Organizing, sharing, and managing expanding repositories of digital documents is a constant headache for information management professionals and business leaders. But with Microsoft’s powerful SharePoint platform on your side, finding, storing, sharing, and updating files is easy and intuitive.
Here are eight of the most powerful SharePoint features you can use to improve your business:
#1. Team sites
A team site is the hub of your SharePoint experience. It’s a virtual meeting place for every member of your team to get together and keep up to date with the latest developments. All team sites are automatically optimized for both mobile and desktop devices. They also integrate with email and document management apps to provide easy access to your other ongoing projects.
#2. Communication sites
SharePoint communication sites are places where businesses can share news updates, policies, and real-time information. There are three templates: blank, topic, and showcase, all of which are extensively customizable. Communication sites are like enterprise social networks. They’re ideal for keeping team members of specific departments together no matter where they are geographically located.
#3. Lists and libraries
Although SharePoint has dozens of features, you could argue that at its core it is a cloud-based document management system (DMS). Most of your employees and business partners will think of it as centralized access to your company resources. You can quickly organize files into lists and libraries of any complexity and have them hosted in-house or online through Office 365. Administrators can easily define access privileges too.
#4. Powerful search
One of the most important features of any DMS is integrated search, which allows employees to locate documents without jumping through any confusing or convoluted processes. SharePoint lets you search databases based on anything from keywords and dates to teams and categories. Thanks to cloud technology, your users see the same simple and intuitive interface no matter where they log in from.
#5. OneDrive synchronization
OneDrive serves as your centralized online repository for all documents and media files for a specific project. It also features built-in antimalware controls which are always kept up to date and require little to no management. Microsoft recently upgraded the OneDrive Sync Client to help organizations with large on-premises databases make their content accessible to remote employees and simplify information management and security.
#6. App integration
SharePoint is designed to work with computing environments of varying complexity. If you have a cloud or localized app that you want to integrate with SharePoint, that’s not a problem. Obviously, it works perfectly with the wider Office 365 infrastructure — including PowerApps, Power BI, Flow, and other business automation platforms — but it also connects to Salesforce, Quickbooks, Slack, and dozens of other apps.
#7. Fewer restrictions
Previous editions of SharePoint had some annoying restrictions on folder names and sizes. These could be especially troublesome in multilingual environments where special characters are commonplace. File path lengths have now been increased to up to 400 characters, with support for symbols like # and %. The maximum file size has been increased to 15 GB — a 50% increase over its predecessor.
#8. Deprecated features
Some features have been either partially or entirely removed in SharePoint 2019, but that’s not a bad thing. We’ve seen what “feature bloat” has done to other apps. Microsoft is committed to keeping SharePoint simple and clean so people find it easier to stay focused on their tasks.
The aggregated newsfeed, for example, is now only in read-only mode, so that people are forced to use communication and team sites instead. The PerformancePoint Services, which depend on Silverlight, have been superseded by PowerBI, and the InfoPath Services and SharePoint Designer have been replaced by PowerApps and Microsoft Flow.
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