Thursday, 23 July 2015

Top Ten Benefits of SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint has been around since 2001 and is one of the top business collaboration resources today. However, it wasn’t until the SharePoint 2007 release that businesses really started to harness the power of online collaboration.

Now, with SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has gone even further to offer sought after services straight “out-of-the-box.”

The SharePoint platform includes SharePoint Designer, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server & SharePoint Workspace; below are the top 10 benefits.

1. Provide a Simple, Familiar & Consistent User Experience
SharePoint is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes and business data. This tight integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ services themselves and facilitates product adoption.

2. Simplify Everyday Business Activities
Take advantage of out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking and reporting common business activities, such as document review and approval, issue tracking and signature collection. And, you can complete these activities without any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail and Web browsers provides you with a simple, consistent experience.

3. Help Meet Regulatory Requirements
By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively. And, you can reduce litigation risk for your organization.

4. Effectively Manage and Re-purpose Content
Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual content is simplified through new document library templates that are specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.

5. Simplify Access to Business Data
Give your users access to business data found in common line-of-business systems like Microsoft CRM through SharePoint. Users can also create personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organizations store and organize business documents in one central location.

6. Connect Employees with Information and Expertise
Enterprise Search incorporates business data along with information about documents, people and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction and alerts improve the relevance of the results so you can easily find what you need.

7. Accelerate Shared Business Processes
Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.

8. Share without Divulging Sensitive Information
Give your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on SharePoint. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents, such as financial models.

9. Enable Employees to make Better-informed Decisions
SharePoint makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities, such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs) and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets or KPIs.

10. Provide a Single, Integrated Platform

SharePoint is built on an open, scalable architecture with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and
Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
. The service has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.

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