Autumn always triggers forecasts about next year’s work innovations and, in 2019, ‘collaboration‘ looks like it will be all the rage.
Collaborating well as a synchronized team can be challenging, however, when team members are spread across offices and time zones. Microsoft’s SharePoint eliminates those barriers by bringing everyone together under a single virtual roof to improve productivity and engage all team members through a shared experience.
SharePoint as the Infrastructure for Collaboration
The new term for the tool is “content collaboration platform” (CCP), although Microsoft has been offering SharePoint as a CCP since 2001, so it’s not new to them. The advantage of that long history is that it provides a thorough understanding of how companies use SharePoint to facilitate their everyday functioning, as that has evolved over the past 17 years. Its designers and programmers use those insights to inform the direction of future iterations of the software, being sure to embrace technical innovations as well as market realities and trends.
As a consequence, today’s SharePoint is an amalgamation of everything that’s gone right for the platform and its users since the beginning:
It maximizes the benefits of existing programs:
- SharePoint automatically integrates with Microsoft Office products, which is not insignificant considering there are an estimated 1.2 billion of them worldwide. At least 60 million commercial customers use Office 365, and there have been more than 340 million downloads of Office Mobile since its inception in 2016. As one of the planets most ubiquitous programs, by combining their Office workloads with the other assets of SharePoint, users around the world enhance their productivity in every industry and market.
- As a cloud-based solution, SharePoint Online is accessible literally anywhere in the world where an Internet connection can be found, and it centralizes content in any format where workers from any location can access it. Mobile and office-based workers have equal access to review documents, make changes or introduce new elements regardless of where they are actually working. Users automatically connect to the most recent version, too, which reduces or eliminates the time and energy wasted tracking down the most current forms of any document.
- The combination of Office products and cloud siting provides an unmatched opportunity for collaboration. Internal controls limit or allow access by any contributor to group or team efforts, so leadership can easily assign exactly the talent needed at any given time. Consequently, collaboration efforts can cross offices, departments, and divisions without losing impetus or security along the way.
It enhances production values, too:
Workflows that are streamlined through automation save employee time and effort, so workers can produce more and higher quality work than they can without the technology support.
– Collaboration also enhances employee knowledge and learning, as space, time, and geographical barriers are removed. Sharing ideas and inspirations becomes as valuable as producing physical products or responding to schedules and deadlines.
– Corporate leadership also benefits from having current, up-to-the-minute data available upon which to base its decisions. As all relevant data is fed into the single database, the C-Suite can now review and publish the facts that underscore its activities; guesses and estimates are no longer sufficient or necessary.
These are just a few of the benefits and attributes offered by today’s SharePoint software.
