What's the point of SharePoint?
Nick Ellis FCMI
AI and Innovation Lead | Future Workplace @ Select Technology | Designing AI & Cloud Solutions
OK, that was an easy headline. SharePoint has gone through massive evolution in recent years though, and it's probably worth reviewing, if you haven't already, what it can do.
File Storage
Back in the day, we all had File & Print servers. We put things on SharePoint only when they very specifically related to the subject of the site. Those days, as they say, are gone.
In the modern cloudy world, SharePoint can be and probably should be your main file storage. Treat it like a shared drive. You can even treat it exactly like one by synchronising the files locally, so Windows will include it in the File Explorer. That does have some drawbacks, notably in metadata being lost, but it serves most people's purposes.
An extra benefit here is that since the files are all in SharePoint, they are also in Delve and will be included in its very powerful search function.
Teams Integration
Teams is moving from awkward plugin through nice idea into essential business tool. The way it integrates with SharePoint is a good part of the reason why. When you create a new team you automatically get a SharePoint site for that team, and Teams will create a document folder for each channel. Any files you upload are automatically saved into SharePoint - meaning they are indexed, searchable, backed-up and available anywhere. What's not to love?
The Power of the Power platform
SharePoint's integration with PowerApps and PowerBI mean it is pretty straightforward to create a mobile app from a custom list, or to build a dashboard from a number of lists.
Recently I have been able to create a management dashboard showing progress of a migration project in about two hours, and a mobile app for client registration based on SharePoint lists in about half a day.
News and Information
Used internally, SharePoint is an ideal place to document your company news and share it with your colleagues. The news page function makes it easy to quickly document news in a visually appealing way, and users can subscribe to different news channels that they think are appropriate. With the SharePoint mobile app, they even get push notifications when new articles are published.
Electronic Signatures
A nice extension to SharePoint is the Adobe Sign plugin. You can use this to create signature workflows for any document in SharePoint, and the plugin will handle all the emailing and status updating. Once you have a contract ready to go, bang it in SharePoint as an archive and drive the approval cycle from there - no more 'customer copy', 'my copy', and the risks of version difference, etc. One document, centrally stored, available in Teams and Delve, with full Adobe Sign capability. That's pretty cool.