Why Migrate to SharePoint Online and Tips for Migration

Posted on by Jaydeep Patel

SharePoint was first released as a portal and collaboration platform as SharePoint 2001.

It has gradually evolved to cover a broader range of content management and collaboration platforms into a document and records management enterprise environment.

SharePoint has grown into a world-class powerful collaboration and content management tool over time.

SharePoint is a safe way to store, organize, and share information that can be viewed from any device from a web browser.

A vast majority of companies have moved to or are considering moving to the cloud. Of course, the latest evolution of the SharePoint platform is the move to the cloud as part of Office 365.

SharePoint Online is more flexible and more fully adopted than the original on-premises versions. Consequently, Office 365 has become Microsoft’s fastest-growing commercial product.

What are the Benefits of SharePoint Online Migration?

1. Complete Access, Always

Employees will have easier access to their content once you migrate your files to SharePoint.

You can access your files on any mobile or personal computing device and from anywhere around the globe, whether at home, at work, or on your way to a meeting.

This is something that ordinary file sharing struggles to match.

2. Co-authoring

A key capability in SharePoint is the ability for multiple authorized users to concurrently edit documents. This enables much faster and interactive efforts and avoids sequential editing of critical documents.

3. Versioning

Every time a document is edited in SharePoint, a version is created. Users can view prior versions, compare versions and even roll back to prior versions.

This offers a safety net, enabling easier trust to end users, given the ability to review and roll back if needed.

Additionally, both minor and major versioning is available, allowing for the option of approval prior to publishing a major version.

Lastly, access for broader users can be restricted to major versions, thereby enabling draft editing in place, prior to making a version broadly available.

4. Alerts

Get notified when key documents are updated.  Notifications are done on your schedule.

You can choose monthly, weekly, daily or even in Real-Time.  Select the kind of updates, such as document creation, editing, or deletion.

Even add others to receive the notifications.  Get notified via email or mobile; the choice is yours.

5. Search Muscles

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to include file shares in your SharePoint online migration is search performance for finding files.

Search for a document name or keyword and get related results in milliseconds.  Search capabilities include filtering by time range, author, and even custom metadata.

Search is highly customizable, allowing for an extraordinary ability of users to find the specific document for which they are searching.

Search refiners that allow drill-in search and search verticals.

The possibility of integrated and consolidated search with emerging MS-Graph capabilities allows Windows Search and Bing Search to surface a consolidated and security-trimmed search experience, including both Internet and SharePoint online content.

6. Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Policies can be set across Office 365 to manage and monitor for Data Loss Prevention (DLP).

This allows enterprise management of data to be following enterprise standards and provide solid assurance to avoid data loss.

7. Information Rights Management

The ability to restrict access, limit download, limit screenshots, limit printing, and retain control over documents even after a local download are possible.

These capabilities allow centralized license management of documents, allowing restricting or removing access, even if a document has left the enterprise.

8. Workflows

Automate the processes behind documents by enabling workflows that assign tasks to users, remind users and escalate in the associated tasks are delayed; collect feedback on documents and acquire approvals for a document.

9. Auditing

Edit, delete, create, and security change auditing and reporting are all available for enterprise tracking and compliance.

10. Check-in and check-out

Frequently, you’ll be working on files and papers with numerous co-workers.

Knowing who is working on the same document as you or who has to make a few last-minute adjustments before starting your assignment can be a pain.

You can check out a file in SharePoint so that no one else can access it, ensuring that everyone knows who has the most recent version of the document. This keeps you from sabotaging each other’s efforts.

11. Information Policy

Fine-grained tuning of an Information Policy is possible, including centralized enterprise definition, management and control of:

  • Document Retention Policy
  • Legal Holds
  • Document Disposition
  • Document lifecycle

The Information Policy can be refined in close coordination and input from Legal and Compliance.

The goal is to meet the organization’s objectives while designing an Information Policy that is both feasible and manageable.

12. No Waiting Time for New Features and Updates

Microsoft has a proactive communication approach for new features and upgrades.

Users of the Office 365 version have an advantage over those who use SharePoint on-premises to obtain early updates on new releases and upgrades.

13. Pay for What You Need and Scale-Up Easily

You can pay for only what you need with the Office 365 environment. You may add and delete members using the monthly subscription model as your company grows. Consider the case where a user leaves the firm.

You can either reassign or delete the license. The same scalability applies to Office 365 data storage, where you only pay for the storage, use what you need, and pay only for what you need, and quickly scale up with a few clicks.

14. Limit Your Maintenance Overhead

Backups, OS maintenance, SharePoint patching, and other duties are avoided while transitioning from SharePoint On-Premise to SharePoint Online.

Your IT personnel may devote their attention to long-overdue intranet updates or other critical activities.

Because there is no hardware to purchase, SharePoint Cloud helps you save money on internal resources.

15. Improvements to OneDrive For Business

OneDrive for business is a highly practical tool for storing and sharing data. A user may create a document in OneDrive for Business and simply share it with internal and external users to gain ideas, feedback, and expertise.

This is essentially your cloud “My Documents” folder. When a document is ready to publish, there’s a capability in OneDrive for Business that allows you to move/copy it to a SharePoint team site for wider distribution.

You can also sync files from your OneDrive for Business and SharePoint sites with the new “Sync client” function, and the new OneDrive app is mobile-friendly.

Are you in need of assistance? We can help!

We help companies upgrade their on-premises SharePoint environment to the very latest for features, performance, security, and scalability.

Let’s talk!

Tips for Migrating to SharePoint Online

➔    Assess the Business Value of Existing Content

Before you start moving large amounts of company data, ask yourself these three questions:

  • Is it necessary to migrate specific documents to SharePoint Online, or may it be archived at a cheaper cost?
  • Do these documents benefit the company?
  • Are there any libraries that need to be rearranged, sites that need to be changed, or access controls that need to be changed?  Remapping and reconciling is possible.
  • Can the security be simplified, optimized and be brought into alignment with existing Active Directory groups?

Making these decisions ahead of time will save time, lower IT expenses in the long run, and help your company achieve its business goals through good information management.

➔    Identify Potential Technical Issues

SharePoint 2010/2013 and SharePoint Online are somewhat different. However, basic architectural differences might make the transition from on-premise to cloud more difficult than anticipated.

Consider the following scenario:

  • SharePoint Online may have different storage and capacity constraints than SharePoint on-premises. Before migrating, do some research to see how this may affect your company and plan for organic growth and scalability.
  • It’s possible that custom code won’t work with SharePoint Online. Work with business teams to develop a plan for keeping business operations running smoothly without requiring customization, such as by utilizing Microsoft add-ins.
  • Check for file types that are not allowed in SharePoint and plan for this content on an exception basis.  Executables and scripts are among the problem file types.
  • Your SharePoint Online transfer will be faster if more bandwidth is available. However, the opposite is also true.  Consider baseline migration timings to be able to project the migration throughput.

➔    Explore enterprise migration tools

3rd party migration tools can streamline migration efforts, reporting, reconciliation, and migration from unusual source systems.

Get expert advice on the best tool for your needs and budget, and ensure your project efforts are optimized.

➔    Selecting the migration approach and mapping

In the summary view, we retrieve and generate an inventory and assign an action to each item or group of items.

We map out what goes to folders, libraries or sites and how to optimize the migration.

Migrations are then mapped into waves or phases that align with departments and sizing that’s feasible for individual cutover weekends.

➔    Planning to make the source read-only

Avoid users inadvertently editing documents in the source after migration to the destination by setting the source to read-only.

This should be in line with the communication plan.  This avoids an inadvertent challenge of later reconciling documents that are updated simultaneously in both the source and destination.

Additional Read

Best Tips for SharePoint Infrastructure Monitoring and Health Check

Create an Effective Communication Plan for Your SharePoint Migration

Your new SharePoint’s migration adoption might hit resistance from users if you don’t have a solid and well-built communication plan on what will migrate, how it will look after migration, and accommodate training needs that could be needed to ensure users are comfortable and aware of the impending change.

Communication is essential and may be built quickly. Constant communication of planned changes is crucial.

We can provide end-user training or train-the-trainer training while also demonstrating new SharePoint online features that add value to the end-user collaboration and document management experience.

A knowledgeable user will be more likely to tolerate minor flaws in the user experience in some circumstances, provided they understand the overall benefit.

Knowing when and how this change will affect their employment and having access to training offers a lot of value and helps you boost acceptance.

Conclusion:

A file-sharing migration to OneDrive and SharePoint is a demanding operation. Still, with proper planning, preparation, communication and consistent execution, you can accomplish a successful project that encourages users to embrace the new platforms.

Engage with Reality Tech to lead your migration to SharePoint or upgrade. Our skilled team will help with the best-in-class migration services.

How Financial Process Automation Can Help Your Business

Posted on by Joel Plaut

 

Finance automation is leveraging technology to automate critical finance tasks with minimal human participation, including accounting, integration, general ledger, reporting, expense management, and bank reconciliation. Financial automation enables tasks to be completed faster and more accurately.

The financial services business is heavily reliant on processes. These process-based operations constitute the lifeblood of financial institutions, from loan approvals to pre-trade clearances, reporting, analysis, approvals, and workflow bottlenecks that can significantly impact operating costs and impact output. Enterprises are compelled to adopt as competitors and organizations worldwide leverage new technology to streamline, speed, and improve their processes.

Finance Automation Definition:

The use of technology to execute activities with little or no human involvement is known as finance automation. This allows for better use of knowledge workers, with greater efficiencies, without actually supplanting them. It simply refers to automation to perform time-consuming, repetitive manual chores. Finance automation’s main purpose is to increase process efficiency by decreasing or eliminating non-value-added repetitive procedures and activities. Finance departments may then more sharply focus on producing value and driving strategy by automating these repetitive processes.

Gartner Definition

“Finance automation technology integrates machine learning and artificial intelligence for use in areas such as financial analysis, payroll administration, invoice automation, collections action, and preparing financial statements. The use of such automated software reduces the need for human intervention in these activities.” 

How Financial Process Automation Helps Business Owners:

According to an EY analysis of how automation affects modern workplaces, automation benefits 80% of finance-related jobs, which is a higher proportion than for other industries studied. Financial functions, according to EY, are suitable for automation since they are rule-based and can be of higher volumes. In contrast, automation can only enhance 12% of activities when it comes to learning and development.

Financial process automation speeds up these common business processes:

  • Invoicing, including automated reminders for customers
  • Transaction processing
  • Approval management including heuristics
  • Accounts payable, such as paying invoices and handling approvals for expenses
  • Account reconciliation
  • Data capture and recording
  • Financial statement preparation
  • Employee expense reports
  • Expense management
  • Employee benefit management
  • Tax reporting and compliance

Automating these financial functions leads to:

  • Finance executives have more time to focus on efforts that require judgment and higher-level insights.
  • Every processing stage generates an automatic approval request, with forms distributed to each stakeholder in the correct sequence.
  • Data is sent instantly from one organization/department to another.
  • Forms that auto-populate with data from related databases.
  • More frequent periodic batch updates, leading to more real-time reporting

Key Processes in the Finance Function

The finance function consists of a range of procedures, that in aggregate directly influence the bottom line of the company. The following is a summary of an organization’s major financial process:

Budgeting: 

Finance reviews and approves each department’s budget. Aside from individual department budgets, the Finance department also develops a consolidated budget for the CFO’s approval. This procedure facilitates forecasting future activity using previous financial data.

Billing and Approval: 

Payments from customers and other organizations are aggregated and consolidated from approved expenditure requests. Manual request approvals may be one source of delays and manual efforts, leading to delays and process bottlenecks.

Accounts Payable: 

After the department heads and financial officials have approved invoices, payment is authorized and executed. If not automated, manual steps and approvals may introduce delays from these process bottlenecks.

Planning and Forecasting: 

Financial planning keeps budgets on track and balances cash flow and expenses against revenues. Future expenditures are forecasted using historical data collected from prior periods, in recurring planning cycles.

Bookkeeping and Financial close: 

In finance, accounting documents an organization’s financial transactions throughout a fiscal year. A final close of financial records is completed after the fiscal period. During the financial closing procedure, the accounts are consolidated and reconciled.

Auditing: 

Financial transactions and records are checked for compliance with the company guidelines and relevant laws during financial audits.

Data collection and reporting: 

All financial transaction data is kept on file. This information is published in reports based on corporate policy.

Are you in need of assistance? We can help!

Book a live 1-on-1 call with the experts of Reality Tech to find out how we will help you to achieve your goal.

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What Are the Benefits of Finance Automation? 

Finance automation offers several benefits to businesses who implement it, including:

1. Cost savings

According to an Ernst & Young analysis, adding robotic process automation may save companies from 20% to 60% of their baseline FTE costs.

2. Error reduction

Reducing the amount of manual labor required automatically reduces the risk of human errors. Financial, regulatory, and even reputational penalties can result from such errors.

3. Employee Satisfaction

Employees may devote more time and attention to problem-solving and strategic efforts since they are spared the drudgery of manual and repetitive tasks, resulting in higher employee satisfaction and ultimately retention.

4. Scalability

Every day more data enters organizations, which can be daunting to manage how to fully leverage it for analysis and insights if the data remains distributed, disjointed, and manually consolidated. Financial automation and Business Intelligence can aggregate data from sources, standardize and format it, and consolidate it so you can get the most out of it.

5. Transparency

Before being deemed complete, financial processes frequently pass through several hands. The steps involved to surface this information can slow the process, leading to stale data in reports to executives and stakeholders who need data near real-time to manage financial oversight and to make informed decisions.

Users who have access to an enterprise software solution visualize the data flow, and surface patterns, and evaluate real-time financial information in an optimal format.

How to Implement Financial Process Automation:

Automating your accounting and finance standards can help you better run your firm, resulting in greater knowledge of your organization’s financial process automation and insights and eliminating points of friction.

Here’s how you can get started:

Map out your financial process:

Account for each step and stakeholder engaged in your financial operations, whether through a rigorous, company-wide critical eye at every stage of your financial processes or start top-down with one extended and expanded brainstorming session. Start building a flowchart to document how financial data is collected and reported, and then identify the most compelling steps that can be automated.

Tie automation to business objectives:

Although it would be ideal to automate every financial operation simultaneously, this may not be feasible. Instead, prioritize your most important demands while implementing automation in phases. If your company is challenged by monthly financial form deadlines, start by transforming those responsibilities and guiding your staff through the refinements.

Find an automation solution for your business:

Automation may be made simple with the correct software solution. Reality-Tech provides a range of options. For example, Reality-Tech offers a variety of business intelligence solutions, workflows, finance templates, and automation, including program management, budgets, and reporting, to help you get started with financial process automation.

Workflows can serve as the foundation for some financial operations, which can be automated. This automation can consolidate, capture, document, and report, and streamline many financial approval processes that keep stakeholders and workers informed and accountable for approvals.

Financial process automation enhances your company’s money management. You won’t have to raise a finger if things operate smoothly in the background.

A future with financial automation:

Although AI and machine-learning algorithms are still in their infancy, they are available and offer benefits today. New opportunities continually emerge due to the exponential expansion of structured data fueled by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the lowering cost of computer power and the increased ability of AI, and machine learning on top of Business Intelligence solutions.

Additional Read

Why You Should Use SharePoint for Document Management System

Conclusion:

Financial automation has a bright future ahead of it, and it is already reshaping how financial processing is done within enterprises in both large and small businesses. Automation might appear overwhelming since numerous activities, and organizational adjustments go into deploying new technology and procedures.  Low-hanging fruit is available for organizations that are looking to streamline and optimize financial processes.

Reality-Tech is a pioneer in Financial Workflow Automation Solutions.

SharePoint for Enterprise Content Management – Why Should Choose?

Posted on by Chitra Dharaiya

Do You Know?

60% of the global data worth 175 zettabytes will be generated and managed by enterprises by 2025, tripling from 2021.

(courtesy: IDC Report)

Enterprises are facing a huge challenge these days in organizing massive amounts of diverse content such as documents, images, videos, emails, and web content in a way that is easy to navigate, find and retrieve. Enterprise content management (ECM) software comes to the rescue because it’s designed to assist enterprises to handle this challenge.

To effectively meet the requirements of content management for large businesses, ECM should be feature-rich and flexible. Consequently, SharePoint emerges as a viable content management solution, with its ability to create, edit, manage, share and archive pages and documents throughout the content lifecycle. Let’s explore how SharePoint proves to be a real asset for businesses.

What is SharePoint Online CMS?

An ECM is software designed to digitally collect, store, manage, and transfer content and documents. This technology allows enterprises to easily collaborate on, secure, monitor, and manage unstructured data, which leads to enhanced business efficiency for almost every user across the enterprise.

To utilize the full potential of ECM software, it must possess significant capability and proficiency for managing content and documents digitally and efficiently generating business information, and this is where Microsoft SharePoint as an enterprise content management shines.

Why Choose SharePoint for Enterprise Content Management?

1) Document Management System 

The document management system is a process of managing documents efficiently. SharePoint offers the below-listed capabilities to manage documents.

  • It’s a centralized system for storing and accessing business documents.
  • Stakeholders can easily navigate, search and identify the location for sharing and retrieving information for further use.
  • It enables users to create teams, focused roles, and task-oriented groups of users for organizing data and exchanging it with the appropriate set of people, which leads to more outstanding work efficiency and better time management.
  • Documents can be tagged and categorized to better target relevance; thus, users can easily and quickly find, retrieve and access the authentic documents.
  • It smoothly and seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office products such as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel as well as Teams and Power BI

2) Records Management System 

Record Management is a sophisticated capability to manage formal records. Automating the process allows stakeholders to refine tagging, discovery, workflows, data handling and search and refine and report in real-time, which improves and boosts team collaboration, compliance, and reporting. With SharePoint, you not only automate the process in compliance with corporate standards but conveniently and securely store data in structured and unified locations, easily accessible by the right team members. This eliminates the need to maintain unnecessary paperwork for legal and compliance purposes. This allows authorized users to audit files periodically, conduct eDiscovery, and maintain and track records and audit trails of file use, downloads, uploads, edits, and deletions.

3) Information Rights Management (IRM)

Information Rights Management (IRM) now known as Azure Rights Management Service (Azure RMS) is a powerful capability to secure and manage content and control what a user can do with the content.  Unlike elsewhere in SharePoint, the management controls are embedded into the content.  Use of the content requires a central licensing server real-time authorization to use the content.  With this approach, even content that left the enterprise can be remotely controlled.  Controls can restrict viewing, printing, and downloading in addition to more common editing controls.

Are you in need of assistance? We can help!

We help companies upgrade their on-premises SharePoint environment to the very latest for features, performance, security, and scalability.

Let’s talk!

4) Web Content Management 

SharePoint ECM allows users to publish web content by using pre-defined or custom templates and schedule publishing, as well as utilize approval workflows for gaining authorization to publish. Using consistent templates and workflow processes offers web design consistency, easy navigation, and a great user experience. This allows the consistent management of extranet, intranet, and internet sites.

5) Robust Third-Party Support 

There is a wide range of 3rd party add-ons to support specific advanced business requirements.  Third-party software can play an important role in a full features enterprise CMS.  Although SharePoint has a wide range of features, sometimes it’s the extra features provided by a 3rd party that enables business and functional success.

6) Metadata-Oriented Search and Navigation 

It’s a daunting task to search through large libraries or lists simply with text search or scrolling alone. However, SharePoint’s metadata-driven search, navigation, and views enable an easier search experience. You can search and refine by metadata refiners, search verticals, or group-by and filtered list and library views.

Additional Read

How to Activate SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure

Conclusion: 

Although the market is flooded with ECM solutions, Microsoft SharePoint tops the popularity chart due to its broad and mature features, functionality, scalability, seamless third-party integration and support, search, navigation, unified storage, and effortless collaboration between global teams.

For the configuration of a SharePoint ECM solution, qualified technical support is available that assists in a seamless and efficient setup, configuration, customization, and training.

Why You Should Use SharePoint for Document Management System

Posted on by Joel Plaut

SharePoint offers Document Management System (DMS) capabilities to streamline the document lifecycle from creation to archiving and offers the following benefits.

✔        20% improvement in employee performance

✔        55% reduction in operational costs over legacy systems.

While SharePoint can be used on-premises, the vast majority of enterprises use it within the Office 365 platform.  Today, countless businesses use it as a DMS and sometimes extended it to include an intranet for internal collaboration and communication.

Here are 16 Reasons Why SharePoint is the Best Document Management System

1. Concurrent editing

SharePoint and MS Office work hand-in-hand to give an extraordinary co-authoring experience, with edits and updates reflected back into the MS Office documents (office 365 workflow app).

2. Versioning

Fine-grained versioning is available in SharePoint, allowing prior versions to be compared in place in MS Word and document versions to be rolled back or forwards on demand.  Minor versions are available to allow collaborators to co-author documents and only publish for broader availability when ready.

3. Workflows

Document review and document approval workflows are available out of the box and easily adapted to allow for concurrent or sequential approvals.  Notifications, reminders, and escalation are all available to streamline the review or approval workflow.

4. Metadata

Location-based metadata tagging is available, as well as user-selectable metadata, in a range of data types, to allow the best tagging experience, leading to an exceptional search experience along with refiners and filters to quickly and precisely locate documents.

5. Security 

If email is your main mode of communication, it’s most likely that you are sharing sensitive information across the company and with your customers. Sending heavy emails with attachments not only slows down the network but also poses a security threat.   Leverage your existing ActiveDirectory groups, Office 365 Groups, or use SharePoint’s own groups for scalable management of SharePoint.

6. External sharing

Documents, folders, and sites can be shared externally, with fine-grained control.  Shares can be set to expire at an enterprise level as a policy.  Domains can be whitelisted to restrict sharing to only known partners and vendors.  Alternatively, domains can be blacklisted, preventing sharing to generic domain accounts.  Lastly, external sharing can be restricted to specific site collections or disabled altogether.

Are you in need of assistance? We can help!

We help companies upgrade their on-premises SharePoint environment to the very latest for features, performance, security, and scalability.

Let’s talk!

 

7. Full Lifecycle Management

Documents within a library or attached to a content type can have their full life cycle defined, from publishing, as they age to having prior versions removed, and finally deleted or archived.  This supports a full range of eDiscovery, legal holds, and regulatory requirements.

8. OneDrive Sync

It’s easy to sync a SharePoint library to OneDrive for convenience and the Explorer experience.

9. Teams

Using or considering using Teams?  An open secret is that all documents stored in Teams are actually stored in SharePoint.  When accessed directly, SharePoint offers a vastly extended set of features for Document Management.

10. Alerts

Get notified in real-time, or periodically, of documents edited or added.  Be in the know on documents updated in your organization.

11. Single Sign-On 

It goes without saying that SharePoint as a Document Management System offers access to the Office 365 suite of applications with a single sign-on. Thus, you can instantly access multiple applications and software on your computer without logging -in individually to each of the applications.

12. Easy Team Collaboration 

Team collaboration becomes easier when documents are stored at a single location accessible to all team members. With SharePoint DMS, you can seamlessly and securely collaborate with teams in and out of your organization, across devices and web browsers.

13. Storage

SharePoint is a true cloud service offering vast scalability for document storage.  Its pricing model and feature set for document management are compelling.

14. SharePoint is on Mobile Devices

SharePoint software is easily accessible across devices and web browsers. It offers convenience to the users because they can download/upload, edit and manage documents on their mobile devices, anywhere, anytime. They no longer have to carry a laptop or sit in front of their computers to access, read, edit, or exchange documents on the go.   All form factors are supported.

 15. SharePoint is Customizable 

SharePoint Document Management System offers customization, with many organizations adding custom functionality to the software as driven by their unique business requirements. This flexibility enables companies to organize their business processes, reduce effort and time wastage, and improve their performance to deliver superior customer satisfaction.

16. SharePoint is Constantly Improving 

In 2001, SharePoint was launched by Microsoft and since then it has gained popularity and momentum. Initially designed as a server management tool, today it has evolved into a successful file sharing and document management software.

Additionally, SharePoint DMS is compatible with third-party security tools, hence it can be used across multiple platforms, web browsers, and devices for storing and managing colossal data sets.

Microsoft continues to patch SharePoint and upgrades and new features are flowing into the enterprise without any intervention by IT or Infrastructure teams.

Financial Outcomes of SharePoint DMS

  • High Scalability – SharePoint Online DMS can easily store and manage several documents simultaneously, hence it’s a perfect solution for all-sized companies – small, medium, and enterprise-level.
  • High Customization Ability – SharePoint is highly customizable, hence it quickly adapts to meet industry and organization’s specific requirements for document management.
  • Easy Availability – SharePoint Document Management System supports 24/7 access, hence employees can access, edit, upload/download documents from any location, device, and at any time, provided they have robust Internet connectivity. The documents can also be accessed offline with Cloud synchronization.
  • Automation – This DMS offers the ability to easily design complex workflows, hence the document lifecycle is fully automated, which saves time and effort for users.
  • Enterprise-level Integration – SharePoint Document Management System seamlessly integrates with other MS applications and document processing tools to deliver quality solutions, quickly. Thus, it’s compatible with Office 365 services (Teams, Power Automate, Outlook, OneDrive, Exchange) and applications (Word, PowerPoint).

Additional Read

Restore SharePoint document timestamp and author from feed file

Conclusion: 

Need an optimal configuration of a  Document Management System? We configure SharePoint, migrate to SharePoint, train your users, and can craft custom solutions that boost your productivity.

Are you in need of assistance? We can help!

Need SharePoint DMS service for your Business? Schedule a call with our expert. You’ll find our solutions robust, scalable, and dependable: complete solutions, and limitless possibilities.

Let’s talk!

Your Complete SharePoint Migration Guide (Step-By-Step)

Posted on by Meet Bhimani

Teamwork is the backbone of any successful organization, and effective collaboration is the key. Collaboration is not easy when teams are located across the globe and operate in different time zones, but with a suitable collaboration service, complexity can be resolved. SharePoint Migration Services with its tools and technology assists businesses to become more productive, efficient, and secure. This article educates you on SharePoint migration and how it works. Read on to find out more!

What Is a SharePoint Migration? 

SharePoint Migration is a process of transferring existing data and solutions residing on a file share system like Google Drive to a new environment, i.e., a new version of SharePoint.

Companies prefer to migrate because they want to use the latest productivity and collaboration tools of SharePoint to improve their operational efficiency, reduce time lags, and deliver superior customer service, which leads to repeat customers and client advocacy (advertising brand through word-of-mouth/referrals). If you intend to use SharePoint Migration Services, analyze your business goals, strategies and requirements to make that successful leap towards simplifying business processes and contributing to organizational growth and expansion.

SharePoint Online Migration Best Practices

1. Scan your source and plan accordingly

Evaluating your existing file-sharing environment allows you to analyze the data from your source – file servers, third-party cloud storage apps, and third-party storage solutions- which facilitates seamless and effortless planning and migration.

You need to start the process by discovering the data location, if it is redundant or in use, the type of users accessing it, and if that data is highly sensitive. Additionally, being prepared with a new file name and path length will help with the new SharePoint environment migration.

Based on your findings, plan suitable workflows and data structures to render a positive user experience. Consequently, install the right collaboration tools to gain success.

2. Pack Your Content Correctly 

Planning the right size for data transfer will be the key to a smooth migration. Microsoft recommends transferring 250 files per transaction to improve the quality and speed of the migration. Further, the package size should be between 100 – 250 MB, if you want hassle-free migration. It’s important to note that larger files migrate faster as compared to smaller-sized files. Moreover, files migrate faster than list items and objects.

3. Test Migration 

Test migration before launching it for end-users. Migration is a challenging process because it involves restrictions with data migration on Office 365, such as limited characters and length used in file names, file size, and file path length limitations. Thus, you should use suitable test tools for effortless migration.

4. Migration 

Once the testing is complete, now live migration begins, i.e., preparing the cloud servers for launching the tested platform for official use. At this stage, you can decide the number of users or files you want to migrate to a new server. If you want to transfer them slowly or as a large data set migration.

5. Decommissioning

Once the SharePoint Migration is complete, you need to retire your old storage file system. Decommissioning is done according to the following stages – retire each server, decommission only 10 users each time, and any other specific decommissioning plan.

6. Post-Migration Steps 

Before introducing the SharePoint Online environment to your users, ensure that it’s operating smoothly.

  • Test the platform to check all functionalities and features
  • Ensure content migration is successful
  • Test workflows post the migration
  • Test user permissions
  • Create a backup of the new SharePoint environment
  • Delete user access to the on-premise SharePoint server

Learn More About SharePoint Migration 

SharePoint Migration Services with the right tools is a manageable task. Start the process by evaluating the business requirement for migration. Next, create data security regulations and a plan for installing the new collaboration platform to optimally serve the business goals.

SharePoint Migration consultants and support specialists train users on the features and functionalities of the platform that involves collaboration, communication, automation, and engagement.

Additional Read

How to Activate SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure

Organizations across the globe need to adapt to the evolving business dynamics that make significant use of technology. They need to migrate from an on-premise environment to the Cloud to enhance their operational efficiency and employee productivity and reduce costs while improving the bottom line.

SharePoint Migration hosted on the cloud offers substantial benefits in terms of quick and effortless collaboration between global teams, seamless communication, and on-time project deliveries while simplifying the complex business processes. However, governance-based research and planning must be adopted for optimal use of this platform.

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6 Trends to Consider During SharePoint Development Services

Posted on by Chitra Dharaiya

SharePoint has transformed the marketplace since its launch in the 2000s. The platform today has evolved from an on-premises solution to several licensed, cloud-based flavors bundled with Microsoft Office 365 and Teams.

For organizations that operate on a server version, the benefits of migration to Office 365 become compelling.  However, this requires a comprehensive review of their custom applications, intranet, and features that may require re-engineering when planning a migration to the cloud.  There may also be specific organizational and collaboration goals, as part of taking advantage of new Office 365 capabilities, in providing document management services, a corporate intranet, and/or a learning hub.

The SharePoint platform in Office 365 enables the use of new client-side capabilities, along with new and evolving PowerAutomate forms, workflow and integration capabilities.  Note the replacement of legacy server-side customizations can require creativity and line of business understanding to design and build successor applications and capabilities that can work within Office 365.

This article focuses on key Office 365 SharePoint development trends that will assist organizations to build, manage, and successfully use the latest SharePoint-based solutions.

SharePoint Development Services Trends


Trend#1: The End of Farm Solutions

SharePoint development techniques leveraged the capability to have full access to the server (Farm) and lead to a range of different solutions – covering farm, sandbox, and scripted solutions. Farm solutions had full control across all the servers in the SharePoint farm, while sandbox solutions have since been deprecated and removed from Office 365 support operated at a site collection level.

Note that the management and deployment techniques are different in the Cloud than on-site.  Farm solutions are incompatible with Office 365 and require a rewrite using different frameworks, such as the SPFx Framework.

Trend#2: Increased Testing

Since deployments of customizations in SharePoint are by definition unique, testing becomes all the more critical, as new capabilities are exposed for integration and automation.  Performance, throughput and identity management, and end-user experience become paramount. Consequently, a potential lack of diligence paved the way for four issues – poor performance, inconsistent integration, usability issues, and governance gap.

Customization of workflows, libraries, views, sites, pages, and integration with legacy systems, and document and metadata automation requires regular testing to locate and remediate, as they involve and affect different departments. Such customizations should be regularly tested as Microsoft updates and patches can cause subtle changes and impacts.

Further, the integration of SharePoint with other third-party tools raises the risk of security issues. Since enterprise-level applications are connected via this software, untested customizations can lead to user authentication issues that frustrate users, or security issues.

Additional Read

Microsoft 365 Groups vs. Teams vs. SharePoint Comparison

Trend#3: SPFx and PnP

Microsoft’s SharePoint Framework (SPFx) enables customizations that serve the line of business requirements. Organizations can use it when migrating from server-based services to the cloud and need to move from farm to cloud-based solutions. It serves as an alternative practice to the traditional .NET framework. Today, TypeScript is a hot technology, which works on the cloud.

Patterns and Practices (PnP) is another popular practice method. It involves a holistic version of SharePoint development, which is tested and updated by the Developer’s community.


Trend#4: Simplifying and Integrating Business Processes

Microsoft SharePoint with its collaborative feature streamlines business operations through centralized master data management. Customers, vendors, and partners can be easily managed through SharePoint along with external sharing and dedicated and isolated external partner sites. Organizations can make educated decisions as these technologies are leveraged across enterprises.  By deploying for individual departments, the end-user experience can be tuned, and gauged in real-time, as we automate and simplify business processes, save effort and time, and find creative ways of accelerating operations.

Since SharePoint Development Services can be easily integrated with other technologies – SQL, Azure, Teams, OneDrive, CRM & the full Microsoft Office Suite, it allows centralization of work environments and consolidated enterprise search, which makes it easier for employees to access data anytime, anywhere. Additionally, it’s compatible with popular web browsers – Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, & Safari. Hence, it renders a comprehensive user experience across all form factor devices as well.

Trend#5: Content Optimization and Data Management Simplified

A content management system (CMS) is critical to the success of an organization. This tool enables employees to communicate ideas, news, and updates about their company’s products and services both publicly and internally. Microsoft Office is a popular choice among users as it easily creates, edits, and publishes documents and converts them into different formats for sharing.  Content can be managed centrally, including drafting, and publishing, with the option for content approval workflows, and scheduled publishing.

Often, organizations struggle to manage their enterprise data sets, as employees continuously generate and publish data. By using SharePoint, organizations can streamline their communication, as this software enables teams to plan, organize, and schedule content for publishing. It’s cloud-based software that supports centralized data storage, i.e., all content in a range of formats is stored in a unified, central location from where users can access the necessary documents, links, events, and tasks with a streamlined and audience targeted experience, without users feeling overwhelmed, or experiencing stale information.

Trend#6: Maintain the Digital Culture

Microsoft’s SharePoint has been assisting organizations in streamlining their team collaboration and engagement for 20 years. It has adapted well to different enterprise and collaboration environments. This SaaS product enables smooth automation of document management and transforms business processes to optimize the workflow. Thus, with our SharePoint Development Services, organizations can significantly improve their employees’ efficiency by helping them migrate to a digital interface.

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How Can Businesses Save by using SharePoint as a Service?

The biggest advantage of using SharePoint as SaaS (software as a service) is that it’s cloud-based, i.e., organizations needn’t install and run the application on their computers. Consequently, the costs related to hardware purchase and maintenance, software license purchase, and support are significantly reduced. Additionally, the online setup cost for SharePoint is negligible.

With cloud services, companies are more agile. They can subscribe to SharePoint offerings based on their usage and requirements instead of purchasing a license and installing it on their machines. If the software requires new hardware, that cost can be eliminated if organizations choose to migrate to SaaS services offered by SharePoint.

Additional Read

How to Activate SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure

Conclusion:

With our Microsoft SharePoint Development Services, your organization can optimize the collaboration, workflow, and engagement of your teams. Our Consultancy services can assist you with automation and data-driven business decisions by developing or enhancing intranets and central dashboards to be the one-stop-shop and the default location for all corporate enterprise information.

 

Best Tips for SharePoint Infrastructure Monitoring and Health Check

Posted on by Hiren Senjaliya

Microsoft 365 SharePoint is a web-based platform that can be used by organizations to manage collaboration effectively.

SharePoint also provides file sharing, content exchange, task management, shared calendars security controls, and workflow.

SharePoint can be used by small and large organizations to manage group collaboration and collaborative project management. By configuring it correctly, you can use SharePoint more effectively.

Correct infrastructure configuration and monitoring also ensure the performance and scalability of your infrastructure.

Moreover, a health check reveals the present and potential risks in your SharePoint configuration.

Best Practices for SharePoint Infrastructure Monitoring

Microsoft 365 SharePoint comes in various installation modes, notably on-premises, online, and hybrid. The SharePoint infrastructure setup of each of the above modes can be involved and necessitates proper monitoring to avoid potential risks.

The proper monitoring and health checking of infrastructure ensures the security of your environment.

It helps you to unmask the potential risks that can be faced by users, developers, or teams over time. Some best practices for proper SharePoint infrastructure monitoring include:

Monitor Health Reports

Regular health checks ensure the prevention of potential harm to the environment due to organic sprawl. Along with the health check, it is vital to analyze the health check reports to be aware of the attributes of the environment.

The health check reports of SharePoint infrastructure reveal various metrics like webpage loading time, library sizing, database sizing and capacity, overall usage, and response time.

Once you are aware of the metric values, you can take action to manage and improve the corresponding metrics.

Implement SharePoint Auditing

User log files can sometimes play a vital role when you are facing regular issues with your website. SharePoint comes with some auditing features that help you view the evolving sizing and performance of the environment.

It enables you to determine which team or user is associated with the effects the sites, lists, and libraries have caused. SharePoint Auditing allows you to filter and analyze the environment to manage such emerging issues.

Monitor SQL Server for Disk Space

Due to the limitation of disk space in on-premises environments, storage management is crucial when working with the SharePoint infrastructure.

SharePoint should not be viewed simply as a database and should be used with caution for large file storage. Monitoring disk space can help avoid performance and scalability issues.

Site Storage Should Be Monitored

The proper structure of the stored data provides many vital advantages and prevents misinterpreting the data. The data for SharePoint content is stored in a SQL database.

It is vital to monitor site collection storage for disk space management and structuring of data. You can view the content stored on your site by following this two-step process:

  • Visit the site settings in your root site collection.
  • Click storage metrics in site collection administration.

Maintain the Structure of the Smart Site Collection

System performance is highly affected by the structure of your libraries. The storage metrics enable you to view the size of your libraries but don’t display the number of items that are contained in a library.

You can store more than 30 million items in a single library, but for best practice, it is advisable to have at most 5000 items inside a library.

Note there are methods to carefully scale beyond the 5000, with limitations. You can view the number of items in your library by using the site content option on your website.

It is advisable to re-evaluate your structure if it contains libraries with more than 5000 items to reduce performance issues and view errors.

Establish Permissions for Governance

If users are not assigned the proper permissions, it causes great confusion in collaborative SharePoint projects.

It is essential to ensure that publicly intended data is easily accessible to all users, while private data be accessible only to authorised users.

Permission management is vital for the smooth workflow and security of projects. The permissions assigned to a site can be viewed by visiting Site Permissions in Site Settings.

Keep an Eye on External User Access

One commonly used feature in SharePoint infrastructure is that you can assign permissions to your site to an external user.

If the permission management is not done properly, the external user may get access to sensitive data from your organization.

Moreover, the data may be visible to the user for longer durations than required.

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When to Go for a SharePoint Health Check

Poor Performance

Running a health check of your SharePoint infrastructure is vital if your site’s performance is being degraded.

The poor performance of your SharePoint site can be due to many reasons, like content structure, library sizing, view configuration, custom solutions, page design, fragmented permissions, and a large number of SharePoint sites along with web parts.

The health check of your SharePoint websites can reveal hidden bugs degrading the website’s performance.

Security Issues

Hidden security issues, vulnerabilities, misconfigured deployments, and mismanagement of permissions can cause serious security threats to the data of the site.

The health check reveals the hidden security threats on your site and enables you to develop a more secure web application.

Poor User Adoption

Users would resist adopting a site if it were changing continuously or poorly structured.

Moreover, teams would be frustrated if security issues and the performance of the site were hampering their users.

High Support Costs

Regular health checks enable you to find issues in the SharePoint site at an early stage. It saves organizations money and effort because bugs at a later stage cost a lot of money.

What Is Included in the SharePoint Health Check?

  • SharePoint farm assessment
  • Custom code review
  • The SharePoint security audit
  • Assessment and analysis of content
  • Customized application evaluation
  • Load time analysis
  • User experience assessment

Additional Read:
7 Critical Office 365 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes Businesses Make

Conclusion

SharePoint infrastructure monitoring plays a vital role in maintaining the security and control flow of your projects.

The outsourced health checks prevent larger security breaches, rework costs, and user interface problems.

Monitoring SQL disk space, site storage, SharePoint auditing, and monitoring health reports can reveal potential risks to your project, site, and environment.

Frequent health checks prevent poor performance, security issues, high support costs, and user adoption problems at their early stages and prevent them from growing larger.

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Microsoft 365 Groups vs. Teams vs. SharePoint Comparison

Posted on by Arpit Patel

Microsoft 365 cloud technology tools have emerged as one of the best platforms for organizations and enterprises to work in collaboration effectively.

Microsoft Groups, Teams, and SharePoint are some of the Microsoft 365 collaboration tools which are used by organizations worldwide while performing different group projects.

These three platforms are independent entities and are developed for different uses. These platforms can be used together to achieve the maximum results and make your group project workflow easy and speedy.

You should be familiar with the SharePoint comparison between Groups and Teams to use these platforms effectively in your group projects.

Microsoft Groups is a membership platform of Microsoft 365 that can be integrated with platforms like Outlook and Planner to create an effective interface for group projects.

The 365 Groups lay down a foundation of productivity and Microsoft Teams is built on the top of this foundation to provide you with additional features for a collaborative group project interface.

What is Microsoft 365 Groups?

Microsoft Group is an object in Azure Active Dictionary that can be integrated with other platforms like OneNote, SharePoint site, planner, etc.

It is a platform provided by Microsoft 365 for creating a group project interface on other platforms.

The team leader can create a group and become a group admin. The group admin can add members to the group and allow them to use the resources of the group.

Unlike some major group platforms, it assigns permission to users automatically.

The groups can be set to private or public as per your requirements. The group can be created on major Microsoft platforms like Outlook, SharePoint, planner, and Outlook on the Web for effective communication in group projects.

On SharePoint comparison, it provides you with the facility of integration with platforms.

Pros and Cons of Groups

For an effective comparison, we need to have a glimpse at the advantages and disadvantages of the Microsoft 365 group:

Pros:

  • Efficient for working on small projects.
  • It provides a user-friendly interface.
  • It is an essential option for departments that require fast replies for day-to-day tasks.

Cons:

  • It provides inefficient data related to tracking and reporting.
  • You need to install local desktop software for a better experience.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams are also known as the “teamwork hub” within Microsoft’s productivity suite.

It is a chat-based collaborative platform that can be used for the smooth workflow of group projects.

Microsoft Teams is built upon Microsoft 365 groups and inherits its various features.

Whenever you create a team using Microsoft teams, a group is created by default in the back-end. Moreover, you can also create a team from your existing group.

But the permissions will be inherited from your group to the newly created team. On SharePoint comparison, the files shared in a team are stored using the features provided by SharePoint and not on the cloud.

Pros and Cons of Teams

For an effective comparison, we need to have a glimpse at the advantages and disadvantages of the Microsoft 365 team:

Pros:

  • The team members can focus more on work rather than problems prevailing due to miscommunication.
  • The productivity of the team has increased.
  • The implementation of the Microsoft 365 team is easy.

Cons:

  • The file structures are confusing.
  • The online meeting experience is different.
  • Flexibility is limited.

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a web-based platform that uses pages, workflows, lists, and other web resources to provide an efficient collaboration platform for group projects.

It also empowers the companies to control their workflow and file sharing. It provides many intranet-based features for an effective group discussion.

It also consists of many security features that, on SharePoint, comparison with teams and groups is missing.

SharePoint can be used by small and large businesses to enhance their efficiency and productivity.

It is a user-friendly web-based collaborative platform that provides intranet features like secure sharing, content sharing, and workflow collaboration.

The various intranet features provided by SharePoint are as follows:

  • The documents are visible only after approval (publishing) by the admin.
  • Notification can be provided to the users when files are uploaded or updated.
  • You can prevent authoring or editing of documents by applying “checkout” on the documents or, alternatively, “co-author” documents concurrently.

Are you in need of assistance? We can help!

We help companies upgrade their on-premises SharePoint environment to the very latest for features, performance, security, and scalability.

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Pros and Cons of SharePoint

For SharePoint comparison against teams and groups, we need to have a glimpse of the advantages and disadvantages of SharePoint:

Pros:

  • It is a part of Microsoft Office and thus easily integrates with Microsoft PowerPoint, Excel, and Word.
  • You can utilize automation and integration features in Microsoft applications and other platforms.
  • It is highly customizable.
  • It stores the files in an organized and structured fashion which makes searching for files easy.
  • Enterprise Search allows sophisticated document and content search.
  • It provides sophisticated document management.
  • It allows you to track the version history of documents.
  • You can manage document security and permissions.
  • It is easily extensible for document metadata for filing and search and can be managed centrally across the enterprise.
  • SharePoint is suitable for both small and large organizations.

Cons:

  • SharePoint can be costly to host and license, although for many organizations, it comes free with existing licensing.
  • Best results are achieved with the support of employee training.

Additional Read:

SharePoint Group Management

Conclusion

SharePoint, Groups, and Teams are Microsoft 365 platforms that consist of various features for creating collaborative group projects efficiently and easily.

SharePoint provides you with extra features when compared to Groups and Teams alone.

These platforms have their advantages and disadvantages, and you can use any of these platforms based on your requirements and availability of resources.

SharePoint can work as a perfect group project collaboration tool for your small and large-scale projects.

How to Activate SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure

Posted on by Alan Bryan

SharePoint has emerged as one of Microsoft’s most popular products after MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

It is used by many leading enterprises as well as small-sized organizations to share data with their teams easily. SharePoint is mainly used by organizations to collaborate.

But SharePoint publishing provides far more features that some organizations are unaware of. The SharePoint publishing is mainly developed using the Publishing Portal Site Template and Enterprise Wiki Template.

If you want to use any of the above publishing features, you need to enable the SharePoint publishing infrastructure.

Let’s discuss the step-by-step procedure to activate the SharePoint Publishing infrastructure for your site.

What Are the Publishing Features in SharePoint?

The publishing features are by default disabled in SharePoint. It does not matter if you have created a SharePoint site for individual, team, project, or enterprise use, or using a SharePoint default site you may want to enable the publishing features to use them for your site.

SharePoint serves up sites by default in a collaborative way. It allows you to create team sites, calendars, department sites, and Wikis.

Publishing capabilities allow more refined and nuanced capabilities including in-place drafting, approval workflows, versioning, and scheduled publishing.

The publishing model is quite different from the collaborative model. The SharePoint publishing infrastructure enables you to present your site content in a more structured, scheduled and organized, and robust way.

Additionally, you can make use of custom branding, themes, and extensive navigation options.

Moreover, you need to turn on the publishing features to enjoy various advanced functions like Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and Content Search Web Part (CSWP).

Sharepoint publishing infrastructure can greatly enhance the structure of the site to make it more organized, having a reliable Sharepoint development company having expertise in Microsoft Sharepoint services is crucial for efficient collaboration and smooth publishing.

Activate the Publishing Infrastructure Feature

  1. Go to your root site (you need to only enable the setting in the root site, child sites will automatically inherit the permissions), click settings->site settings.
  2. On the site settings page, click on Site collection administration and go to site collection features.
  3. On the site collection features page, go to SharePoint publishing infrastructure and click on activate.

Publishing Features

Once you have enabled the SharePoint publishing infrastructure feature on your root site, it will be automatically applied to the whole site collection.

You will be able to enjoy various Publishing features on your site collection from the ribbon itself; note some features are only visible by clicking the links on the site settings page.

Additional Read

Best Tips for SharePoint Infrastructure Monitoring and Health Check

Navigation and Ribbon

Let’s discuss some major features that are available to use from the ribbon itself:

  • Check-in/Check-Out: You will be able to use the check-in/check-out feature if you are currently editing a page in the edit group feature of the format text tab. It will allow you to edit the content of your page with an embedded version control feature.
  • Publish, approve, and reject buttons: If you are using the approval workflow, then you will see the publish, approve, and reject buttons on the publish toolbar. They will ensure that data is not published on a site without prior reviews.
  • Publish list: The publish list consists of many options including the Submit button. The submit button will link the page to one or more approvers for approval before publishing the content. You can also unpublish or unapproved a page depending on the permissions you have been allotted.
  • Schedule button: The schedule button opens a dialog box where you can specify the schedule to publish your page.

How to De-activate Publishing features

If you want to switch back to the collaborative mode and disable the publishing features on your site, you must keep the following points in mind:

  • Make sure that any of the sites of your site collection is not using any publishing features. If you will disable the publishing features, then these features will not work on the sites anymore. For example, if you are collecting information from multiple sites using the Content Search Query Web Part it will stop working as soon as you deactivate the features.
  • Secondly, you are required to disable the publishing features for each site individually. You cannot disable the publishing features for your collective site collection. It will generate errors if any of the sites in the site collection is using any publishing feature. So, to avoid the error messages you need to follow a bottom-up approach to disable the SharePoint publishing infrastructure.
  • You need to follow the activation steps in reverse order to disable the publishing features. To disable the SharePoint publishing infrastructure at the site level visit site settings->Manage site features and click on the deactivate button.

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Users and Permissions

You can assign different kinds of permissions to different users by using the SharePoint publishing infrastructure.

The Publishing Portal site and Wiki both provide you with various user permissions to choose from. Publishing Portal Site includes Designers, Approvers, Hierarchy Managers, and Restricted Readers.

The Wiki provides the same features with Viewer as an additional feature. Approve, Manage Hierarchy, and Restricted Read are included by default as site collection features.

The child sites will by default use the groups and permission levels from the root site.

*Note: If you have enabled the SharePoint publishing infrastructure features and started using it. You must be careful before deactivating the publishing features as some features on your site may stop working and featured applications may not respond.

Conclusion

SharePoint provides you with many SharePoint publishing infrastructure features to present your web content in an organized, enterprise-class, and structured fashion.

The publishing features are by default set as disabled for the custom as well as default sites in SharePoint. You only need to enable the publishing features for only the root site; child sites will inherit the features automatically.

But once you start using the publishing features do not disable the features (unless truly necessary) as it can disable many features for your site.

7 Critical Office 365 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes Businesses Make

Posted on by Alexis Daniel

Data is the primary asset for every organization and a data loss can become very costly for respected enterprises. The lost data may include customer, employee, or even stakeholder information. Intruder attacks, hardware failures, and system hacking have become some common issues in the current world.

If you don’t have a proper disaster recovery plan, you can be subject to huge hacker ransom demands. If you are using Office 365 in your organization on a regular basis, then the Office 365 disaster recovery plan becomes very important for your firm. You must be careful while planning the Office 365 disaster recovery plan for your organization and should not make seven common mistakes.

Office 365 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes

1.Forgetting to Set Up Litigation Hold/Retention Policy

You must be clear about the priority of your data. It will help you to choose the data that you need to back up on a daily or weekly basis. Microsoft already provides you with a data policy that keeps your data stored with them for some time after deletion. After the files are deleted permanently, they are completely removed from the system.

If you have not created a disaster recovery plan (DRP) and applied it consistently and thoroughly, you may face severe problems. It can result in a loss of priority data and affect your Office 365 disaster recovery plan policy compliance. A better DRP will help your business to recover your prioritized data at times of disaster.

2. Confusing Microsoft 365 Data Backup with Office 365 Data Preservation Tools

Sometimes businesses misinterpret the eDiscovery and Preservation hold library as the office 365 preservation tools. It only stores data on a temporary basis. E-discovery helps you to locate, aggregate, and report on relevant data, and leverages the robust SharePoint search system. It lets you take backup of the Office 365 data e-mails, team chats,SharePoint, and OneDrive files.   Note some user data is only retained as long as a user is active in a system such as OneDrive and Exchange, and based on Retention policies, the data is disposed of overtime.

Once the user is deleted from the system, relevant data may be automatically discarded and access and restoration may no longer be possible.

3. The Plan is Outdated

Your Office 365 disaster recovery plan and retention and disposition policies need to be updated periodically to stay in line with compliance policies and stay one step ahead of threats. Similarly, new files might need to be backed up for protection against future threats.  Similarly, the document holds need to be managed to keep in compliance.

4. There’s No Communication

The communication between the recovery team and stakeholders plays a vital role in the Office 365 disaster recovery plan. There should be clear communication between the management and the DRP team to avoid any confusion in the recovery procedure.

Alternate communication channels should be available for the teams to communicate if the primary channels are not available for communication. It should be clear whom the team members have to contact to inform about the updates in the recovery procedure. Better communication ensures the speedy recovery of lost data through DPA.

5. Relying on Single and/or Infrequent Backups

Backup is the most vital part of a successful Office 365 disaster recovery plan. You should take frequent backups as new data keeps added to the organization’s database.  There are third-party backup tools that can greatly improve backups and more importantly, the ability to restore content.  Your backup must contain the data stored consistently across all systems to avoid data loss. Infrequent backups are equivalent to no backups at all as the desired recovery will be inconsistent at best.

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6. Not Preparing Remote Access

If your organization faces a disaster, then the work of the whole enterprise can come to a halt. You need to be pre-planning for the organization’s work to continue at the same pace during a disaster. Remote business planning should be your priority factor in Office 365 disaster recovery plan.  Covid has accelerated organizations awareness and led to a focus and boost in their capabilities, but it is an area for planning and remote access testing.

A disaster may affect the hardware, applications, and communication channels of an organization. If the business is not pre-planning to overcome these, it can face a serious operational and even financial crisis.

If the hardware of computers is unavailable or even destroyed, then the employees need to work from the remote computers. The best option for remote access is to work from personal computers and company laptops. The task of remote access becomes easier if data of employees’ computers are considered under backup.  The best is to retain all data and documents in company-controlled systems and environments.  Alternate channels must be created for the employees to communicate as the communication channels can be deeply affected by a disaster. You should consider the use of SaaS or cloud-based applications to remotely use the applications from other computers.

7. Not learning from experience

It might happen that your DRP plan will not be perfect at the first trial. The recovery plan may not be able to recover some particular kind of data or reduce the damage of the disaster. But once the disaster is over, we need to learn from the experience and find out and correct the shortcomings in your data recovery plan. You should identify the areas of concern in your plan and find solutions to the problems so they do not recur in the future.

Additional Read

MS-Office Integration with SharePoint

Conclusion

Data recovery plans are the primary requirement for a company to avoid data loss during an intruder attack or system hacking. If your organization works primarily on Office 365 then you should include Office 365 disaster recovery plans in your periodic tasks.

You must prepare a complete data recovery plan (DRP) to secure your open office data from being lost in an unforeseen disaster. You should have a policy and systems for frequent backups from a range of sources and maintain alternate communication and remote access facilities to avoid future problems in DRP. The Reality Tech team can help plan to avoid a disaster becoming a true disaster for your enterprise.

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