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Collaboration tools and resources seem to be all the rage these days in the modern business community. The only problem is that a great majority of businesses are doing it wrong. In fact, many are still relying on email to collaborate on complex documents and files. This poses several problems. For instance, if you keep bouncing emails back and forth via email, you have to download the file, update it, re-upload it into your email server and bounce it back to the desired party. What an incredibly inefficient way to collaborate. What if you could skip all that bouncing back and forth and collaborate in real-time on business critical documents and projects? This is where SharePoint comes in handy.
What is SharePoint?
Simply put, SharePoint is Microsoft’s answer to email collaboration inefficiency. For instance, SharePoint provides a single robust infrastructure for sharing and collaborating on data. From here, you can build powerful collaboration communities, build websites and develop dynamic content all from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Benefits of Using SharePoint
- Stay Up to Date – With SharePoint, you don’t have to sift through pages and pages of email to find the most current version of a document or project. In fact, you can set up your SharePoint collaboration system to automatically update files after changes have been made.
- Manage Failures Effectively – Failures in daily business processes are inevitable. Still, you need to have solutions in place to help you handle shortfalls in daily business processes. As you’ve probably experienced, it’s often difficult to pinpoint specific trouble spots that caused a business process to go bad. Managing processes in real-time with SharePoint gives you insight into specific problem areas so you can isolate problems and fix them quickly.
- Leaves a Virtual Paper Trail – With email it’s hard to really know if business procedures were followed, or whether a file or document was updated correctly. With SharePoint you can always have birds-eye view as to what is going on in your collaboration environment. For instance, if a mistake is made on a company document, you can immediately see information on the last person to edit that document.
- Smoother Collaboration Processes – Again, collaboration processes are streamlined in the SharePoint environment. You can skip the complicated mess that is your email server and work on large projects with your colleagues in real time. This comes in handy as many companies deal with a mobile workforce. So, when it comes down to the wire on that new company document you can work quickly with your colleagues to produce the best work possible regardless of physical location.
Making the Switch
While switching from email to SharePoint collaboration is a great idea for virtually any company, it does come with challenges. The main challenge is the learning curve associated with adopting a new system. This is why it’s increasingly important that you put in the time to train and educate your employees on how to access, use and get the most out of the SharePoint collaboration system.
