Over 75% of the Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint, but the funny fact is that they are all not using it for the same purposes. Before explaining what SharePoint, do you need to understand that SharePoint is not a software program but rather a platform on which several kinds of programs can be run? It isn’t something that you can buy and install on your PC instead of a back-end system that lies all of your employee's desktops and smartphones together allowing everyone to communicate and synchronize their efforts with each other. The basic aim of SharePoint is to make it possible for an organization with at least 100 employees spread over somewhere work with the same productivity and same level of agility as a company with 10-15 employees working out in a single office.
How SharePoint does this?
SharePoint site is an internally facing site that all the employees in your company can sign in and find the news, scheduled tasks and access to a variety of information. The dashboards can be customized with departments and roles and different levels of access to ensure everyone in the company i.e. From the CFO to the interns get their needed information which may be the client history to the status of ongoing projects or employee performance. SharePoint also provides SharePoint tools for building Social Networking Platforms (SNP) for the employees and company wikis. A company’s intranet serves as a meeting room where everyone in the company can visit and attend throughout in their workdays.
SharePoint provides a shared space for the documents to be stored so that they are not locked away on any one person’s hard disk. Any employee the company can access the documents, which are shared in SharePoint unless the admin has limited their access to some smaller groups. With this, you don’t have to travel to multiple offices or get a lot of emails to get the files you need to complete the task. With SharePoint, you and your coworker can simultaneously work on a single document. So you can avoid having to create several different versions of the documents by emailing it to the different people for inputs.
It may be easy to stay updated and work with coordination on various projects when you have a dozen of people in the company. However, SharePoint is designed with the aim of extending the ease of interaction beyond the small group of people in the single location. You can sign in from anywhere using a desktop or mobile devices and can access various information on client’s histories, locations, schedules of a coworker and anything related to the project.
SharePoint also helps to set up a site that you can share with the outside businesses you are collaborating with. You can also provide them with all the access to the information if they need from your company if the other business is a part of your supply chain or a company you are contracting with for a project.
You can use SharePoint to build and manage a public facing site as well. As a website, CMS SharePoint allows you to sign in and make changes to your pages. You can update information, add graphics or text and create new pages.
With the access, SharePoint provides to all the business data you can find countless ways to use the various information to make better decisions. SharePoint makes it easy to search throughout the company’s files and apart from that, it can help you discover larger patterns.
Some benefits of using SharePoint
Developers worldwide prefer SharePoint to other platforms due to the following reasons:
Unmatched collaboration
The SharePoint team members can remain connected while being able to share files and updates throughout the app development project. This allows real-time streaming of information allowing more access to shared information within an organization.
Custom suited to development needs
SharePoint comes with an array of most sophisticated but unique tools to customize the feature as per the need of the development project in hand. You can add components and integrate them as per your requirement for the project in development.
Easy to handle the centralized administration
SharePoint has a deeper control and comprehensive mechanism to manage the whole platform. It has a central admin for all the features like system specific settings, backup, restoration, configuration wizards etc. within a single location.
The lower learning curve and ease of use
SharePoint developers have now developed SharePoint solutions and business tools without really needing the involvement of a professional developer. This data management offers optimum ease of use without needing knowledge
What makes SharePoint such a powerful tool? It does not simply rely on the functions and features it provides out of the box but the SharePoint implementations can be customized to streamline the aspects of business collaboration you can think of. Contact one of our SharePoint experts through this website and ask any specific uses or capabilities of SharePoint.