What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a product from Microsoft that provides an internal portal known as an Intranet.

It also provides an excellent document management experience. Allowing users to easily upload, edit and delete documents based on their level of access.

There are multiple versions of SharePoint that you can either install on your own servers or use Microsoft 365 offering of SharePoint Online.

We share more information on our section for SharePoint Intranet.

SharePoint Video Reviews

Here are a couple of SharePoint videos from our Microsoft Services YouTube channel that will give some additional insights into using SharePoint.

Top 10 Examples of SharePoint Review

Top 5 Features of SharePoint Review

SharePoint Benefits

There are countless benefits to adopting SharePoint here are some of our favourites.

SharePoint Intranet Review

Using SharePoint you can very quickly build powerful internal portals that can help boost employee engagement.

Your SharePoint Intranet will typically help employees navigate around complex document structures and point them to useful resources.

The SharePoint intranet should also contain additional features and functionality to interest your employees enough to return back to the intranet.

You might like to replace internal email traffic with SharePoint news articles. This keeps your employees informed and naturally will boost traffic towards your new intranet.

“Often a common compliant from employees is not having enough direction from senior leadership. Using our new Modern SharePoint Intranet we have quickly setup a platform for our senior management and CEO to post frequent updates and direction to all staff.” – Amnu Customer

To find out more information see our SharePoint Intranet Examples.

SharePoint External Sharing

If you do not give your employees a platform for sharing documents externally, they will often source their own solutions to this. Typically using third party products such as Dropbox, WeTransfer or BOX.

The problem with this is that this is then outside of the control of your IT department and poses a significant security risk.

If an employee left the business and still had access to this via their personal email address there is no way for you to remove their access to company data.

However, if you were to use SharePoint and enabled external sharing you would not have this problem.

As all of the access and security controls are governed by your Office 365 user accounts. Meaning if you employee did choose to leave the business you can block their account and instantly stop them from accessing this data.

Opening your SharePoint for external access is often referred to as an Extranet. In this case it would be a SharePoint Extranet.

We have helped many clients build external facing extranets for things like supplier management portals, recruitment process portals, employee onboarding process and providing documents to external parties such as contractors or even volunteers of a charity without having to incur additional license costs.

Integrating SharePoint with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is becoming the one stop shop for everything you need within Microsoft 365 platform.

Not only is it providing employees with a chat room type forum for their colleagues and making it simple to access their files.

It is also providing a centralised area for employees to access key business applications and useful links all under one roof.

This then makes it an obvious move to make your SharePoint intranet accessible directly inside of Microsoft Teams.

Using the newly released Viva Connections you can simply integrate your SharePoint intranet as a tab for all employees to access from the left hand side of Microsoft Teams.

Improve communication with SharePoint newsletters

Although intranet owners and communication departments are often aware SharePoint online can create news articles, not many are aware that you can create newsletters also.

Newsletters is a great feature of SharePoint Online that allows you to provide a title, description and a selection of news articles that have previously been created.

It will then put this in to a pre-made template for you and send it out to one or multiple email addresses of your choice.

A well presented newsletter will then be delivered and links to the individual news items will be presented.

This is a great way to not only boost employee engagement, assist in user adoption of SharePoint but also drive traffic to your new modern SharePoint intranet.

SharePoint Review and Approval Workflows

Once you have your SharePoint intranet setup with multiple areas of documents, why not consider extending this functionality further to include automated reviews or approval processes.

Through the use of Microsoft 365 workflow engine known as Power Automate, you can build simple or complex workflows for a lot of different business processes.

You can also consider using Microsoft PowerApps for building out custom user interfaces. This is a great way to replace InfoPath forms if you are migrating away from an old version of SharePoint.

Power Automate will provide a very simplistic drag and drop type interface for building out your workflows. There is also hundreds if not thousands of different pre-built templates that you can browse to learn from.