From strategic business planning, empowering employees to confidently contribute to team projects, and inspiring collaboration, to storing and sharing confidential documents easily and safely, it’s no surprise that SharePoint is Microsoft’s best-selling web application platform for companies striving to streamline, access, and utilize their data better.

Benefits of using SharePoint

SharePoint provides a centralized administration; this single-location benefit enables you to maintain control of all facets of the entire SharePoint platform. From one location you can choose how the application management features are accessed, system settings, monitoring of your forms, managing of the security settings, and how you perform upgrades, backups, and restorations. A second benefit: SharePoint is easily customizable. Whether you want to utilize SharePoint’s features as they are originally provided to you, customize every aspect of the SharePoint platform to be in sync with your company’s branding strategy, or just prefer specific components of it get customized, that’s all doable via SharePoint. Another benefit of SharePoint is its ease of collaboration. Your staff can collaborate as a team ~ using and sharing documents while remaining rest assured that the integrity of the documents housed on SharePoint’s cloud will never be compromised. Your teams can stay connected and informed through every facet of a project’s lifecycle. Through SharePoint’s collaboration features, individual members of a specific team can readily access the key information and critical knowledge they need for a project.

SharePoint eliminates security concerns regarding sharing documents

By running your proprietary, financial, and other highly-confidential information on Excel spreadsheets through Excel Services on the SharePoint platform, you are not only able to have your designated employees access and interact with the spreadsheets in real-time, but also simultaneously protect the integrity of your data from unauthorized use at both a broad spectrum level and at an item level. The SharePoint platform enables you to easily manage accessibility and permission to web applications, folders, lists, sites, and much more. Through specific settings that demand users checkout documents prior to editing, the users can view all the revisions made to a document and then easily return the document back to its original state.

How SharePoint prevents security issues regarding sharing documents

SharePoint prevents security challenges of your sensitive business information by enabling you to specify your particular security settings, your auditing policies, your storage procedures, and the expiration actions on your business records – all while remaining in accordance with compliance regulation. Since SharePoint enables you to decide, customize, and manage who has permission to access and review any or all components of the SharePoint platform, the security of your business information cannot be compromised or accessed by unauthorized individuals.

The importance of training users on your SharePoint platform

As with any new web application framework implemented at an organization, it’s critical to include formal training for your staff to optimize the product’s seamless, stress-free, and easy implementation. This holds true for embracing Microsoft’s SharePoint as well. While your Application Administrators and end-users could easily immerse themselves in comprehensive and rigorous training for months to embrace every aspect of SharePoint’s full-featured Microsoft Office-platform, fortunately that’s not required to launch and use this product. For Application Administrators, Microsoft recommends training on:

• Creating lists
• Document library management
• Editing pages
• User management
• Permission management

A power-user bootcamp is an ideal course to support this level user.

For the end-users of SharePoint, Microsoft suggests training on:

• Basic Navigation
• Adding documents to libraries
• Viewing lists
• Creating new list items

which can be covered in a one day fundamentals course for users. Having the knowledge for every user eliminates fears of the unknown and enables users to jump into SharePoint optimizing it's true benefit to the work environment.

The goals of embracing any new platform are to make things easier for end-users, save time, and cut costs while simultaneously maintain quality and security; SharePoint delivers all of this and more. By streamlining processes, more gets accomplished in less time.