As more and more companies migrate their staff to O365, the question IT leadership’s evaluating is whether their organization needs SharePoint. Data is telling us that companies are electing to adopt SharePoint, with an increase in online deployments from 2016 to 2017 of 167%. Centriq has also documented an increase in students signing up for SharePoint training over the past two years. But, numbers aside, your IT leadership has to decide what’s best for your organization!
SharePoint expert and Centriq Training Instructor Karla Sharp recently found a blog by Greg Zelfond, the SharePoint Maven that perfectly explains what criteria should be considered when evaluating the decision to adopt SharePoint. Greg covered all points so well, we elected to share a summary of his notes (with a link to the full article at the bottom of this page).
REASON # 1: SHAREPOINT IS A BACKBONE OF OFFICE 365 GROUPS
You may not realize this, but anytime you create a new Office 365 Group you actually provision a brand new and fully functional SharePoint site collection. That means that you can create subsites underneath, change the look and feel of pages as well as create custom lists and web parts like in “regular” SharePoint.
REASON # 2: TIGHT INTEGRATION WITH SHAREPOINT
Whether you are using Teams or Planner, they tightly integrate with SharePoint. Anytime you upload a file or share it, the file management is happening in SharePoint.
REASON # 3: PROJECT VS. OPERATIONAL STUFF
All these new tools such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Planner, Yammer and Office 365 Groups are not meant to be a replacement for SharePoint. They are supposed to complement it.
REASON # 4: ADVANCED FEATURES
While the tools can enhance the end-user experience, your organization could benefit from capabilities, like advanced document management via metadata, retention policies and records management, advanced/custom search experience, consistent drop-down navigation, form and workflow customization.
REASON # 5: COMPANY INTRANET
Companies need one place for employees to go to for company stuff, like an HR Employee hub or project hub with PMO information and project dashboard. You may also use Intranet as a communication channel with employees, using recently released Communication Sites.
REASON # 6: MICROSOFT FLOW AND POWER APPS
The other two applications that Microsoft released in the last few years are Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. While both work independently of SharePoint, they can help make SharePoint more interactive and “user-friendly”. Both are tightly integrated with SharePoint lists and libraries and links to both are prominently featured in both.
REASON # 7: TRAINING
No matter what your opinion is on SharePoint and all the other available applications, training is a fundamental piece you should not ignore or avoid.
Obviously, we’re big fans of training at Centriq and Greg describes an O365 deployment without any training as “an unmanageable Wild West full of company collaboration and intellectual property,” and who wants that, when developing a training plan is so much easier?
Source: https://sharepointmaven.com/really-need-sharepoint/
If you’d like to dive deeper into the capabilities of SharePoint for Administrators and/or End Users, sign up for a training class at Centriq.
VIEW CENTRIQ’S MICROSOFT Sharepoint TRAINING CLASSES
Get specific information by speaking with a Training Advisor by email, by phone at 913.322.7062 and 314.644.6400, or by completing the following form.