Recently, a survey of Microsoft declared that near about 85% of Fortune 500 companies have this software, and that’s not it. With over 10 million SharePoint sites being generated, 190 million users, around 250,000 organizations are using it.
But only a few people know that this has not started recently. Yes, since 2001, Microsoft SharePoint has been around and also became one of the top business collaboration resources today.
However, have you ever thought why SharePoint is gaining so much popularity? Or how it became one of the top business collaboration resources? So, here we are with answers to all the questions running in your mind. Yes, let’s know all of its benefits for which it is gaining such high popularity and how MS SharePoint is helping in business growth all around.
But before knowing that, let’s begin with its brief introduction to understanding the article better.
Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint
It would be hard to define SharePoint accurately as it can be used in plenty of ways. But in a nutshell, Sharepoint is a platform empowering a lot of different workplace activities, but majorly, content management and collaboration.
In other words, it is a web-based collaborative platform, which combines with Microsoft Office. SharePoint is originally traded as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable, and its usage ranges substantially amidst organizations.
If we classify SharePoint, it can fall in two categories; namely:
1. SharePoint Online
SharePoint Online is for those who don't want to install and deploy SharePoint Server on-premises and is a cloud-based service for enterprises. And, by subscribing to an Office 365 plan or the standalone SharePoint Online service, this service can be availed.
2. SharePoint Server
Organizations can easily manage and deploy SharePoint Server on-premises. Here are some of the key features SharePoint includes:
a. Intranet Portals
b. Social Networks
c. Document & File Management
d. Websites
e. Extranets
f. Increased Business Intelligence solutions
g. Advanced Search Functionality
How it Became the Top Business Collaboration Resource?
Well, it wasn’t until the SharePoint 2007 released that many businesses can now start to harness the power of online collaboration. Further, in May of 2016, Microsoft released the final versions of its SharePoint Server 2016 and Office Online Server products, which was a significant release by the software giant.
The reason behind this was the SharePoint 2016 includes numerous new capabilities for IT professionals, end-users, as well as administrators. And, as feedback, a lot of people have already stated that SharePoint Server 2016 is the most reliable, secure, scalable, and best-performing SharePoint Server release ever.
Another best thing about the SharePoint platform is it includes SharePoint Designer, SharePoint Online, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Workspace & SharePoint Server.
Benefits of Microsoft SharePoint
Besides its less-than-stellar reputation, SharePoint has some things going for it. Yes, surely there’s a reason that it’s becoming such a hugely popular solution for creating corporate intranets and collaboration sites. Let’s know those reasons now:
1. Enhances Security
For any business in this modern era, all they need is strong security. And, the reason behind it is cyber-attacks, system hacks, and even fraud schemes that can leak sensitive information about your customers or your brand.
There is no doubt that poor communication security can not only compromise the reputation and integrity of your company, but also letting information fall through the cracks could expose your company to a major breach, bad press, and data losses.
Hence, including SharePoint into your operations can prevent some of those security issues. Without divulging any sensitive propriety information embedded in documents, your teams can share vital information through SharePoint real-time collaborations.
Moreover, as a fact, hosting operations via a single, integrated platform typically decrease your vulnerability to holes, attacks, and leaks across multiple systems. And, to help ensure compliance with any internal policies, you can also monitor user behavior.
2. Offers a Simple, Consistent & Familiar User Experience
To render a consistent user experience that explains how people interact with content, processes, and business data, SharePoint is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail, and web browsers.
It can be said that this out-of-the-box functionality and tight integration help us to employ services ourselves and facilitate product adoption.
Moreover, one can develop business tools and solutions without even needing the involvement of a professional developer. This data management and collaboration platform provides optimum ease of use and can be managed without any deep knowledge of coding. Whether you need to give your development team some specific tools or update your website, MS SharePoint allows you to do that.
3. Simplifies Regular Business Activities
Especially for initiating, reporting, and tracking common business activities, such as issue tracking and signature collection, document review & approval takes advantage of out-of-the-box workflows.
And, as its best part, one can complete these activities without any coding. Moreover, a simple, consistent experience can be earned by tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and web browsers.
4. Can Meet Regulatory Requirements
It can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively by specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records following compliance regulations. And, also you can lessen litigation risk for your business.
5. Highly Customizable
The term ‘customizable' here means that no matter what you want your SharePoint system to do, it can almost certainly do it.
SharePoint is not a product but a platform. That implies one can build all sorts of things on top of it. Well, many of the functionalities can be built into the basic form of the platform, but make sure that the most successful SharePoint systems have a lot of custom development behind it.
That means if you have (or can hire) the expertise to make it happen, your company’s version of SharePoint can be tailored to meet your needs perfectly.
6. Effectively Repurpose and Manage Content
Content creators and business users can create and submit content for scheduled deployment and approval to internet or intranet sites. Plus, through new document library templates, managing multilingual content is simplified, specifically those which are designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and further translations of the document.
7. Connects Employees with Information and Expertise
For producing comprehensive and relevant results, Enterprise Search incorporates business data along with information about documents, web pages, as well as people. One can easily find what they need by using features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts to improve the relevance of the results.
Moreover, it offers a Simplified Information Exchange. That means with better collaboration, easy information exchange happens. Unique features like alerts make it easy for employees to easily get the important information they need, even without miscommunication or costly delays. No doubt, providing access to business information to everyone enables collaboration and keeps everyone in the loop.
Well, without using SharePoint also, users can have access to business data from systems such as Microsoft CRM, and create personalized dashboards for maximum usability. But with such platforms, users won't have the same version control issues that are prevalent when storing files on a server. For instance, Sharepoint enables one to maintain a single document, and for the same, it allows multiple users to continuously update it, all with a record of the changes and the ability to revert to an earlier version anytime required.
In all, it simplifies Access to Business Data. Moreover, by dragging configurable back-end connections, it can also create personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser. Plus, enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help the organizations to organize and store business documents in one central as well as accessible location.
8. Accelerates Shared Business Processes
To collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser, one can use smart, electronic forms–driven solutions, without coding any custom applications.
Also, to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry, built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems.
9. Sharing without Divulging Sensitive Information
Through Excel Services running on SharePoint, it gives your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser.
10. Enables Employees to Make Better-Informed Decisions
By using integrated BI capabilities, like dashboards, scorecards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), business data connectivity technologies, and Web Parts, SharePoint makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that both assemble and display business-critical information from diverse sources.
And, also for placing the latest reports, KPIs, or spreadsheets, one centralized Report Center sites provide users a single place.
11. Provides a Single, Integrated Platform
With support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), SharePoint is built on an open, scalable architecture.
Moreover, the platform has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for the documents and the lists. Well, such features offer integration with existing systems plus the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.
No wonder, this makes it easy to create and share business information from a single location. Furthermore, it can seamlessly connect employees with the documents, people, information, and projects they need to perform their jobs.
Apart from that, Collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams fill gaps in business communication and use technology to facilitate internal conversations.
Besides all, Microsoft Teams enables each company to personalize its collaboration solutions. So, along with encouraging creativity and innovation, one can create a new collaboration in minutes, tailoring it with specific features to help make teamwork as efficient as possible.
Moreover, Teams can work closely on a project without any lack of program consistency across systems or blocked access to certain information. Plus, you can build the collaboration setup with Teams that’s right for your team.
Conclusion
We all know that several organizations strive for increased productivity, regardless of industry, and possessing a tool in a place like Microsoft SharePoint can make all of the difference.
And, all these 11 benefits easily translate to increased productivity and cost savings for any organization. So, now we have learned in detail how does it boost business growth.
Try this platform for your organization as well to achieve the results you desire. All the best!
