It's included with most Office 365 plan, and you might not even know you have it
Here at TMB we’re big fans of Office 365. As well as the convenience of cloud-based versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, many O365 plans include offline versions of those same apps. However, there’s much more to Office 365 than these old favourites; in fact, most Office 365 plans comes bundled with a whole bunch of other great applications – some of which you might not be using or might not even have heard of. SharePoint is one of those apps.
Also available as a stand-alone, on-premise product, SharePoint is collaboration tool with multiple uses that can benefit businesses. It allows the user to create ‘sites’ and ‘pages’, which can host all kinds of material. In many cases, organisations simply use SharePoint as a file storage and sharing service. Users can upload their files and other users can then view, download or edit them, dependent on permissions.
But there’s much more to it than that. SharePoint integrates closely with other Microsoft tools, including Teams, Outlook and Planner. You can, for example, create a team in Teams, and this will automatically create a team site in SharePoint. (A team site enables everyone with access to make changes to the site. SharePoint can also be used to create communication sites, which are for sharing data without allowing others to edit them.)
You can then use Planner in your web browser, in Teams or in SharePoint to create tasks for yourself or others. When someone comments on one of these, it can then send an email notification via Outlook to every member of the team. All this activity can then be viewed in SharePoint.
So SharePoint is also great for planning.
However, one of the most popular uses of SharePoint is for building company intranets. It’s a highly customisable solution, which offers businesses a straightforward way of creating branded internal sites. Indeed, TMB’s own software team offers custom development of SharePoint as a service, and intranet projects are a regular occurrence.
The very qualities that make SharePoint so good for intranets also mean it’s a powerful solution for web design too. At www.topsharepoint.com you’ll find hundreds of websites that have been built using SharePoint. Included among them are the sites for the Singaporean tourist board and the Portuguese football club FC Porto .
Depending on what you need it for, you might be better off with an on-premise deployment of SharePoint, one reason being that it can be customised much more than the cloud version. However, in other cases, the version of SharePoint in Office 365 is more than enough for most users.
If you’re unsure about how to use SharePoint most effectively in your organisation or you want help deciding if you should use the Office 356 version or the on-premise version, please get in touch. Our team will be happy to discuss your requirements with you and guide you in the right direction.
