Mobile, remote workforces still need tools to share and collaborate with one another. Business teams want to work together and get the job done efficiently. Microsoft SharePoint helps make that happen.

SharePoint is used in science and education, law and government, finance, computers, electronics, and technology verticals. Its largest market share globally is in the United States. Other top markets are Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

If you’re subscribing to one of Microsoft 365’s business plans, you already have access. SharePoint is Microsoft’s document management and collaboration tool. Users, wherever they are, connect to SharePoint through their own browser. SharePoint streamlines the process of tracking workflow and documents. But that’s not all that the platform offers.

SharePoint Core Features

Businesses gain several benefits from using SharePoint.

Collaboration. Now, you can store documents in a folder on a server. SharePoint lets you create workflows, see document history, track file access, and more.

Organization. SharePoint greets users with a screen that shows:

• what they interact with most frequently;
• sites that they are following;
• featured links;
• a search bar

Having recent activity and access to important links and relevant sites as the entry point to the platform can help keep your people productive.

Within SharePoint sites, you can also create lists to collect items. This might be announcements, contacts, links, or a task list.

Integration. SharePoint works with Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and more. A team might create a shared notebook to keep information in one place and evolve as projects do.

Create community. SharePoint websites are a centralized location for teams to find what they need. Human resources might set up a site with its updates and important forms. This allows everyone to quickly find the information they need.

Version control. Don’t worry about emailing documents to various team members for input. A SharePoint document becomes the single source for the one, current document.

Search. Advanced search capabilities make it easy to look across a site library. Or users can search content in all SharePoint sites they can access. Avoid decentralization where assets are spread over employee PCs or different department siloes.

Data insights. Keeping all business data in one place makes it easier to review. Determine what’s being used or who is accessing what to identify trends. Site admins, owners, and members can track number of views, popular items, how many times people interact with the site, and more.

Share news. Keep teams engaged and informed using the News feature. Users post updates, or share reports and documents in the newsfeed section of the website.

Mobility. Users can upload files and access them from anywhere. SharePoint works with Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, or Mozilla Firefox browsers. There’s even a mobile app to let people remain connected from their mobile devices.

Why SharePoint?

SharePoint bundles many features together in a dedicated platform suiting different industries. Replace inefficient, paper-based processes with a centralized, online repository of documents. This can help with accountability and limit business bottlenecks.

SharePoint helps you build personal, team, project, customer, and/or vendor-facing websites. Avoid unwieldy email threads or confusing conference calls. Chat online and track edits in SharePoint.

You can also automate business processes. SharePoint allows you to create intelligent workflows for simple tasks. For example, you can streamline processes, with SharePoint automatically sending files for approval. Once done, you’re notified the review is complete.

Success with SharePoint

You’ll need to establish an implementation strategy, and also train employee to understand SharePoint’s value. Know that businesses lacking IT resources struggle to customize features and build automated workflows.

Our IT experts can determine the SharePoint service model that’s best for you. We can help integrate SharePoint and add customizations where they can help you. Contact us today at 231-881-3123 or email us at info@ntsmanaged.com

Working from home is a big change in an already tumultuous time. Yet there’s a bright side. The quarantine could be your opportunity to reinvent how you work for the better. Migrating to Microsoft Microsoft 365 has benefits now. Plus, when you’re back to business as usual.

Microsoft 365 is the cloud-based version of Microsoft Office. With a subscription, you get both the desktop and online versions of apps you already know. This includes Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, and more.

Microsoft 365 enables collaboration in many ways, on desktops, tablets, and smartphones. For example:

• Outlook: primarily associated with email, but also lets you share notes and files
• Teams: a hub for instant messaging, video conferencing and calls
• SharePoint: an internal content management platform. SharePoint lets you customize team sites where you automate workflows and share resources
• Yammer: a social network connecting all the users in your organization
• OneDrive: allows users to share and co-author documents securely

Remote Work with Teams

Microsoft teams at its core is a chat program. But it does so much more. On all your devices, both iOS and Android, Teams allows “channels”. You can have company-wide or small task group channels. Or use a separate channel to instant messaging to a single person.

You can also invite clients or customers into channels to join the discussion. Additionally, you can set up security features that filter what they can access. You don’t want them to know the ingredients to your secret sauce!

Within Teams channels users can share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Teams also integrates with other software. The options include Zendesk customer support, Asana project management, or Zoom video conferencing.

Using Teams in Microsoft 365 creates a streamlined platform for remote work.

Remote Work with OneDrive

Working on premises, your users always had access to the business file server. OneDrive is the cloud equivalent. Yet, since it’s online, it’s always accessible. Microsoft’s hosts the file storage to let you access and share work files from all your devices.

Employees can even work offline. Any changes or edits to files automatically upload when you next connect.

Share OneDrive folders or files with external partners as well. Again, you can secure access with limits on who can see what and specifying what actions they can take. You can even set up automatic revoke access after a set time limit.

Microsoft 365 & Business Security

An Microsoft 365 subscription protects from viruses and cybercrime. It also offers ways to recover your files from malicious attacks.

Microsoft 365 apps update with security patches without any effort on your part. Plus, Outlook scans email attachments and checks links for viruses or phishing scams.

OneDrive helps you restore files, so they’re not held captive in a ransomware attack. Microsoft 365 also lets users encrypt email, prevent forwarding, and secure sensitive files.

Microsoft 365 lets your business communicate and collaborate in real-time. Work on any device, anywhere, at any time. Enjoy business agility and flexibility with internal and external users.

Migrating to the cloud isn’t as simple as pressing the “start” button. Still, our tech experts can get you up and running quickly and with ease. Let us help you go online and get back to business as usual, even working remotely. Call us today 231-881-3123.

The modern IT workplace is constantly evolving – Seemingly every day, a new tool or application is introduced that impacts the way we work.

Office 365 provides a complete collaboration tool-set that can be scaled and customized to match the unique work-style of each sub-team. However, the release of these new tools often come with little guidance to help businesses understand the intended purpose of these applications and decide which one to use and when.

As a leader in your organization, it’s important to put the right tools in your team’s hands so they can communicate and collaborate effectively. But, simply put, knowing which tools to use when can be really confusing.

In this blog, I’ll try to clarify this looking specifically at three of the most popular tools in the Office 365 toolkit: OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint.

OneDrive vs. Teams vs. SharePoint

In this comparison, we’ll look at the purpose behind each solution and provide examples of when it makes the most sense to use one over the other. Understanding these productivity solutions will increase your ROI with these tools and improve your, well, productivity.

OneDrive: Individual File Storage

OneDrive is Microsoft’s file hosting and synchronization service operated as part of its suite of Office Online services. You will use this to secure individual corporate file storage and sharing. These are files that you’ve gathered or created and want to keep securely.

When comparing cloud-based file sharing systems, you’ll want to compare price, storage and file sharing capabilities. If you purchase Office 365, OneDrive is included in that subscription, as well as a host of other powerful apps from Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.).

When to Use OneDrive

Personally, I think of OneDrive as my individual workspace. Maybe I found a whitepaper I want to read later on the plane – I save it to OneDrive and I’m still able to access the file locally, even when I’m not online.

Or maybe I’m working on a draft of something and not ready to share with anyone, other than a couple of people – I save it to OneDrive. You can still co-author and autosave in OneDrive, and you can manage who can and cannot see your stuff for data security, which I like.

Teams: Group Collaboration

Teams is Microsoft’s unified communications platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage (including collaboration on files), and application integration. The solution integrates with your organization’s Office 365 subscription office productivity suite. It also features extensions that can also integrate with non-Microsoft products.

Teams is replacing Skype for Business, so if you’re already using that as your main communication app, you may want to learn more.

Teams is designed to help small to medium teams communicate and collaborate. From a document sharing perspective, it features secure co-authoring, auto-save, and revision auditing and tracking. It is intended to be used as a central hub to all communication, including voice, email, chat, and video, offering both internal and external guest access. Aided by AI bots and connectors, it’s constantly evolving to stay innovative.

Teams is part of the Office 365 stack and therefore integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft Office programs, with the option to integrate with other third-party services. It is quickly becoming the go-to option for many organizations.

When to Use Teams

I use Teams when I need to collaborate with different co-workers on shared initiatives and projects. I may take a doc I store in OneDrive and share it in Teams when I’m ready to collaborate with my larger team. Because Teams brings all of your main communication apps under one roof, it’s easy to keep track of what everyone is talking about and doing when it comes to their part of a project. With less context switching, you don’t have to search through emails, chat threads, voice mails and files to piece together the bigger picture – it’s all centralized in Teams.

For example, when my team was working on a new approach to organize alerts and communication. We implemented Teams to send alerts via connectors to certain channels, and then dispatch via teams who is in charge. Or another example, when working on projects we create a special channel to organize all the information on that one project in the one channel.

Here are other examples of when you should use Teams:

• You’re moving at a much faster tempo and need to chat with teams and individuals on the fly
• You want to chat, create tasks, and share files within a subset of individuals
• You’re dealing with documents that are only pertinent to smaller groups but not the organization at large
• The communication you’re having between team members tends to be less formal and more conversational and timely
• If the group membership is small, ad-hoc, or fluid
• Teams enable any set of team members to collaborate on a topic without intervention from IT to maintain group memberships. Teams do not need to conform to AD structures.
• Teams has also added the ability to share the team’s collaboration experience with users from outside your organization

In Teams, users can join meetings, start conversations, add notes, and share documents all in a single platform. This allows for more flexible, faster, more frequent communication – ideal for collaboration among smaller groups.

SharePoint: Organization

SharePoint is Microsoft’s web-based document management and collaboration platform. It is widely used as an organizations intranet – a central place where employees can go to find company information. It is often also used to store and collaborate on files, though more and more we’re seeing more discussion and collaboration transition over to Teams.

In SharePoint, you can securely manage data in lists, workflow approvals, and document publishing.

SharePoint is a robust tool, and hub sites help users organize content within it.

When to Use SharePoint

Because SharePoint comes with firm governance, consistency, and structure around functionality, it’s a great tool for communicating and sharing documents with larger groups. You can still manage who has viewing and editing rights. However, the structure and standard functionality of SharePoint can also delay response time, so it works best when dealing with company-wide documents that don’t require an immediate response, such as training, policies, and templates. SharePoint is a great place to store and reference these types of documents.

Here are key reasons why you should choose SharePoint:

• Governance, consistency, and structure are very important to you
• You want to create several areas of publishing information (such as a series of HR onboarding guidelines with a main landing page and supporting subpages)
• You want a site with specific configurations
• You want integration between sites and rollup of information

Governance is Key!

Keep in mind, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive can often work together to create the ultimate collaboration platform based on your organization’s unique work styles. What this means is, if you’re interested in leveraging these tools, you should begin by establishing a strong foundation in SharePoint and governance across all tool sets.