Why you should be using Microsoft Sharepoint in your business

There’s a lot of things we love at Upsource, and one of those is our biweekly coffee and catch ups. Not only because it’s a great chance for us as virtual workers to get some much needed “watercooler” chat, but also because the team always shares some great nuggets of insight. So thanks to Gemma, our resident coaches expert, for this inspiration! 

Gemma shared with us that a surprising number of Microsoft users don’t use Sharepoint, the proprietary MS intranet. Further investigation tells us that despite there being 270 million daily users of Microsoft Teams (up from 145 million in 2021!) there are only 190 million Sharepoint users. That’s still a pretty big number of users; Sharepoint is the world’s most popular collaboration and document management tool. But that 80 million shortfall is significant; think the population of Germany.

If your business uses Microsoft Office 365, but not Sharepoint, you’re missing a trick! Here’s why.

Live global collaboration

Sharepoint is a cloud-based intranet, which means that any member of your team with internet access can access, contribute to and share any content or documents on your site. Any edits are reflected instantly for all teammates and version histories are available to track updates. Not only that, but it is system and device agnostic, so Mac users can still use the app and desktop site. 

Integration with other useful tools

With all the usual benefits of a wiki, Sharepoint has the added benefit of being able to integrate with other Microsoft products, so you can e.g. create and collaborate on forms, workflows and complex diagrams, use Teams and schedule appointments via Microsoft Bookings.

Sharepoint also allows you to share content with users outside of your organisation, so if you have documents you need to share with clients and customers, whether that’s an instruction manual, service contracts or a guided meditation, you can do so easily.

Keep your business safe

An important issue for small businesses is often security. Small sites can be the target of cyber attacks because they don’t have the infrastructure or support to create really secure systems. Sharepoint has many inbuilt security features as well as helpful prompts to change passwords at specified intervals.

Make your business more efficient

Most of all, Sharepoint can help your business save time and work more efficiently as a centralised source of information for your team, reducing the number of tools and systems you need to pay for and consult. Your HR/Finance/Tech team won’t have to answer the same questions endlessly about holiday requests/expenses/why the printer isn’t working, it’s all in there! And if your team is working virtually they can collaborate on documents live from across the globe.

We can’t recommend having a company wiki more highly. If you’re already using Microsoft 365, try Sharepoint. We’d love to hear how it works for you.

If you need some help making your business run more efficiently and maybe even getting set up on Sharepoint, get in touch with Caroline and she can set you up with your ideal Virtual Assistant.