Modern business users want tools that make them more productive and engaged. Office 365 is considered one such tool which is constantly evolving and expanding rapidly, moving towards Microsoft’s vision of the one-stop online-productivity hub. Office 365 is a cloud environment suite which comes with SharePoint online giving a leverage of collaborating and communicating effectively.
Way back SharePoint was launched as an application for document management. Slowly it has transformed into document management and records management alongside web content and portals. SharePoint has evolved over the years into a robust collaboration and content management platform. With just a web browser (Internet explorer, chrome or Firefox), you can use SharePoint as a secure place to store, organize and share information which can be accessed from any device.
Recent development in SharePoint platform is, of course, the move to the cloud as part of Office 365. Offering more flexibility and portability than on-premises instalments, SharePoint Online has seen mass adoption. It seems every business has either moved or is contemplating a move to the cloud, which has led Office 365 to become Microsoft’s fastest-growing commercial product in the company’s history.
Here are the 6 reasons why we should start using SharePoint Online:
Managing external user access is much easier:
With SharePoint Online, granting external user access has become much easier. Users can share sites, folders, and individual documents with anyone, who has a Microsoft Account linked to their corporate e-mail address. We can also generate Guest Links, which allow Read or Edit permissions to be granted without requiring authentication while allowing the Guest Links to be revoked at any time.
Hybrid environment:
Some organizations choose to use a hybrid cloud environment, in which highly customized and secure information remains on-premises, while everyday collaboration needs to be moved to the cloud.
Improvements to OneDrive for Business:
OneDrive for Business is a powerful place to create and collaborate files. Using OneDrive for Business, an individual can create a document, easily share it with internal and external users to get ideas, feedback, and add expertise to the document. Essentially this is your “My Documents” folder in the cloud. When a document is ready to publish, we have featured in OneDrive for Business which allows you to move/copy the document to a SharePoint team site for greater consumption. Also, the new “Sync client” feature lets you sync files from your OneDrive for Business and SharePoint sites, and the new OneDrive app offers a mobile-friendly experience as well.
Features that you will never get On Premise:
- Microsoft Graph – Get valuable insights and intelligence about the data.
- Delve – Discover and organize the information that’s likely to be most interesting.
- Flow – a workflow management tool.
- Power Apps – Use SharePoint lists and other office 365 data to create apps.
Stay up to date, always:
The online version users are privileged to get early updates on new releases upgrades than those who use SharePoint On-Premises. Moreover, some features might not even be available for the on-premises version at all.
Cost Control:
Many large organizations want flexible ways to bring collaboration solutions and functions to more of their workforce while reducing the overall cost of the infrastructure. The license-based SharePoint Online helps manage these costs. You could use inexpensive, limited licenses for some roles in your organization, based on the arrangements you make with your Microsoft rep, to keep costs down.
SharePoint online migration is a big endeavor which can bring lots of positive changes to the way enterprises collaborates. Choose the right way to make the best out of this most crucial step.
