Is Excel Not Cutting It Anymore?

For many small businesses, Microsoft Excel is the default software application used to store company information, communicate with team members, and control content. However, as businesses grow and their needs increase, they often find Excel cannot meet emerging challenges that demand faster, more efficient communication, more control over information, and better organization. Excel is independent in nature and it is therefore it is difficult to connect external parts of a business. Due to Excel’s structure, it is cumbersome to manage large amounts of data, especially if they involve disparate parts of an organization. Businesses may be wasting untold time and resources trying to stretch the use of an outmoded program that can no longer keep up with their needs.

For these businesses, it may be time to step up to a SharePoint solution. SharePoint enhances sharing and communication by providing a central repository where information can be easily managed, controlled, and distributed. SharePoint breaks down the different areas of a business and provides tools for connecting them in meaningful ways.

However, a lot of businesses are skeptical about Microsoft’s rapidly growing SharePoint technology. This may be because they are unsure about what it does and how it can be applied to their business operations. The purpose of this article is to define SharePoint, discuss its uses, and help you consider how it can be applied to deliver a positive return on your investment.

What is SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is a multi-purpose web application platform that can make communications, collaboration, and content management more fluid and effective for many businesses. The SharePoint platform assists with information sharing, enterprise search implementation, business processes, and business intelligence to streamline business operations, increase productivity, and ultimately save time and money. The three main themes of SharePoint are communication, information, and organization.

3. Organization

Organization is also enhanced through SharePoint. Content can be added in the form of a table or lists where users can easily search and assign tasks. By storing content within a manageable database, it becomes much simpler to access and share. With the calendar tool, an event can be created and stored with related documents and other media. Automatic notifications can alert relevant parties about upcoming events or document changes. Data can be accessed with Internet-enabled mobile devices so all parties can have information at their fingertips, no matter where they are in the world.

Essentially, SharePoint is a collaboration tool, improving the way people work together in an organization by providing tools that allow information to move fluidly among users and departments. Users are able to collaborate, share ideas, discover information, and stay in sync with the challenges of the organization. Better collaboration leads to better productivity, innovation, and more informed decisions that ultimately reduce costs and save resources without adding any overhead to an organization.

How Can a SharePoint Solution Help Your Business?

Useful SharePoint Tools

Often the reason businesses are reluctant to switch to SharePoint is because they fail to envision how it can be applied to their specific business to deliver tangible benefits. While there are many tools associated with SharePoint, the following tools usually have the most understandable applications to business operations.

1. CRM Tools

With SharePoint, businesses can more easily implement a strategy for managing their company’s interactions with customers, clients, distributors, and sales prospects. CRM tools afforded by SharePoint can assist with marketing endeavors, customer support, and even technical services. SharePoint can share CRM data with customers, partners, and distributors, enabling them to submit requests, track status, and view information. Content management features can be extended to your customers or clients – you can create secure central documents that your clients can view and edit. These documents are synchronized so updates are accessible with a click of a button so they can be shared among clients and partners. SharePoint makes it easy to offer training materials or other customer information available in a password-protected website that can be accessed anywhere in the world.

2. Calendar

A SharePoint calendar will keep your users apprised of upcoming events, meetings, deadlines, milestones, and other important dates to remember. Users remain focused and teams are more cohesive when all users are aware of calendar events. Customers also are kept aware of company or product events through email updates. You can overlay a SharePoint calendar with Outlook calendars or with other SharePoint calendars so that you can filter events or see them all at once.

3. Workflow Solution

All businesses, no matter their size or scope, have workflows that dictate a pattern of activity enabled by the systematic organization of resources, defined roles, and flow of information into a tangible process that can be documented and learned. In SharePoint, workflow is defined as the automated movement of documents or items through a sequence of actions or tasks that are related to a business process. Using SharePoint business logic, a set of instructions that specifies and controls the actions that happen to a document or item can be attached to workflows. This can streamline the cost and time required to coordinate common business processes.

For example, by attaching the right business logic to a project approval or document review process, you can quicken the process and improve accuracy. When the document author starts the approval workflow, the approval tasks are automatically created and assigned to workflow participants and sent as email alerts with instructions and a link to the document to be approved. The workflow owner is automatically notified when the tasks are completed, and can check the workflow status at any time to see which participants have finished their tasks.

4. Dashboard Tools

SharePoint allows you to create a project dashboard to help keep people synchronized and on task. You can view and filter project elements, such as project details, project documents, project tasks, project issues, project calendars, project milestones, project lessons learned, project risks, project change orders, and others. Effective use of the dashboard can help you monitor business metrics, analyze issue causes, and enhance business intelligence to improve decision making. You can customize the SharePoint dashboard to make essential tools readily available to manage your contents and users.

Is SharePoint Right For Your Business?

There are sound business reasons for using SharePoint, but it is up to each business owner to take a hard look at their business case and calculate the true cost of ownership. Consider your number of users, licenses, and servers, and any extra modules of functionality you’re likely to require. Overall, if deployed seamlessly and used effectively, SharePoint should reduce costs, save resources, and ensure accuracy while delivering tangible business benefits, including improved productivity, better decision-making, and increased innovation.