SharePoint

This week’s topic is about SharePoint. SharePoint is a business collaboration platform where employees can publish, share, analyze and manage information through a browser.

Many corporations use SharePoint but they’re not all using it for the same thing. SharePoint isn’t something you purchase, but rather a platform for several different kinds of programs. The basic goal is to make it possible for a company with employees spread all over the region to work with the same level of agility and coordination as a company with ten people working out of a single office.

Let’s look at some features SharePoint offers.

Search – SharePoint plugs into an existing Intranet, file shares, databases and applications to become the “Google” for your company.

Knowledge –With SharePoint, you can create community sites or communities of interests, where employees can share a knowledgebase and best practices. You can also create blogs plus, each employee can get a personal home page with all the appropriate security, and none of the risks of using public tools.

Document Management – SharePoint provides one central place to store documents, track changes, group related documents, retain, archive and manage records. It also enables several people to edit the same document simultaneously.

Manage Projects – This feature enables everyone to work together efficiently with shared team calendars, contact lists, task lists, and document libraries. This becomes the central information hub that team members collaborate around, rather than having documents and information locked away on personal hard drives and in email.

Although SharePoint has a number of great features, there are some drawbacks.

Steep Learning Curve – The administrator must have SharePoint- specific knowledge and experience. Highly technical skillsets increase costs for outside vendor use.

Customization – Specific expertise is needed to write scripts. Customized web sections are not supported by Microsoft, requiring detailed documentation in case of problems.

Not User Friendly – Requires special attention regarding permissions and configuration settings to achieve consistency between sub-sites.

Some people may think that SharePoint is similar to working with cloud storage. They seem similar to each other but there are differences. When working with a cloud, the idea is that you can access all your saved files, videos, and music from any device.   SharePoint is a collaboration of document management and other Intranet portal functionality.   Cloud computing is a technology where client access software, applications, service and data remotely.

SharePoint has more agility and capacity than cloud computing. SharePoint requires development and customization from programmers or system administrators, but can do just about anything you may want it to do.

I hope that you found this information helpful. Please feel free to forward it to others.  If you would like to learn more about this topic or would like to request a topic, please contact me. If you missed any past newsletters or would like a printed copy, please visit my website at.  www.mdsystemsolutions.com.

Until next time…Happy Computing!!!