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Switching to SharePoint

Most organizations have one central place for storing a lot of sensitive information. Some offices save documents to personal or work computers, or somewhere else on their servers. Others, including myself, rely on SharePoint for information saving and sharing.

If you’ve ever worked in Office 365 or Microsoft 365 you may be familiar with SharePoint or used it at least one before. It is a collaboration platform that allows teams to create websites and provides features that make it easier for groups to work well together. So, while OneDrive is used to store and share an individual’s work, SharePoint is setup by a company to use for sharing information with the appropriate people in each department. It is an amazing central hub where you’re able to build useful tools for your organization.

How work is accessed and stored in SharePoint

Since SharePoint lives on a server its users can access its content through an online browser or through the cloud (as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription) on their computer, tablet, or mobile device.

I personally like to think of SharePoint as the file and management system of Microsoft 365. It is made up of websites and allows you to create as many page sites as you want (many pages are created for separate departments). Inside each site there are two areas where you store information 1) libraries and 2) lists. Libraries are used to store documents created in Word, videos, images and smaller files. Lists are used to store large amounts of data that typically comes in a list form, like an excel spreadsheet.


How SharePoint improves collaboration

Aside from providing the ability to host web content and create websites, SharePoint is used primarily for storing documents and file-sharing. It is designed to allow individuals to create workflows and automate tasks to stay organized and save time. It also integrates with other Microsoft 365 applications like Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, to make syncing information quick and convenient. And, since so much content is stored in SharePoint, you can find exactly what you need in seconds when using the search function.

Having used SharePoint now for a few months, I’ll say it is a very user-friendly platform with numerous features to make you work smarter and faster. I’m a huge fan of short-cuts and often access SharePoint through a simple click in Teams, OneDrive, and OneNote. It’s reliable and makes team collaboration and document sharing easy (especially as you work remotely). It syncs with all the other applications I consistently work with, keeps my files organized, and can be accessed from anywhere, on any device. For these reasons alone, there’s really no reason not to switch over to SharePoint.

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