Top Features and Benefits of SharePoint Online for Collaboration and Teamwork

Introduction:

SharePoint Online is a powerful collaboration and teamwork platform offering a range of features and benefits to improve productivity, communication, and collaboration across organizations.

You can access a variety of productivity tools with Microsoft 365 registration. It is one of the most user-friendly, intuitive, intelligent, and adaptable tools available, allowing you to greatly simplify your business processes.

SharePoint is utilized by a whopping 190 million users across over 200,000 distinct enterprises across a wide range of industries.

SharePoint can save time by removing the need for dedicated tasks and project management software.

SharePoint even enables businesses to find answers to typical business problems using applications and commercially available components.

Here’s a rundown of SharePoint’s top features and benefits of SharePoint Online for collaboration and teamwork. Let’s check it out.

Clearing the basics of Microsoft SharePoint Online

SharePoint is a one-of-a-kind platform for managing content online. You can use it to save files on the cloud for collaboration and sharing.

It can assist you in building sites and subsites to organize duties from various groups or individuals.

With best-in-class built-in functionality, SharePoint enables you to construct an intranet where you, colleagues, and clients can safely work on pages, as well as sites, library/list folders, and files, in a collaborative concurrent manner.

Thanks to centralized access controls, each user will be able to open, view, modify, and save files without challenge or support needs.

SharePoint provides several advanced functions that can assist you or your team in handling both personal and professional tasks.

Out-of-the-box features & benefits of SharePoint Online

1. Document Management:

SharePoint Online provides a centralized location for storing, managing, and sharing files, documents, and other content.

It allows users to check out and check in documents to avoid version conflicts and provides access control and permission settings to ensure secure access to content.

Alternatively, users can choose to work to edit documents concurrently or submit documents for approval prior to publishing.

The full lifecycle of documents can be managed by using built-in functionality to dispose of or retain the documents after a certain period of time across the environment.

2. Team Sites:

SharePoint Online enables teams to create team sites where members can collaborate on projects, share files, and communicate with one another – leading to effective team collaboration and better end results.

It connects the team to shared content and resources to track and stay updated on Project Status, organize or co-author the shared content, and connect to a group to access shared team resources. You can customize these Team sites with web parts, themes, and other features to meet the unique needs of the team and business.

3. Co-Authoring:

SharePoint Online comes with built-in functionality that enables multiple users to edit the same document at the same time.

This one-of-a-kind SharePoint functionality streamlines collaboration and reduces the need for emailing files.

It supports users making real-time changes, seeing each other’s colorized updates, and work together concurrently and much more efficiently.

The added advantage of SharePoint Co-authoring is – It is available for many file types across MS Office, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Another advantage is when you open a shared document in a desktop or mobile app, it doesn’t matter if you’re connected or not; you can keep working.

If there are others editing the same document, they won’t be able to see your changes while you’re offline. When you go back online, you’ll be notified of any changes that are available, and others will see that you have changed.

Co-authoring functionality in SharePoint is designed to be easily used and requires minimal effort to manage.

But there are several things to consider when you set up and manage co-authoring, such as Permissions, Versioning, and Number of retained Versions and Check Out, and optional capabilities such as major/minor versioning.

4. Seamless integration with Microsoft Teams:

SharePoint Online allows its users to integrate seamlessly with Office 365 apps such as OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook, allowing you to work seamlessly across different apps and services.

Users can easily access SharePoint content and collaborate on files directly from the Teams interface through this platform. This makes for easy collaborations and better results, which are a win-win for everyone.

Teams uses SharePoint as its data repository. The Documents shared in Teams are available on SharePoint sites and can be accessed by the team members.

Also, the Power Platform applications- PowerApps, Power Automate and Power BI Reports that are available in SharePoint can be used in Teams as well.

5. Workflows:

SharePoint Online offers built-in workflows that enable users to automate business processes and streamline collaboration. You can customize your workflows to meet specific business needs.

With its impressive workflow management features, users can save time, eliminate duplication of manual efforts, and speed up work while reducing errors.

It even includes features such as approval workflows, assigning tasks, and real-time alerts, leading to better end-to-end management.

There are many ready-to-use templates to fast-track the setup and configuration. The Flow templates can be customized as well to adapt to requirements and include a wide range of connectors to pull and push data and modify data.

Some common connectors are– Salesforce, Dropbox, Outlook, Calendar, Adobe, DocuSign, and many more.

6. Mobile Access:

SharePoint Online and MS Office offer mobile apps for iOS, Android, and Windows devices, enabling users to access SharePoint content and collaborate on the go with team members and external users.

Users can easily access their SharePoint sites, lists, and libraries from mobile devices.

Users can view and edit documents, participate in discussions, and access their team sites, even when they are away from their desks, leading to effective remote work management.

7. Search:

SharePoint Online includes the best-in-class search engine functionality that makes it easy for all users to find content across the organization through their folders, files, libraries, and documents.

You can search for content by keywords, author, and file type and filter their search results based on document type, author, or date range.

This easy searching & filtering leads to accelerating work efforts and reduces user frustration in locating content.

Search has been developing so well over the years that now we have the functionality to search from SharePoint to a data source such as – SQL DBs, Websites and more.

Search results can be consolidated using MS-Graph to include SharePoint results interleaved in Bing search results for authenticated users.

Search verticals and filters can be configured at the Organization level as well as the Site Collection level, adding a richer and more functional-oriented experience.

Search is also available across apps like – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and Teams as well.

8. Analytics:

SharePoint Online provides detailed analytics and usage reports that enable organizations to track usage patterns, identify popular content, and monitor user engagement.

SharePoint Online also lets you integrate with Power BI, providing powerful data visualization and analytics capabilities. You can efficiently use this information to identify popular content, measure user engagement, and optimize site performance.

Analytics also helps increase user engagement by providing a great deal of information for site users and owners and helps better manage the environment.

9. Security and Compliance:

SharePoint Online is designed with security and compliance in mind for its users.

This platform provides robust security features, including data encryption, access controls, and audit logs, to help you keep your data secure and comply with regulatory requirements.

This feature enables businesses to control access to information, enforce data policies, and comply with regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA.

SharePoint provides endless options to handle the data with the implementation of Policies, eDiscovery, Data Lifecycle Management, Information Protection, Records Management, and Privacy Risk Management.

10. End-to-End Customization:

SharePoint customization has an exciting future since it enhances and standardizes the way that enterprises customize the platform.

You may maintain SharePoint’s basic features and benefits or modify them to meet your specific business requirements.

You can even transform the entire application’s interface to showcase your branding and enhance the employee experience with the application’s drag-and-drop features.

11. Streamlined Content Management

Content management can be an obstacle to a company’s increasing productivity. You can overcome this difficulty with SharePoint without complex vertical software or programming.

SharePoint makes publishing or updating site content simple, including events, news, blogs, presentations, picture carousels, etc.

SharePoint even has some ready-to-use professional designs that you can use for your content management needs.

SharePoint products help by giving you tools to organize and manage content throughout the content life cycle, from creation to archive.

12. Design Support

Another advantage of SharePoint is the ability to create solutions to meet the organization’s demands. This capability eliminates the need for you to engage developers to improve the websites or create a database management system.

The APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are available in SharePoint Online and are utilized for integration and data extraction, and synchronization. Working with SharePoint development features for app development is a standard and effective way to integrate within your environment.

Conclusion

So, here’s a wrap on some of the best features and advantages you want to know about SharePoint. To leverage its benefits properly, ensure your team is fully aware of the capabilities and functionality.

Overall, SharePoint Online is a top-of-the-line platform for business collaboration and teamwork. This platform has several features and advantages that enhance efficiency, interaction, and teamwork across enterprises.

SharePoint’s capabilities transform it from a straightforward cloud storage and file-sharing service into an end-to-end enterprise collaboration and project management tool.

You can easily optimize your corporate environment by using SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 tools to handle key business processes and act as the central hub for information and coordination.

If you are looking for expert guidance, reach out and get some expert assistance to fast-track your intranet and consolidate your files, business process, and environment.