SharePoint is a Microsoft product, described as an “integrated suite of server capabilities for enterprise search, content management, business process facilitation, simplified information sharing, and enhanced business insight” according to the developer. SharePoint allows you to manage all over your enterprise-wide applications on an integrated platform, saving your organization significant time and money.
The platform is ever-evolving and as recently as the last two weeks, new changes were announced – primarily driven by customer needs. Presented at Ignite, features such as more customized search results and multilingual site capabilities were derived directly from the customer’s feedback.
SharePoint Features Explained
SharePoint offers such a diverse range of features that users may find themselves overwhelmed – or not full taking advantage of everything available to them on the platform. Here are just a few of the capabilities SharePoint provides.
- Comprehensive control over the storage, security, distribution, management administration of their electronic contents.
- Info-path to accelerate shared business processes within organizational boundaries in service-driven industries.
- Efficient searches of data, information and people through greater ease of information sharingand simplified content publishing.
- Increased accessibility of back-end data via browser and personalization of data.
- Effective delegation of responsibilities like file sharing and different content management.
- Centrally locates and manages content from multiple locations into a repository with consistent categorization.
- Reduction of workload and increase and productivity and profits for all relevant parties – employees, partners and customers – by making information easily available in the single central repository.
- Making the sharing of assets across organization, departments or teams easy and collaborative.
- Streamlining and automating tedious or multi-step processes through custom workflows, business process automation and forms solutions.
- Easily collecting and validating data through electronic Info-path forms.
- Automating the aggregation, analysis and reporting of business data through the utilization of ready-to-use KPI, scorecards and reports.
Relevant Updates
According to a report from Redmond Magazine, these are the developments that SharePoint and NMicrosoft 365 users can expect to roll out imminently.
Labeling and Information Barriers: One of the most popular requests from Microsoft clients is the ability to tag data to gain control over information access. SharePoint names these tags “labels” and has announced a preview of “Sensitivity Labels”. This feature offers increased privacy, external user access, and unmanaged device polices. Microsoft is private-previewing the ability to “automatically detect and label the sensitive files in SharePoint and OneDrive.” Also in private preview stage are the new Information Barriers compliance controls for SharePoint Online and OneDrive. The features are designed to keep certain employees from electronically communicating with each other, which might apply in certain legal and financial (insider trading) scenarios.
Project Cortex: Microsoft’s new “knowledge network” application offers in-context organizational information via “Topic Cards” that pop up across Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Office applications. Project Cortex utilizes Microsoft Graph and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for operation, and SharePoint is used to deliver the content. Project Cortex is in private preview stage, with broader release slated for early 2020.
SharePoint Online Home Site: Announces earlier this year, the feature is now considered at the “general availability” commercial-release stage. This means that the new capability is currently being introduced to Office 365 customers. Home Sites, built on top of Communication Sites, are imagined as landing pages for employees to share news and content. It is also expected that Microsoft will design Home Sites to become the new home page for the SharePoint Mobile App. That upgrade is still pending, but expected within the next several months.
File and Site Collection Expansions: File and site collection capacity has been expanded for Office 365 and SharePoint Online users; supporting large file uploads up to 100GB for OneDrive, SharePoint Online and Teams users. The expansion was needed to address concerns of companies migrating files to Office 365. The SharePoint Online site collection limit was increased to 2 million collections, 4x the previous limit. Each site collection can store up to 25TB.
For smaller Sarasota businesses, the exact implications of SharePoint – in its current form and with coming new features – may be difficult to ascertain. But if you are looking for ways to streamline and automate your business processes to increase productivity and profit, SharePoint may offer the platform you need. Call Alliance IT today to schedule an appointment to discuss how we can help you to implement the tools of the future, today.
