In this article we will give you a rounded SharePoint review and some useful insights along the way.
As Microsoft Gold Partners we have delivered thousands of SharePoint projects and understand the needs of our clients starting their journey into SharePoint.
Watch our video SharePoint Review below!
SharePoint is a product from Microsoft that provides an internal portal known as an Intranet.
It also provides an excellent document management experience. Allowing users to easily upload, edit and delete documents based on their level of access.
There are multiple versions of SharePoint that you can either install on your own servers or use Microsoft 365 offering of SharePoint Online.
We share more information on our section for SharePoint Intranet.
Here are a couple of SharePoint videos from our Microsoft Services YouTube channel that will give some additional insights into using SharePoint.
There are countless benefits to adopting SharePoint here are some of our favourites.
Using SharePoint you can very quickly build powerful internal portals that can help boost employee engagement.
Your SharePoint Intranet will typically help employees navigate around complex document structures and point them to useful resources.
The SharePoint intranet should also contain additional features and functionality to interest your employees enough to return back to the intranet.
You might like to replace internal email traffic with SharePoint news articles. This keeps your employees informed and naturally will boost traffic towards your new intranet.
“Often a common compliant from employees is not having enough direction from senior leadership. Using our new Modern SharePoint Intranet we have quickly setup a platform for our senior management and CEO to post frequent updates and direction to all staff.” – Valto Customer
To find out more information see our SharePoint Intranet Examples.
If you do not give your employees a platform for sharing documents externally, they will often source their own solutions to this. Typically using third party products such as Dropbox, WeTransfer or BOX.
The problem with this is that this is then outside of the control of your IT department and poses a significant security risk.
If an employee left the business and still had access to this via their personal email address there is no way for you to remove their access to company data.
However, if you were to use SharePoint and enabled external sharing you would not have this problem.
As all of the access and security controls are governed by your Office 365 user accounts. Meaning if you employee did choose to leave the business you can block their account and instantly stop them from accessing this data.
Opening your SharePoint for external access is often referred to as an Extranet. In this case it would be a SharePoint Extranet.
We have helped many clients build external facing extranets for things like supplier management portals, recruitment process portals, employee onboarding process and providing documents to external parties such as contractors or even volunteers of a charity without having to incur additional license costs.
Microsoft Teams is becoming the one stop shop for everything you need within Microsoft 365 platform.
Not only is it providing employees with a chat room type forum for their colleagues and making it simple to access their files.
It is also providing a centralised area for employees to access key business applications and useful links all under one roof.
This then makes it an obvious move to make your SharePoint intranet accessible directly inside of Microsoft Teams.
Using the newly released Viva Connections you can simply integrate your SharePoint intranet as a tab for all employees to access from the left hand side of Microsoft Teams.
One of our very popular intranet solutions is a leave request with PowerApps that will manage leave requests with an approval process, watch the demo below for more information.
Although intranet owners and communication departments are often aware SharePoint online can create news articles, not many are aware that you can create newsletters also.
Newsletters is a great feature of SharePoint Online that allows you to provide a title, description and a selection of news articles that have previously been created.
It will then put this in to a pre-made template for you and send it out to one or multiple email addresses of your choice.
A well presented newsletter will then be delivered and links to the individual news items will be presented.
This is a great way to not only boost employee engagement, assist in user adoption of SharePoint but also drive traffic to your new modern SharePoint intranet.
Once you have your SharePoint intranet setup with multiple areas of documents, why not consider extending this functionality further to include automated reviews or approval processes.
Through the use of Microsoft 365 workflow engine known as Power Automate, you can build simple or complex workflows for a lot of different business processes.
You can also consider using Microsoft PowerApps for building out custom user interfaces. This is a great way to replace InfoPath forms if you are migrating away from an old version of SharePoint.
Power Automate will provide a very simplistic drag and drop type interface for building out your workflows. There is also hundreds if not thousands of different pre-built templates that you can browse to learn from.
The following are some of the pitfalls and commons issues we see when our clients get started using SharePoint. Another reason Valto’s expert SharePoint Consultants are mission critical to business efficiency and support.
There are a few pitfalls when using SharePoint, including thresholds of how many items that you can store in certain areas of SharePoint. That is why it is vital that your properly design our your SharePoint structure before building it.
You can read more about SharePoint thresholds here.
SharePoint is not the easiest technology to setup and it truly requires a team of professionals to oversee the deployment to avoid potential security or storage implications.
Even if you have potential SharePoint resources inhouse, it can always be worth having a second pair of eyes cast across your plans to ensure that everything is water tight.
Valto provide SharePoint services from right at the beginning of your projects such as requirements gathering, user stories and designs, we offer all levels of SharePoint Help and unrivalled SharePoint Support.
All the way through to the development, testing, adoption and training of your new modern SharePoint intranet.
If you have any questions or require assistance please get in touch via the forms on this page.
If you are getting started with SharePoint and rolling out to your organisation, you might find that any colleagues with experiences of using SharePoint in the past has a negative opinion about SharePoint.
This is because older versions of SharePoint such as:
All use SharePoint classic experience which is known for having terrible user interfaces and not at all user friendly.
However, Microsoft have since released their new Modern SharePoint experience, which will turn round the reputation of the SharePoint user interface.
Legacy (Old) versions of SharePoint are known as ‘Classic SharePoint experience’. This is what has given SharePoint a bad reputation in the past.
It was often clunky, poorly laid out and did not look like an appealing portal to interact with.
However, Microsoft have released in recent years a new Modern SharePoint experience which is fantastic.
This has not only made the SharePoint intranets look great, it also makes it run much faster and smoother.
Another of our favourite intranet solutions is a expense request PowerApp that allows users to scan receipts and submit them for approval.
Just like all of the products contained in Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online gets frequent updates with new features.
The below are extracts from Microsoft’s SharePoint feature roadmap that are upcoming in 2022.
We are very excited to see how these new features are going to benefit our customers SharePoint intranets.
The ability to be able to customise the command bar within SharePoint Online will be very useful.
We have helped customers customise their SharePoint forms using JSON based language. However, also being able to control what buttons are available on the command bar will be very useful for customising the user experience. Where previously this would only be possible with SPFX extensions.
You may already be aware that SharePoint 2010 designer workflows have already been decommissioned from SharePoint Online.
It will not be long before SharePoint 2013 designer workflows follow the same path.
We are very excited to see that Microsoft are going to provide new ways to migrate your workflows into their new workflow engine known as Power Automate.
You can read more about replacing SharePoint 2010 workflows by clicking here.
SharePoint Online has already got a quick charts web part that can easily pull data from SharePoint lists to create a quick visual chart.
However, Microsoft have also announced that the quick chart web part will also be able to interact with document libraries.
We hope that this will allow users to quickly create visual dashboards of documents.
This may show a total amount of documents of a certain type, approval status, process stage or category that has been tagged against the document.
You might be asking yourself some of these questions below. However, if we have not answered all of your questions or if there is anything else you are unsure of please contact us using the form on this page.
The price of the SharePoint Online is included in many different license plans. You can find full details by visiting Microsoft’s SharePoint Pricing.
You can read all about SharePoint Online as a product directly on the Microsoft website by visiting SharePoint Online. However, if you require any assistance getting starting with SharePoint online, get in touch with us today via a form on this page.
Often our clients come to us because they are already using competitor products such as DropBox, WeTransfer, box, Confluence, Huddle, or Google G Suite and are looking to migrate into SharePoint Online.
Each competitor above will have their own pros and cons just like with SharePoint Online.
However, for typically the competitors that are listed above are used by much smaller businesses. Once a business starts to scale these products are no longer fit for purpose.
Businesses and charitable organisations of all shapes and sectors use SharePoint for different purposes.
Often in medium, large or enterprise sized organisations different departments will have ownership for separate areas of the Modern SharePoint Intranet.
The Marketing department may wish to have an approved image library that allows colleagues to collect branded materials.
A Finance department may wish to provide the organisation a site to access key documents such as the latest expense request form.
If your organisation is getting started with SharePoint or potentially already using it but struggling, Valto are here to help.
We can provide support to you directly from our support desk or provide training to your existing team to upskill them allowing them to support themselves.
I hope you found this article useful, if you are interested in getting some assistance with SharePoint Online, please feel free to contact me with any questions using our contact us form.
Solutions Architect
What makes Microsoft Office 365 so popular?
Dougie Wood
