Microsoft Office 365 is one of the best and most popular tools used for office productivity. This platform has all the classic old tools including Word, Excel, PowerPoint Templates and Outlook. Besides having all the old and necessary tools, it has also new and innovative cloud tools like OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
Many of us are not fully familiar with the new tools so are not using these new and innovative tools to their full potential. Many clients mostly use the more familiar tools like MS Word, Excel etc.
Out of all the new tools, SharePoint is the most underutilized one. This is a platform for storing files and information which can be accessed online providing a more secure and easy way for communication and better organization of the information.
The companies working online with Microsoft office 365 do not quite understand so they do not how to get the most out of SharePoint which results in missing out on important and necessary benefits of the MS Office 365 subscription.
Here in this brief article, we are going to provide you with the Microsoft office 365 solutions and give you some tips to get the most out of them. At the same time, we will be giving some tips to SharePoint to use to its full potential to let it do wonders for your business.
Understanding SharePoint
Before getting to the benefits of using SharePoint, let’s first know a little that what is SharePoint and how can we use its different sites to get the benefit for our business.
The best brief description of SharePoint is that it is a sort of intranet of your own company. It is a system of sharing files and information among the members of the company. It allows you to control the privacy and security of your information. You decide who can see what.
You do not need to build a website to put your information for certain people to see it. You can just put your information, images, text, statistics and other attributes on SharePoint. This app will make a page or website interface by itself and you can control who gets the access to view all this information.
SharePoint Site Types
Based on the information and with whom to share it, we can describe SharePoint in the following types.
SharePoint Site Types:
Team Site: These types are for the specific group of people working as a team on a project on MS Teams or MS Office 365 Group. The information or other items can be put on this type of site where only authorized members are given access. It is a secure platform for a team to share their information.
Communication Site: This type of site is used as a communicating platform for some specific level of the people in the company like HR. communication site is used by different departments for communication within the department. Heads of different teams of the departments have access to this site. Here they can communicate with all employees.
Hub Site: A hub site is a sort of directory where there is information about all the team and the communication site. If you want to find which team is working on what project and who is working in that team, you can find it on the Hub site. Apart from this Hub site also gives you information about the communication site of the different departments. It makes it easier to find information about who to contact for what purpose and it becomes for everyone to find concerned people.
Site Templates
SharePoint provides you with several different site templates to make it easy for you to make shortcuts when putting information on it to make a site. Make the template as it suits your work the best and save it for the entire company to use.
There are many different types of templates to choose from, here are some of them given below:
Templates include:
- Modern team site
- Classic team site
- Blog site
- Project site
- Community site
Security & Communication
In all the companies certain information of the certain department needs to private and secure, like the accounts department. This information is limited to a certain level of or a certain group of people in a company or an organization.
You have to be very sure and watchful that you do not put a confidential file on a public platform where everybody has access to it. A small example is a company account detail or payroll cannot be put on a public platform in SharePoint or OneDrive.
SharePoint makes you overcome that problem by giving you the option of creating secure document storage. You can put your confidential files and information on the place giving access to a certain group of concerned people of the company.
While setting up the SharePoint Team site for setting up a group of people as a team in Teams, you are given the option of a protected cloud sharing area where the member of a certain team can securely put sensitive information and save confidential documents. You can give access to this area to certain concerned people to have communication that is not going to go to the other people outside the team.
Useful Tool for HR Department
On the SharePoint communication site, you can put some information regarding frequently asked questions, such as the vacation policies, health insurance benefits, request forms etc.
The benefits of this will be that instead of giving answers to the same question to different employees you can direct everyone to this information so they can see the information by themselves instead of coming to you again and again for similar questions.
The HR department can use this feature very effectively. They can streamline the information process for both the employees and your HR team on the SharePoint communications site.
Employees can have access to this communication site and not have the trouble to go to the HR official for every single piece for the information again and again.
Improve Companywide Communications
SharePoint can be used as a centralized system for sharing important information such as news and other updates in the company policies. In this way, the employees will not think that they are missing out on the information regarding the company policies. It will avoid a lot of misunderstandings between the employees and the company policies.
It can serve as an easy way to communicate with the employees to publish news, policy updates, and more in an online company intranet. With this method, you can avoid the problem of miscommunications when employees are hearing about a new policy second or third hand.
Make the Most out of SharePoint in Microsoft Office 365 with Al Rafay Global
Al Rafay Global provides services for your online business to get the full benefits of cloud solutions like Microsoft Office 365 through our expert IT consulting and SharePoint development.