A Complete Guide on Microsoft SharePoint: Features, Pricing, Benefits

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What is Microsoft SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is an online solution for the storage and sharing of files that is focused on customers and extremely flexible. It is connected to the Office suite from Microsoft.

Microsoft SharePoint, in essence, a kind of file and content management system. It provides organisations with safe workplaces and assists employees in coordinating and communicating with their teams. This involves creating tasks, tracking timetables, and locating any information relevant to their everyday activities or projects. SharePoint features make it possible for users to share reports, documents and a whole lot more with co-workers with ease. The location you are working from does not matter because you can share files and documents, and work on them collaboratively if you have access to the cloud-powered Microsoft SharePoint.

What is Microsoft SharePoint Online?

Microsoft SharePoint Online is a set of cloud- and internet-oriented applications that allow businesses to easily save, distribute, and handle digital data. Newsfeed, OneDrive, and Sites are the three centres of SharePoint Online. In the Newsfeed, a new microblogging feature allows users to join in discussions, "share" posts, include videos, images, and records, and cite other users. SharePoint Sites for mobile devices may be simply customised or set up.

SharePoint Online also allows for cooperation with third-party users, such as suppliers and clients. It is offered as an independent service as well as a component of the Office 365 package, which also includes Exchange Online, Skype for Business, Office clients, and Office Web Apps.

What is SharePoint Used for?

SharePoint is a more extensive corporate platform as an intranet because it links workers to the resources and knowledge they use daily. Several companies use Microsoft SharePoint whilst creating websites.

Instead of utilising a one-time tool for a specific activity and having your data stay in isolation in that tool, your information may move and be integrated into reports, statistics, and workflows with SharePoint. In fairness, cloud support is one of the SharePoint features used frequently by professionals across all verticals and disciplines.

Key SharePoint Benefits/Advantages of SharePoint

Integrating Other Microsoft Apps Becomes Simpler

Microsoft products and apps, such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and OneDrive are integrated with SharePoint. It provides a unified digital experience while saving hours of productive work. Here are some instances of how:

• Employees can view their SharePoint documents and files without leaving Outlook by synchronising Outlook with SharePoint.
• With the connection of OneDrive and SharePoint, employees can work on projects remotely while all changes are instantly synchronised to SharePoint online in a matter of seconds. It makes no difference whether you left an office file on your home computer; your data is synchronised and available all the time.
• You may add a SharePoint link right into MS Teams while you are using it. This connection allows you to view project papers and track actions without ever leaving MS Teams. Integration with other Microsoft tools and services is one of the best SharePoint features.

Enhanced Security Protocols & Controls

Measures should be put in place to guarantee that only authorised users have access to confidential details and customer information. At each checkpoint, SharePoint enables users to choose security settings that meet their compliance laws. You may also define storage and auditing procedures, as well as what to do when company data expire. This assists your organisation in maintaining compliance while successfully regulating and managing business-critical information.

What distinguishes SharePoint is, in part, its extensive ability to handle user rights along with how they connect with functionality. Companies can restrict user access to specific websites, spreadsheets, and repositories. They can control who can see, edit, remove, or conduct other SharePoint operations. Permissions can be specified for a single user or numerous users within the same Office 365 group. This is one of the biggest SharePoint benefits.

It is Highly Scalable

SharePoint is very scalable, and it can be utilised in organisations ranging from 150 to 20,000 people and beyond. Unlike many other intranet technologies, SharePoint may be customised to provide the functionality desired by the organisation. It is accepted and usual practice.

The platform may be expanded with new web elements, apps, and workflows. Many have no need for any modification and may be constructed by expert users. As a corporation expands, SharePoint may provide a versatile solution that adapts to a changing business environment. It is one of the most popular SharePoint features.

Collaboration is Made Easy

You and your team may work on one file in real-time without experiencing any lag. As a result, numerous creative developers as well as content producers favour SharePoint for project collaboration.

Another key role of SharePoint collaboration is to maintain uncluttered information moving between sites and subsites. It allows everyone to keep up to speed on the project without having to go through various emails, missed conversations, video calls, and so on.

SharePoint online not only allows you to view it from any device, but it also allows you to share documents and files with others in your organisation who need them, and anybody with an internet connection may access these documents from anywhere. If you are in a region where there is no Internet, you could continue to work on your documents while offline, and they will synchronise to Microsoft SharePoint when you return! SharePoint Benefits, such as this one, come in handy if you want to work with your teammates on a report or research study.

There is Absolutely No Need for Coding

Employees may be resistant to adopting complex software. And no one is interested in investing in new technology just to have people forsake it.

Business users appreciate a platform that is simple to set up and does not necessitate any technical knowledge. SharePoint's recent upgrades make it an ideal alternative for non-technical users.

You do not have to be a developer as the owner of a business area to construct a viable SharePoint site from scratch or edit an existing page. Power users may utilise the SharePoint look-book to take advantage of easily accessible designs and build websites in minutes.

Content Management Made Easy

Many business users, from bloggers to media gurus, work behind the scenes to optimise your company's content strategy. A successful one necessitates prompt approvals, modifications, and input from your team. If you rely on a network of separate folders to provide comprehensive content management, you will most certainly fall short. It can be difficult to tell who has touched the document, the number of times it has been reviewed, and whether the version you are viewing is indeed the most current. Do check out SharePoint features that let you manage and curate content with Microsoft SharePoint in detail whenever you can make time.

Investing in SharePoint provides you with quick solutions to these and other questions. In seconds, users may develop and submit material for approval. Assume you arrange your content to go live at a specific time on your SharePoint intranet or web pages. In that situation, you never have to question if your post or article has gone through the necessary review steps ahead of time. If you are an international business with linguistic content management requirements, SharePoint can rise to the challenge. It is one of the striking SharePoint features that Microsoft users absolutely love using.

The programme offers document library templates that make it simple to switch across an original document and its numerous translations.

Identification of Skill Sets Becomes Simpler

Do you have a large firm with several remotely located offices performing various tasks? If this is the case, it might be difficult to keep track of each team member's distinct skill sets and job duties.

How would you locate a certain person if you needed help, counsel, or information? It is quite straightforward to locate a co-worker if your organisation has 20 or so individuals in a central place.

When you have a large number of employees to find, this stage becomes more time demanding. To expedite the process, SharePoint enables you to develop organisational charts. These depict each person's position within the larger team. Each person's job and availability may be found by clicking on his or her name.

A list is an accumulation of data that you may share with members of your team and anyone to whom you have granted access. There are several ready-to-use list templates available that give a suitable starting point for organising list elements.

SharePoint Pricing and Licensing

The difference between SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online

Feature	On Premises	Online/Cloud-Oriented
Hosting	SharePoint Server is a platform that is hosted locally and is owned and operated by your organisation You will be in charge of anything from server design to active directory	SharePoint Online is a Microsoft-supplied cloud-based service They oversee identity and design; just tell them how many websites to produce and what to title them.
Hardware Requirements	SharePoint On-Premises requires you to invest in expensive hardware because every piece of data is stored within your private server	You do not need to invest in external hardware if you have access to the SharePoint Cloud because everything will be stored in a centralised location on the cloud
Data Privacy	You enjoy full control over your data and may choose to not share it with anybody else	The data you store on the cloud can be shared and edited by several people simultaneously
Collaboration	Efficient collaboration is not possible as a business owner may not share all the information with you	Everything you write or add can be viewed by your co-workers. This makes collaborating on reports and pie-charts simpler and easier.

SharePoint implementation methodology

Form an Implementation Team

To get things done swiftly and correctly, you will need personnel that are competent and familiar with the SharePoint deployment process to lead the project. Inexperienced staff may cause disappointment and loss of efficiency, leading to poor implementation.

Unless your organisation has staff with SharePoint expertise, it may be preferable to employ the services of a seasoned SharePoint implementation team, such as the executives at Dynamics Square. Despite having an admin-friendly interface, SharePoint is a sophisticated programme that requires an experienced hand to deploy properly.

Identify, Analyse, and Prioritise Needs

Since a successful solution needs agreement at every level, its implementation team must have concentrated talks with important players, leadership, and representatives from each department. The conversation should elicit both immediate and long-term requirements. These criteria will aid in the creation and scalability of infrastructure suggestions and high-level architectural design.

Visualise, Develop, and Deploy

It is time to start building after assessing and prioritising needs. The implementation team draughts an information architecture, generates sites and libraries, adds users, establishes security groups, configures metadata and views, constructs navigation, and so on.

Utilise SharePoint's out-of-the-box functionality as much as you can to avoid developing code. It will be less expensive to maintain and update.

Perform Acceptance Testing for Users

Conduct user acceptability testing with a group of users from throughout the organisation after the initial development and deployment. This stage is critical since it ensures that the developed solution meets expectations. It also enables the execution team to collect early input and identify faults.

To improve user experience, the input obtained at this stage should be included in the SharePoint solution, and all faults should be resolved before the solution is distributed to the rest of the organisation.

SharePoint Implementation Best Practices

Recognise Present Problems

SharePoint is a strong tool for document management, corporate communications, project management, and more. However, if you have not identified the business concerns that SharePoint is meant to answer, its adaptability may become a liability. To achieve an effective SharePoint project implementation, you need to properly understand the difficulties your organisation is facing before installing new technologies.

Find SharePoint Professionals

To guarantee the accomplishment of your SharePoint project, you must work with SharePoint professionals. Your SharePoint professionals will turn your goals into a workable plan. Because SharePoint is a difficult programme that demands a skilled hand to implement properly, professional assistance is required. A team of SharePoint experts knows how to coordinate your needs with the resources at hand and projected timescales.

Create a Training Strategy

To get user acceptability, you must give user training. Even if your staff has some experience with SharePoint, many people feel it is merely a way to save and share documents. Involve your users immediately and invest the time and effort necessary to create a successful training plan for them. Training strategies that are successful start before the installation is finished, so that users can get familiar with the system and feel upgraded as they begin using it for the first time.

Construct a Management Strategy

You can get your SharePoint deployment off to a strong start and set it up for long-term success with a solid governance strategy. Create a team comprised of business users, IT specialists, project managers, and administrators. This group will be in charge of analysing site metrics, user permissions, and content expansion, among other things. One SharePoint governance best practice is to set up a management site to keep track of important information and collaborate as a governance team.

Dynamics 365 Integration with SharePoint

If you use SharePoint Online, you are using the Microsoft Cloud infrastructure. This programme works smoothly with other cloud-based apps and may be used in conjunction with other Microsoft solutions, such as OneDrive for Business if you have an Office 365 or Microsoft 365 licence.

SharePoint for Not-for-Profits

Most charitable organisations have personnel spread over many offices, with branches being the most dispersed and distant. All workers may be connected with each other on a continual basis using a technology-aided platform, such as SharePoint, which helps them operate better together.

SharePoint may automatically distribute information on events, workshops, and news with no additional work, relieving staff members of administrative tasks associated with event planning and ensuring that everyone can fit them into their calendars. Most current e-learning platforms provide capabilities like content communication, disclosure, calendaring, and management tools to assist employees to keep up-to-date and in sync.

SharePoint is a versatile solution that is ideal for the demands of non-profit organisations. It provides several services, such as centralised document management, training, social, and regulatory compliance, all of it in one centralised site with free or discounted prices and cloud choices.

Which is better, SharePoint or OneDrive?

Feature	OneDrive	SharePoint
Ownership	OneDrive offers centralised ownership, which means it may hold all your personal data that you are not yet prepared for sharing with others or that require some preparation before anyone can share them The material may only be viewed, edited, or shared by the owner	SharePoint documents and material are controlled on-site, and the site administrator has complete authority over the SharePoint site Only the site admin may provide you access to a website by inviting you to the SharePoint group.
Storage	OneDrive, on the contrary, is Microsoft's cloud storage and synchronisation service that securely keeps all your files in one place whilst additionally permitting you to collaborate with other people and view them from anywhere	SharePoint is a cooperative storage in the cloud solution and document sharing tool that enables you to exchange documents, manage projects, and construct interactive forms, visualisations, automatic workflow, and a lot more SharePoint is the first collaborative workspace from Microsoft.
Collaboration	OneDrive is an amazing content collaboration tool inside the Office 365 environment that provides users with cloud storage and allows them to share and work with anybody within or outside of the organisation It also allows mobile collaboration for on-the-go cooperation	SharePoint is the initial collaboration workgroup from Microsoft, in which you may save and circulate material, work together, handle assignments and projects, and discuss ideas One of the SharePoint system's strong strengths has been sharing information and helping people work together

Things to Keep in Mind While Choosing SharePoint Partner

All of it would boil down to experience (and expertise) the moment you hit the market to get Microsoft SharePoint implemented. Dynamics Square is a prominent SharePoint implementation partner that you can count on when it comes to implementing Microsoft products. Contact us right away if you are finding it hard to search for the right SharePoint Implementation partner.