What is Microsoft SharePoint Online? The 2023 Guide to SharePoint Online
Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of applications has been the cornerstone of offices worldwide for decades. Microsoft SharePoint is just one of the mighty 365 tools that you can use to enhance your workplace — and it has been doing so for over two decades.
SharePoint Online — the newest version of SharePoint — is a powerful collaboration platform that can be used for lots of different things throughout the workplace. From simple file sharing and collaboration to team communications, SharePoint can help your entire organisation stay connected and unified on multiple levels.
In this article, we’re going to go over the ins and outs of SharePoint Online, and how you can use it within your organisation to help key aspects of your business reach its full potential.
What is SharePoint Online?
SharePoint Online is a cloud-based collaboration and data exchange platform created by Microsoft.
The cloud-based version of SharePoint — originally launched in 2001 — SharePoint Online is powered by the top-of-the-industry technology that’s been infused into all of Microsoft’s 365 cloud offerings. It can be used for many different aspects of your organisation —
Build Your Intranet: SharePoint Online can be used to create an intranet system to enable your team to easily communicate and collaborate.
File Storage and Sharing: SharePoint Online can be used to create document libraries for easy and convenient file sharing and storage throughout your team.
Project Collaboration: You can easily use SharePoint Online as a basis for whole-project team collaboration in a formal setting. The tool is built to enable communication and productivity throughout your organisation.
Many businesses and organisations around the world use SharePoint Online as a simple communication solution to ensure that important information is available to those within their organisation in an accessible manner. However, SharePoint Online is a very flexible and capable tool for multiple aspects of any organisation.
SharePoint Online Features
Collaboration
SharePoint Online allows you to create a document library and share documents and files within your team with ease. It makes collaboration much more simple throughout your organisation, meaning that productivity and efficiency in working together will always be high.
It also allows you to collaborate externally with Outlook Integrated SharePoint, with easy tools to secure and authenticate access to the systems and files that are being shared with SharePoint Online. With this, collaboration is truly unlocked throughout your organisation.
Inform Employees
SharePoint Online also allows you to create detailed and useful intranets to be able to inform your employees about important information being changed at an institution-wide level.
Using tools such as SharePoint News, you can easily create news digests to keep your team in the loop about happenings in your organisation.
You can also notify your team when new files are uploaded and also create detailed alerts when files and folders are changed within SharePoint, meaning that you can easily ensure that everyone in your organisation is informed.
Microsoft 365 Integration
SharePoint Online also integrates easily with other Microsoft 365 tools and applications, unlocking powerful new solutions to truly innovate within your organisation.
With no-code Microsoft Teams implementations, the more informal collaboration capabilities of Teams and formal collaboration capabilities of SharePoint can easily unite to fully boost productivity in your workplace.
Microsoft 365 tools such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel also fully integrate with Sharepoint, allowing you to organise and manage files throughout your organisation’s network with ease.
Mobile Application
For any modern business, being flexible in the devices that you can use to work is vital. With full mobile integration, creating responsive and accessible mobile content in SharePoint Online is simple.
SharePoint Online lets you access all dashboards, content, news, images, lists, business data, and so much more from your mobile device, meaning that you can work on important SharePoint files on the go.
SharePoint Online Use Cases
Document Management
SharePoint Online can be used to manage documents throughout your organisation with ease.
With its robust document management UI and file management settings and capabilities, SharePoint Online is a great way to ensure that files throughout a project or generally throughout your organisation are easily accessible.
Content Management
You can use SharePoint Online to store and manage enterprise content — known as enterprise content management (ECM). You can easily create and publish web content using tools within SharePoint, ensuring that your content is uniform.
SharePoint Online has capabilities to both manage content using file metadata and with wider ECM capabilities — whether it be audiovisual content or written content, you can use SharePoint Online to ensure that it’s stored in an organised and accessible manner for anyone that needs to access it.
Knowledge Management
Knowledge management — the ability to connect the nodes of ‘knowledge providers’ and ‘knowledge seekers’ — is key to ensuring that everyone within your organisation can easily access the information that they need.
SharePoint is fully capable of enabling knowledge management in your system — its file exploration and search capabilities mean that anyone within your organisation can easily find the information that they need.
Project Management
With full collaboration and team connection tools, creating and managing projects in SharePoint Online is simple.
Rather than having to use different tools to collaborate, SharePoint Online is a robust collaboration tool that also can be fully integrated with other 365 tools, meaning that you can fully take advantage of SharePoint Online’s collaborative power.
How To Get Started
Microsoft SharePoint Online is a powerful collaboration and file management tool, that fully enables your organisation’s communications, file storage, and collaboration to reach its full potential. With so many different applications and integrations, implementing SharePoint into your organisation’s infrastructure is a no-brainer.
If you’re looking to implement 365 and SharePoint Online into your organisation, reach out to us today. Our experts will be able to help you work out exactly how to get started and will be there to ensure that you have a helping hand throughout your organisation’s entire Microsoft 365 journey.
Get in touch with us now and see how we can help you.
