Why Sharepoint?
Traditionally, the core of many business networks was a server or servers, located in the company premises, responsible for among many things, the email and company document store. This generally works well for colleagues working with the data locally, but often presents challenges outside of this, such as a remote worker with a poor or no internet connection, or if the office containing the server suffers a power outage, internet failure, or in extreme cases, fire/flood/theft etc.
Microsoft’s suite of cloud-hosted products and services are going from strength to strength, with offerings such as their 365 Exchange Online, which is an excellent alternative to the more traditional and costly Exchange Server software. SharePoint however, is the focus of this article, to give you a glimpse of the fact you no longer need a traditional file server to locally hold all company data accrued over the years. Instead, hosting your company documents and data in a modern cloud platform means benefitting from increased security and reliability, inherent to enterprise-class data centre environments, such as the ones underpinning these solutions.
Many benefits in terms of accessibility and collaboration are also at the heart of things, such as;
- You can access your SharePoint library from anywhere in the world, on many common web browsers and on most computers, smartphones and tablets. This is clearly useful for Adhoc remote-working but also minimises disruption in the event of something more significant, such as a major power failure at the usual office location.
- Remote workers can work on cached documents seamlessly while offline, which then sync back to the SharePoint library automatically for all to see once connectivity is available again.
- The latest versions of Microsoft Office software such as Word & Excel have excellent collaborative working baked-in, allowing you to see changes made by multiple people in near-real-time to the same document while working on it live.
- Flexible and informative document info and file versioning/restore functionality to give confidence when authoring/editing.
- Comprehensive options and flexibility around document and folder access for colleagues, and sharing functionality to allow granular document access to 3rd parties as required.
- Functionality can easily be integrated with Microsoft OneDrive to present the SharePoint library as a more traditional company network drive, to help with the transition process for colleagues.
Sedcom have already migrated many of our clients onto solutions comprising elements mentioned in this article, and more, and would love to speak to you, to tailor a solution that’s best suited to your business needs and future journey. We will work closely with you to transition you to the new solution, then manage the support and administration of the software and services going forwards, so you can focus on the benefits now available to you.
