SharePoint keeps changing for the better. Is it time to re-examine your ECM strategy?

Microsoft SharePoint has come a long way since its beginnings in the 2000s.

Starting out as a web portal for the Microsoft Office product suite, SharePoint has continued to evolve to meet new needs. Today, many businesses now find it indispensable.

In this newsletter, we look at how SharePoint has kept on adapting to new requirements - and it continues to evolve today.

As we’ll see, by allowing you to wield your enterprise content with unparalleled productivity it may be the key to supporting your business growth in the coming years.

Supporting deeper collaboration

Today, SharePoint forms a core part of the Microsoft 365 product family, and it helps organizations to gain the most benefit from AI tooling such as Copilot.

But it was a rocky start for SharePoint; in many ways, the world just wasn’t ready for it yet.

However, once organizations realized the benefits of easily sharing and accessing Office files via a secure intranet, SharePoint quickly took off.

As collaborative processes shifted increasingly to the online space, SharePoint’s momentum only grew - and new features soon followed.

Shifting to the cloud

Within a decade, SharePoint had increased its capabilities to include centralized management of global sites, social media functionality, and much more.

With the move to the cloud in 2013, SharePoint Online became a catalyst for many enterprise users to move their data from on-premise servers to highly secure cloud storage - with all the economies of scale and other benefits the cloud offers.

This evolutionary process has been accelerated further with the addition of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Combining the best parts of Microsoft 365

As a conversational interface for the Microsoft 365 product family, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is enabling a more holistic approach. It harnesses and combines the best parts of each application to deliver greater value.

Building on a layer of shared service components, the entire Microsoft 365 family can now work together like never before.

And at the center of this is SharePoint.

SharePoint is the key to unlocking the unique potential of your content - by giving full control over your enterprise content and enabling more ways to leverage the value it contains.

In particular, SharePoint Premium has opened the door for generating new synergies with the power of your enterprise content.

SharePoint Premium offers AI-supported metadata extraction, document classification, time-saving templates for document creation, and a host of intelligent document processing capabilities.

How SharePoint unlocks new synergies with enterprise content

There are many ways that SharePoint can now assist organizations, by making it easier for enterprise content to flow to where it can generate the greatest business value.

Here are a handful of key examples.

Copilot for Microsoft 365

Copilot relies on accessing the meticulously labeled and organized content stored in SharePoint to generate reliable ‘outputs’ that are highly specific to your organization.

These outputs can vary immensely, depending on how you specifically choose to implement Copilot. In other words, this is where you can make a strategic difference.

However, common use-cases such as the automation of emails, extraction of customer insights, generation of meeting summaries, and organization of follow-up actions all have a profound impact on productivity.

And all these repetitive and common tasks become more effective and efficient with the use of SharePoint as a centralized point of access and control.

All your content is accessible, correctly labeled, and securely administered with access controls and retention policies.

Teams

SharePoint has become an embedded feature of Microsoft Teams, allowing the seamless sharing of documents from within the Teams client itself.

This substantially lubricates collaboration within your organization, where the flow of information must be ‘frictionless,’ but where access controls still have critical importance.

Purview

Organizations can gain a lot by using Purview to maintain a clear overview and management of information security and access.

Working perfectly with SharePoint’s own built-in security and classification systems, Purview helps your organization to take the necessary steps to meet compliance and other requirements.

Viva Connections

Putting your enterprise content into action has never been more engaging than with Viva Connections.

With SharePoint working behind the scenes as the functional backend to your enterprise content management (ECM), Viva Connections allows you to create personalized dashboards that surface the most important content and actions for each team.

This greatly simplifies experiences for users, who have almost everything they need at their fingertips - without needing to search around for the right document or other content.

SharePoint Embedded

This is a highly versatile way to wield SharePoint’s capabilities in a way that perfectly matches your enterprise requirements.

Operating as a ‘headless ECM,’ SharePoint Embedded allows you to connect any application to your content in SharePoint with an API integration.

Migration doesn’t have to be a headache

SharePoint is swiftly becoming an indispensable part of the office toolkit.

It can even support highly customized infrastructure thanks to SharePoint Embedded, integrating with a wide range of applications - perhaps including your core enterprise software.

But migrating to SharePoint is always the first step in this journey.

Although this can be a complex task you needn’t do it alone. Our content migration Software Platform and experts at Xillio are ready to help devise and execute an optimal strategy for your organization’s smooth and comprehensive migration.

As you’ll see, once SharePoint is properly set up, it forms a solid foundation for managing enterprise content in the most effective and secure way – today, and for the future.

About Xillio

Xillio software empowers organizations to maximize their Microsoft 365 investments by offering a robust platform for content migration and integration. Tailored to enhance the SharePoint experience, our platform not only simplifies the migration of valuable data into Microsoft 365 but also enables the integration of diverse sources for Copilot utilization.

Want to know more? Please feel free to reach out to me.

Xillio is proud to be a Microsoft Content AI preferred partner.