These guest links can be configured with read-only or edit permissions, which can be granted without authentication. This also means you can revoke file access later if need be.
Eliminate Network Shares
If you work in IT, you know that managing network shares can be painful. Office 365 and SharePoint come with OneDrive for Business, which eliminates the need for network shares. Each team member with an Office 365 subscription plan gets access to a full terabyte of personal storage, and those don’t even count against your overall storage quota for SharePoint Online.
Each employee gets a personal SharePoint site that they can use to share and sync documents. They can also use the platform to collaborate on documents with other people in your business. And best of all, if an employee leaves, your SharePoint admins can take over control of that person’s OneDrive and retain any important documents they may have there.
Access SharePoint Anywhere
These days, businesses have to be flexible and ready to go 24/7. Business hours aren’t limited to 9 to 5, and your business meeting could just as easily take place in a hotel room or the back of an Uber as it could in a boardroom. So your employees need to be able to access their files from anywhere, not just from one computer. SharePoint gives you that flexibility with cloud storage. Your employees can get to their email, documents, contacts, and intranet content from any device that can connect to the internet. And if they need to work while they’re outside of internet connectivity, they can sync that content to Windows Explorer and the system will automatically update the cloud version as soon as the device connects to the internet again.
Scale Up or Down Easily
Another part of being flexible comes from being able to scale your business processes up or down at any given time. Maybe during peak season, you hire on some temp workers who need access to your SharePoint system and then you let them go after a few months. SharePoint can help you scale up or down as needed with no hassle. Your SharePoint contract can be run on a month-to-month basis, so you only pay for what you need when you need it. It only takes a few clicks in an admin portal to add a new user, and once they leave, it’s a simple matter to deactivate their license. No more keeping accounts no one uses around just in case someone comes along who needs it.
Free Up IT Staff
One of the biggest roles IT plays is updating office collaboration tools. It’s an important job that keeps things in the office running as efficiently as possible. But it does mean that IT isn’t free to take care of other systems that could use maintenance and updating. With SharePoint and Office 365, your IT staff doesn’t have to take care of that updating anymore. SharePoint Online means that you don’t have to maintain SharePoint on-premises, so you can focus on improving your document management solution or intranet instead. You can also work on other improvements to your system that may have been sitting in a backlog for weeks or months.
Gain Reliability and Security
When your business relies on a system like Office 365 SharePoint to operate, you need that system to work. A system failure even 2% of the time can cost your company thousands, and trying to put in failsafe measures can put your CFO into shock. But Microsoft offers a 99.9 percent service-level agreement and has an average response time of less than a business day when things do go wrong. And even though most of your business is run through the cloud, Microsoft offers plenty of security for their system. There are layers of physical security, data encryption, no data mining, multiple layers of redundant backups, in-region servers, identity protection, and an ironclad data protection agreement. So you can rest assured that your data is secure with Microsoft.
Learn More About Office 365 SharePoint
Office 365 SharePoint can transform the way your employees communicate and collaborate. It makes data sharing easy and allows employees to access the systems they need anytime, anywhere. It’s secure and reliable and frees your IT people up from dealing with inconveniences like maintenance and network shares.
If you would like to get started with Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint, get in touch with us at IncWorx. We are the leader in Office 365 and SharePoint consulting and can help give your company a competitive advantage. Contact us for a free consultation and see the way we can revolutionize your business practices.
