SharePoint – Super Tool or Scary?
Find out what makes SharePoint the "swiss army knife of tech" and why it has so much offer and so little fear.
Last week on twitter, @Office365 posed the question, “What is the most valuable piece of technology you own/use?”. While a number of people responded with “SharePoint”, one individual’s explanation stood out. He said, “SharePoint – the swiss army knife of tech.”
I thought that was a great way to explain SharePoint. Just as a Swiss Army Knife keeps a number of tools connected so that they are always at the ready to do their individual jobs, SharePoint is a collection of tools that can address a variety of needs you may have in the course of doing business. With SharePoint, you have six integrated capability areas or tools to work with:
Sites – provide a single infrastructure for all your business Web sites – intranets, extranets, and internet sites which enable you to share documents with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers.
Communities – leverage a single platform to manage all of your collaboration tools, making it easy for people to share ideas and work together.
Search-combine relevance, refinement, and social cues to help people the information and contacts they need to get their jobs done.
Content – manage content by setting up compliance measures behind the scenes and allowing people to work naturally in Microsoft Office.
Insights – give people access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications so that they can make good business decisions.
Composites – create do-it-yourself, no-code business solutions to quickly respond to changing needs.
With such powerful tools combined into one solution, SharePoint can seem like a big, intimidating undertaking. That couldn’t be further from the truth, however. Everything from the implementation to the customization to the day-to-day usability of SharePoint is designed to be scalable and accessible to organizations of any size.
