There is a host of collaboration tools that prove to be helpful in running your business in a better way. But which one will work best for your business? Introduced by Microsoft in the early 2000s, SharePoint is one of the most popular solutions that power enterprise collaboration.
While SharePoint on-premises is still the most used deployment model of the platform, the cloud-based SharePoint Online keeps gaining popularity thanks to active promotion. So let’s see what makes SharePoint Online so attractive for organizations.
What is the place of SharePoint Online in the Office 365 suite?
Today, SharePoint Online exists not only as a stand-alone solution but also as a part of the Office 365 suite. Office 365 brings together not only well-known office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, etc.). It also embraces a variety of collaboration tools, including SharePoint Online, Yammer, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups.
In this collaboration diversity, SharePoint Online takes the deserved central place, because it enables organization-wide collaboration, supports document and workflow management, fosters corporate knowledge and innovation. Moreover, SharePoint can complement or even replace other Office 365 tools, especially when the latter aren’t able to cope with large volumes of collaboration-related content.
All in all, there are several reasons for SharePoint Online to become a rightful member of your enterprise software family.
Why stake on SharePoint Online?
It ensures a smooth transition from on-premises to cloud intranets. If you have been using an on-premises SharePoint intranet for a while, but consider switching to the cloud environment, SharePoint Online will be the best solution. It will allow you to benefit from all the cloud advantages while keeping the familiar SharePoint features.
It suits different collaboration scopes. It doesn’t matter how many employees you have – SharePoint is capable of handling collaboration on different scales. The ability to streamline employee-to-employee, team and departmental collaboration makes it the prime choice for any of your collaboration needs.
It supports various collaboration scenarios. Today, SharePoint Online provides well-known team sites and brand-new communication sites. You can use each type to support different teams’ and departments’ activities. At the same time, SharePoint Online sites can become the basis for your cloud-based intranet. Integrated with other collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams or Yammer, SharePoint sites will also support employees’ ongoing communication.
It enables secure content-oriented collaboration. As things stand now, SharePoint Online can be an optimal solution to manage various types of content. From usual documents to knowledge items, SharePoint offers a centralized location for organizational content. The solution will allow you to structure all the available content, make it easily searchable and reusable. At the same time, owing to the advanced security features, SharePoint administrators can control content flows so that any piece of sensitive information doesn’t cross organizational borders.
What about the pricing?
When SharePoint existed only as the on-premises platform, it was hardly affordable for smaller organizations due to impressive deployment and customization costs. SharePoint Online has finally changed this trend. Thanks to a flexible payment model, an organization of any size can benefit from the platform’s capabilities. To add more, SharePoint Online has already allowed many organizations all over the world to reduce their IT infrastructure costs and their efforts on SharePoint support.
Give it a try
While SharePoint Online offers a multitude of advantages, only you can decide if it suits your collaboration needs. Some organizations prefer not to switch to cloud solutions due to security concerns, so they are more likely to stay with their on-premises deployments. However, if you’re already on your way to cloud technologies, turn your attention to SharePoint Online and try it out as a stand-alone solution or as a part of Office 365 collaboration stack.
