SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that incorporates Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, it has come a long way, from a stripped-back document manager to aacollaboration, file accommodation, and content management powerhouse. The product is highly configurable and its usage fluctuates substantially among other organizations.
It lets user acquire internal sites to create document libraries & share documents which can be shared across your company whether your employees work inside an office or remotely, through the cloud. Microsoft states that SharePoint has 190 million users among 200,000 customer organizations.
Specifics about SharePoint
Before jumping into particular tips, make sure that the basics are done. Create a simple site by adding text, video, images, and other custom content using SharePoint's site editor. Here are some activities that you can perform as a SharePoint user.
Collaborate Office Documents
It is a tool that you can use for collaboration which tracks the situation of other users in the document and comprehends the changes as they happen. Multiple users can work on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations alongside without conflicting with one another.
Make and Share Site Templates
It provides a choice about how you modify your sites with logos, lists, workflows, etc. Build the perfect site for your organization and save those settings as a template. A template contains the basic framework of the website, i.e. its libraries, content, documents, and lists. Templates can be transferred to other SharePoint environments, can be opened in Visual Studio & uploaded and can be shared with particular users.
Create a Team Site with Exact Permissions
Sign in to Office 365 and track the creation wizard's instructions to build a team site. During the setup process, create group email lists to manage user access to the site. User access can be accessible to everyone in an organization or only selected groups.
Customization by SharePoint Views
Set up SharePoint views to acquire quick insight about specific columns of lists & libraries or build a more visually engaging style. It is similar to the view of the email inbox filter. You can add a drop-down menu, which tells who is working on what, or you can add a column displaying where you are during an item's life-cycle.
Add Files to Your SharePoint Instance
It is accessible in the cloud with SharePoint Online and confined with SharePoint Server.
SharePoint's drag-and-drop interface lets you upload documents easily from your computer. You can upload complete folders at once by using Microsoft's Edge browser that's fabricated into Windows to access SharePoint Online.
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Other Advanced functions
Set up alerts
SharePoint can be configured to send you a notification whenever a specific item in a library is changed or if anything in a library as whole changes. This is beneficial since you won't then have to go back and manually check each SharePoint site for changes. By using the "Alert Me" button given in the toolbar, alerts can be set up and will alert the user for the entire library or any particular item.
RSS feeds for external content
You can add content from external sources to your intranet sites by using SharePoint' web parts' toolbar, such as adding news and weather reports or information from industry-specific sites. It should be noted that SharePoint Online users will have to move to the 'classic' SharePoint instead of the new UX to use the RSS web part.
Tips to handle the basic SharePoint implementation
Document Library Structure
As collaboration using the Document Library has always been the main aspect of SharePoint, so the tips are:
- The use of folders should be avoided while designing the document library structure. Use it only when the files are less or for a small member team.
- Use metadata to store the document. Metadata properties aid us to filter the documents and provide easy access to files.
SharePoint Branding
To make a SharePoint site to be more appealing, the tips are:
- Fit the data of your SharePoint website in a single screen making it less scrollable.
- Modify HTML and CSS according to organization brand image and make changes only if required. Create the look and feel consistent across your site.
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Searching with SharePoint
Despite many features, users face a lot of awry for not finding the right documents when required. It's not that document is not available, but it's about teaching the users how to do an effective search.
- Use of the keywords 'OR,' 'AND,' 'NOT' to expand your search, or filter your search results.
- Use the double quotes to find the exact phrase in your search results.
- Use the wild card operator (*) to fetch words that start with a character string.
Keep the end-users engaged
- Conduct end-user training for the usage of organization SharePoint.
- Improve the branding of your SharePoint sites to draw more attention towards your site
- Rollout innovative features of SharePoint in your organization to keep your application up to date.
Integrate with the Microsoft Office Apps
With SharePoint 2013 and Office 365, Microsoft has invested in integrating the SharePoint with Office products i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Microsoft has launched a new app model architecture to improve the solutions in SharePoint to create a SharePoint Hosted, and Provider hosted apps.
- Use the SharePoint Hosted apps
- Use the provider-hosted apps to deal with a large amount of data and when to interact with the external systems.
How to Learn SharePoint
The SharePoint training course is a great way to complement the on-the-job experience. As a beginner, a training course can help with basic SharePoint principles and tasks you can build on.
Suggested Course:
This 5-day course will provide you with the information and skills to plan and manage a Microsoft SharePoint 2016 environment. The course is about how to deploy, administer, & troubleshoot your SharePoint environment. This course provides guidelines and best practices that help you adjust your SharePoint deployment. The salary for a Microsoft SharePoint Administrator is approximately $115,000 per year.
By learning SharePoint and introducing skills in your organization can help improve efficiency for individuals and teams and multiply your value to the business. This SharePoint course can provide aid to every SharePoint user
Talk to our experts for further guidance on how you can get expertise on SharePoint administration