The features and benefits of SharePoint

SharePoint is a back-end system that ties all your employees’ PCs and mobile devices together, allowing them all to communicate and synchronize their efforts. Its goal is to make it possible for a company with a number of employees spread all over the region to work with the same level of agility and coordination as a company with three people working out of a single office.

Sharing documents and reducing costs through leveraging existing investments are just some of the benefits of using SharePoint. For our customers, SharePoint has added value through the following features:

Websites & customer facing portals

SharePoint is designed to make websites quickly and easily. Each website can have its own set of permissions, allowing you to share sites with individuals, teams or company wide. You can create individual blogs, a corporate intranet or even a customer facing portal, extranet or website.

See how Contoso uses SharePoint below:

Communities & project management

SharePoint makes it easy to work with colleagues; this could be anything from two people working on one shared document to creating shared calendars, discussion lists, shared task lists and a lot more. Additionally, SharePoint will notify you when your shared documents have been updated.

Content, document management, task management & version control

SharePoint provides a place to store all your files, documents, spreadsheets and product brochures etc. It has a robust content management system which enables you to add version control and security to your documents.

Integration with Microsoft Dynamics NAV

In addition to storing all your files on SharePoint you can also present data using other business applications. See a screenshot below of some data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV embedded in SharePoint:

Search

Once you’ve uploaded your content onto SharePoint you can take advantage of the search function. This allows you to create fairly complex queries and search in different libraries and department zones in order to easily find the documents you’re searching for.

Insights

SharePoint makes it easy to analyse and find insights in uploaded content. You can create SSRS reports, build web parts or use Excel’s scorecards and Power View to start aggregating data and producing meaningful reports.

Composites

By composites we mean the extensibility of SharePoint and its ability to create new features that are specific to your business, such as being able to add a workflow to a document library, create custom lists, applications and libraries. In summary, you can shape SharePoint to fit the needs of your business.