According to Global Workplace Analytics, the number of people who now work from home has increased tremendously with 4.3 million employees working from home for half the time. Sometimes remote working is involved not due to employee’s demands but due to the business requirements. Although, remote working has specific benefits for the employees, but it comes with added challenges for efficient working too. These challenges can be addressed by using dedicated tools. One of the best platforms for this is – Microsoft SharePoint.
Microsoft SharePoint is a widely used enterprise-level platform, adopted by organizations for efficient collaboration, data storage, and document/project management. It brings everyone together for better interaction and engagement, offers a common space to conduct discussions, update each other on the progress, and keep an open line of communication. Overall, SharePoint simplifies business processes, provides a secure internal information sharing platform, and enhances productivity.
Here, we will talk about the 5 ways in which Microsoft SharePoint can help teams collaborate:
1. Create a Community
One of the significant advantages of SharePoint is its ability to create communities within communities. Most of the organizations are usually a collection of small teams where everyone is working on specific projects. SharePoint allows you to create communities for each of your teams. It allows members to track and discuss changes, collaborate more seamlessly, and have a central location to share files. This becomes highly beneficial if your team is spread over various geographical regions or if your team comprises remote workers.
By creating communities, SharePoint becomes the central virtual location where team members can chat, meet through video conferencing, compare calendars, and store shared documents.
2. Exclusive Access to Teams
When Microsoft SharePoint is deployed as part of the Office 365, it creates a virtual workspace with team-only access where teams can meet, collaborate, and carry out tasks. You can enable team members to create a project, decide who can participate in it and what access each member will have. The IT department doesn’t have to manage these tasks.
Hence, only authorized members can access the documents located on the SharePoint server. You can also adjust access to the server depending on the flow of work.
3. Collaboration at Various Levels
SharePoint is beneficial for collaborating at both small and large scales:
Small Scale Collaboration (Team-based collaboration)
AS WE DISCUSSED IN THE ABOVE POINT, SHAREPOINT ALLOWS SECURE COLLABORATION WITHIN THE MEMBERS OF A TEAM.
Large Scale Collaboration (Company-wide collaboration)
YOU CAN ALSO CREATE CROSS-DEPARTMENTAL COLLABORATION IN SHAREPOINT BY USING CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS. THE KEY ELEMENT OF COMPANY-WIDE COLLABORATION IS THE INTRANET THAT CONNECTS ALL DEPARTMENTS AND STORES TO ALL CORPORATE DOCUMENTS, POLICIES, UPDATES, AND MORE. EMPLOYEES FROM VARIOUS DEPARTMENTS CAN EASILY COMMUNICATE THROUGH THE INTRANET’S INSTANT MESSAGING TOOLS, DISCUSSION BOARDS, ETC.
4. Clearly Specify Team’s Tasks
In many cases, teams are created for specific projects like developing a new product, organizing an event, etc. To carry out these projects smoothly, the team leader is required to assign these tasks to the team members. With SharePoint, the team leader can easily set up individual tasks and assign those tasks to the participants. Hence, team members can find out what tasks they need to carry out.
Additionally, members can also track the tasks of other team members. This ensures efficient and effective collaboration as it is often the case that one task depends on some other task. In other words, one task cannot be started before the other one is complete. With SharePoint, you can get a clear idea of such dependencies.
5. Combine SharePoint with Outlook for Added Functionalities
It’s interesting to know that SharePoint accompanies Outlook in some really impressive ways. You can leverage Outlook’s rich feature set in SharePoint for calendar management and email. It ensures that all of your work items flow seamlessly between your regular calendar and your SharePoint calendar.
This functionality has its own advantage. It reminds employees about their daily tasks, deadlines and more.
Conclusion
Team collaboration within an organization has been part of the work culture since inception. With modifications in the ways teams collaborate in a modern work environment, enterprises require to deploy better platforms to achieve efficient collaboration at all times.
Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most powerful and useful tools falling in this category which provides complete solutions your enterprise needs to keep your employees engaged and productive always.
If you want to get a SharePoint solution developed for your organization, contact a dedicated SharePoint development company and transform your organization into a more collaborative workplace.
