Looking back at 2020, one can easily spot the changes it demanded of individuals and businesses. Most companies adopted remote working options with digital solutions like Microsoft 365. Companies that maintained documents and applications on-premise opted for cloud-based solutions to store, share, and collaborate. Over 78 million users opted for M365 in the last one year alone, taking the worldwide count of M365 users to over a whopping 250 million!

Interestingly, most organizations that have adopted M365 are either not aware or have not taken advantage of the various other apps and services (like SharePoint, Teams etc) that M365 has to offer besides the basic office tools like word, excel and outlook.

SharePoint benefits for M365 subscribers

While Microsoft 365 provides tools that makes it possible for employees to collaborate easily, its main attraction remains SharePoint – a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with the entire Microsoft Office & 365 suite. From storing files, lists, and videos to engaging sites, intranet portals, custom apps, and knowledge solutions—on the web, desktop, mobile, and increasingly, within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint has become one of the most popular enterprise-ready web applications. This platform can work as a centralized and secure space where organizations access, share and edit documents/information from any device.

Over the last few years, SharePoint has seen a considerable increase in its userbase and recorded a 100% YoY growth just in 2020, with over 200 million active users. With the growing demand for M365 and SharePoint solutions, Microsoft has heavily invested in making the application faster, better, and more secure with a new platform, storage, and experience architecture deployed across over 60 regional data centers catering to millions of requests per second and exabytes of data.

Some of the notable features of SharePoint include:

• Content management features to help organize and manage content using libraries, lists, metadata, records management, and retention policies
• Websites, team sites, portals to help collaborate on content, data, news, and updates
• External sharing of files and content with people both inside and outside the organization
• Mobile business apps to access intranets, team sites, and content on Android, iOS, and Windows devices
• Automate business processes by creating alerts and workflows
• Search functions that help surface relevant people and important content

How to get started with SharePoint?

SharePoint is available in two versions – On-premise and SharePoint Online. While the on-premise version is available as a stand alone product, SharePoint Online is a part of the cloud-based offering bundled with Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions. Users can access it “as a service” rather than setting up all the hardware on their premises.

Since SharePoint falls under the Microsoft Office 365 umbrella, it benefits from all the security features that come with it, including network security, access security, physical data centre security, data security, and file encryption. With an active M365 subscription plan, any user or organization can sign-in to SharePoint using their Microsoft office account. You just need to choose the SharePoint tile on the M365 home page and get started with the SharePoint journey. It’s as simple as that!

How can we help in your SharePoint journey?

Getting started with SharePoint is simple. However, to develop and design within SharePoint requires some level of expertise. Here’s where we can help! Often, M365 subscribers concentrate more on their business and miss out on several SharePoint features and how it can help them work better. The capabilities of SharePoint can help build valuable solutions that can streamline many business processes.

With over 13 years in SharePoint implementation and development, we have vast experience and expertise in creating enterprise solutions leveraging SharePoint. We have designed and developed portals and document management solutions that can serve as accelerators for faster implementation and adoption of SharePoint to digitize business processes. With our solutions and expertise, we can serve as the perfect partner for automating your business processes efficiently and cost-effectively.