Regroove
There are mounds, endless mounds, out there. Stacking the CDs will probably reach to the top of Mt. Everest. There is no shortage of software to help businesses but most aren’t worth the time to review.
Many are for home-based business use. Or single consultant operations. Few meet actual business needs of staff working together. I mean beyond everyone having MS Word. How many times do staff need to work on a brochure or spreadsheet together? Lots. So what are the needs of the business and staff when it comes to managing documents? Here’s our top 5 business benefits for SharePoint:
- Empower Staff to Create Documents – everything is now an app. They are meant to be easy to use and reduce the workload on the already overworked IT department. They make it easy for Content Owners (the ones creating documents) to implement new functionality. (We even have our own apps, check it out here. http://www.brainlitter.com/2012/11/28/itgroove-is-in-the-sharepoint-2013-app-store)
- Design pages to your liking – internal websites used to look terrible. Now beautifully branded pages can match the external website of your company. Easily use HTML and CSS with images to create beautiful consistent pages within the Design Manager. This app allows you to convert existing HTML, like an external webpage, to a SharePoint page using your favourite HTML design tool.
- Get your people sharing – this sharing thing really works. We’ve been benefiting from this for the last couple of years. Knowledge is shared via search. Less is duplicated. People’s availability is quickly checked. It’s been really helpful for us. In SharePoint, there are exciting social capabilities, like micro blogs, activity feeds, Following, Likes and Reputations to help your staff collaborate better. Some great features to put to use!
- Drag ‘n’ Drop documents – this seems so simple or subtle but when you are the one uploading and moving documents, you don’t want to waste time. Now with SharePoint 2013, it is a snap. Simply drag documents to the document library. A small feature but it lifts away the previous frustration with all the clicking.
- 5. Enjoy your tablet – it’s no secret that staff find using mobile phones and tablets easy to access work information. Maybe they need to check something while at home after dinner. Or they are out at a customer site. Now SharePoint 2013 formats itself based on desktop, tablet, and mobile phone. No extra programming or separate mobile sites required. Or as we like to say… SharePoint is BYOD ready (Bring Your Own Device).
So there’s our top 5 business benefits. I suspect you will be able to relate to a few of them. Let us know below if you think of others we missed.