Imagine that all valuable information in your company is conveniently stored, easy to manage, and always at your fingertips. This is where Microsoft SharePoint can help.

This compelling platform can enable any business to optimize workflow processes, improve the efficiency of working with documents, and improve the team’s overall efficiency. In this article, we used the expert help of the IT company Avenga’s professionals to explore six SharePoint features that allow your company to perform faster and more effectively.

Feature #1: Work and document management collaboration

Enterprises whose business activity is built with the help of sharepoint development services claim their workflows have acquired much more structure. SharePoint allows real-time, collaborative work on documents, versioning, adding metadata, and establishing storage policies. All users collaborate on one document in real-time, and changes by others are displayed as a pop-up. Moreover, many users need to trace all document changes, and Sharepoint offers incorporating the built-in version control for that. It further assists the user to go back to previous versions easily and to keep a complete log of changes. With metadata, the structuring of storage will become more accessible, and you will promptly find the necessary documents with extra information in the manner of tags, categories, and dates.

Feature #2: Business Process Automation:

To save your time and reduce the number of errors, you can automate routine activities using SharePoint Workflows and Power Automate. In this case, the tools allow automated creation processes that emanate from different actions, such as document approval, the sending of notifications, and the collection of data. You can design a complicated workflow process working by certain conditions and triggers.

Feature #3: Integration with Other Microsoft 365 Tools

The fact of integrating SharePoint with Teams, OneDrive, Power BI, and all other tools that come under the Microsoft 365 suite makes Sharepoint a unified space for working. Documents can be shared easily, data are analyzed, and the discussion does not have to wait for the comments made after the analysis is received. You save documents in OneDrive, discuss in Teams, analyze with Power BI, and then roll everything over one interface.

Feature #4: Security and Access Control

Modern companies dread data leakage and unauthorized access to confidential data. By using the features and capabilities of SharePoint, they can securely safeguard that data with multi-level security and, therefore, not fall prey to data leaks so easily. SharePoint offers a multilevel security approach and excellent access and user policies ranging from system setup level to file level. This includes setting up permissions on sites, documents, and libraries, multi-factor authentication, and access limitation by IP addresses and devices. The administrators get to easily manage permissions through managing user groups and security policy configuration.

Feature # 5: personalization and customization to fit business needs

SharePoint allows flexible platform customization to your business needs. You can easily brand the interface, design your web site, configure pages to your liking, and elegantly introduce elements of branding and visual profile. This flexibility makes SharePoint very easy when user needs are diverse—corporate portal, project management system, or internal site where employees can interact.

Feature #6: Mobile access

SharePoint provides mobile access. You can then collaborate on documents and share data from your phone or tablet. Essential data are accessible at all times. This ensures that employees are not out of touch and are constantly involved with business. Of course, this is especially relevant to mobile employees or those who are able to work from home well. Access is only a start, and everything that follows is simple and provides agility to the execution of any tasks. You can quickly respond to any request and make changes without being attached to the office workstation. With SharePoint mobile applications, you receive sufficient access and working capabilities just like you work from your PC. These tasks include viewing files, editing documents, managing tasks, or participating in team discussions—all thanks to a quite intuitive interface of the application, which makes the work on mobile devices simple and very effective.

Success stories

Many organizations and companies have increased business efficiency by using SharePoint. Let’s look at a few examples.

Cummins: Gaining efficiency in productivity and collaboration

Cummins is a global leader in delivering diesel engines. They opted for Office 365 and SharePoint to increase efficiency and empower collaboration among teams. By implementing SharePoint, they developed one single platform for document and project management. Moreover, they reduced time needed for information search and empowered collaboration among the employees. As a result, the solution led to a significant increase in team outputs, while the IT costs were reduced.

Bioverativ: employee portal

Bioverativ Inc. is a pharmaceutical company that wanted an efficient and convenient employee portal. To realize it, they created an easy-to-use portal via SharePoint, allowing their most essential information to be easily accessed and enabling the flow of information among the employees. The new portal also offers collaborative and management tools to work with documents, considerably improving the workflow.

T-Mobile: content management

T-Mobile´s content management system was created with the help of SharePoint, which integrated different internal processes and improved the departments’ collaboration. The new system helped to reduce failure rate and increase the accuracy of the routine work and information exchange. This improved the quality of customer service and optimized internal processes.

Aggreko, targeted intranet

One of the world’s leading providers of temporary power solutions, Aggreko, used SharePoint to make their internal communication more targeted through a superior intranet. Their new intranet gave employees fast access to the necessary information, enabled the employees to share documents, and coordinated their actions to achieve higher productivity and greater engagement.

As these examples show, SharePoint can assist companies in very different industries in enhancing internal processes, boosting efficiency, and promoting the collaboration of employees