What Is Microsoft SharePoint? 4 Features and Benefits of Using It – MUO – MakeUseOf
Microsoft SharePoint is a collaboration and file management tool that helps your professional and personal productivity. Here’s what you need to know!
A Microsoft 365 subscription gives you access to many productivity tools. The most intuitive, intelligent, and customizable one is SharePoint. A staggering 190 million people in more than 200,000 organizations of different sizes use SharePoint.
SharePoint can easily save time by eliminating the need for multiple tasks and project management apps. Eventually, you can invest more time to grow your professional career, freelance clients, or side hustles.
SharePoint is an online content management tool. It enables you to store files in the cloud for sharing and collaborative work. It can help you create sites and subsites to declutter tasks from different teams or individuals.
SharePoint allows you to create an intranet where you, your collaborators, and freelance clients securely work on a file or document. A centralized admin will control accesses so that each user can seamlessly open, edit, and save files.
SharePoint has many advanced functionalities that help you or your team in managing professional and personal works. The followings are some of the most frequently-used actions:
SharePoint works as a safe haven for all creative files such as app codes, graphic designs, audio clips, videos, website articles, invoices, etc. SharePoint offers other tools like data analysis, website templates, knowledge base templates, and project management workflows.
Therefore, its scope of use ranges from an individual content creator to large businesses. Many freelance professionals or small groups of creative individuals use SharePoint in different stages of software, mobile app, website, or content development projects.
The web-based SharePoint tool that comes with Microsoft 365 subscription is a robust yet simple productivity tool. The widely-used features that make it one of the best task and project management tools are:
SharePoint is a highly flexible and scalable platform for collaboration with internal or external resources. A central admin user can assign different levels of access permission to individual users of team sites.
You and your team can work on a single file in a real-time scenario without facing any latency. Therefore, many creative developers and content creators prefer SharePoint for teaming up for any project.
A significant function of SharePoint collaboration is to keep flowing decluttered information throughout the sites and subsites. It helps individuals stay updated about the project without going through multiple emails, missed chats, video calls, etc.
Content management is a big challenge for any individual or group of professionals that want to deliver better productivity. SharePoint enables you to get past this challenge without going through complex programming.
Content managers can easily take care of multiple projects simultaneously on SharePoint. Publishing or updating website contents like events, news, blogs, presentation stacks, image carousels, etc., made easy with SharePoint.
You don’t have to start every content management project from scratch. There are ready-to-use professional templates that you can use. Apart from the content, you’re in total control of its versions. SharePoint creates and saves multiple versions of the file on which you or your team works upon.
When in need, you can recall any previous versions or fix any files system errors from SharePoint. You don’t need to depend on any third-party tools to backup, restore, or fix files.
SharePoint has a range of functionalities that you can leverage for task and project management. The most evident function is that the tool functions as centralized storage for all project-related documents and deliverable files.
You can also customize the SharePoint sites in many ways. These tailor-made sites could serve you as a daily planner, weekly task scheduler, and FAQs for tasks. Furthermore, for project documentation and performance review purposes, you can activate time logging features as mentioned below:
SharePoint also enables you to create a workflow to streamline tasks like task handover, sign-off project deliverables, approvals, presenting a demo, and client feedback.
SharePoint integrates with most Microsoft 365 apps to offer you a seamless user interface for project management. SharePoint works as a central repository of your project data, whereas other Microsoft 365 apps make it easy for you to manage tasks and resources.
You can sync SharePoint with tools like To-Do, Tasks, Planner, and Project Online for specialized approaches. You can generate reports to present project insights to your freelance clients.
SharePoint syncs with your Outlook and Calendar profile to organize tasks and schedules so that you can prioritize your work. Similarly, publish your SharePoint team sites in the Teams app to access contacts, files, tasks, etc., from Teams.
SharePoint also has the ability to integrate PowerPoint, Video, Stream, OneDrive to preview files and documents within the SharePoint sites or subsites. You save time by avoiding mundane tasks like downloading files from SharePoint to make PowerPoint slides.
SharePoint offers many benefits when comparing with any other productivity tool for project or content management. Some of its advantages are:
You may already be paying for it through Microsoft 365 subscription. Avoid unnecessary spending on apps and tools by using SharePoint as the primary productivity tool for professional or personal needs.
Governments and big organizations trust the SharePoint ecosystem with their sensitive data. So, you can store your creative work on SharePoint for collaborative work without any fear of intellectual property theft.
The scalability of the tool allows you to budget your cost towards productivity tools. If you see an inflow of too many projects from different clients, you can change the subscription to accommodate more resources and projects. When projects ease off, you can switch to low-paid plans.
A higher level of flexibility and multipurpose utility means that you can keep using SharePoint as the chief productivity tool while you keep changing your roles or creative skills. You can use a template when one project ends, and you need to start another one. You can minimize the budget by avoiding multiple app purchases.
SharePoint’s features make it an elaborate project management tool rather than a simple cloud solution for file sharing and storage. By using SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 apps to manage your professional or personal tasks, you create a domino effect of ever-increasing productivity.
Tamal is a freelance writer at MakeUseOf. After gaining substantial experience in technology, finance, and business processes in his previous job in an IT consulting company, he adopted writing as a full-time profession 3 years ago. While not writing about productivity and the latest tech news, he loves to play Splinter Cell and binge-watch Netflix/ Prime Video.
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