For me, SharePoint is the convergence of all the tools one would ever need in a small business or office environment to efficiently and effectively deliver the exact results that are needed from any number of scenarios. Remember back in the day what word processing was one program (WordPerfect), spreadsheet (Lotus 123) another, graphics generator another, and presentation program yet another. To those of us who lived in that world, whether on the end user or the back office support side, using these tools with any level of consistency was indeed a great challenge. Today, SharePoint makes it possible for all these different and diverse needs to come together within a seamless web interface; seamlessly integrating all these programs and utilities into a personal efficiency workspace. At its core, SharePoint is a Microsoft tool that integrates virtually all their products, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, SQL, Visio, Outlook and even Paint into a single product that enables all of them to intelligently speak to each other. And with a little wrangling even a non techie person can create an incredibly efficient workspace.
What can you do with SharePoint?
For most people, this is the only question that matters so here goes.
Imagine
that you work in an environment where many people work on developing documents that ultimately need to be finalized and approved by one person. Well, SharePoint can help you with that. Since Word is tightly integrated with SharePoint, you can create your document, load it up to your SharePoint portal, send a link to your reviewers and each of them can access the document, make their updates; even all at the same time. When they're done, you can just grab your final document, PDF it and viola; done.
Maybe you work in a fast pace environment with lots and lots of mini projects and you need a task list to simply keep track of your project activities; SharePoint can do that too. Right out of the box you get a built in task list that allows you to create tasks and assign them to your team. They'll even be notified based on your due dates.
Your share drive is a hornet's nest. You can never find anything there and when you do find what you're looking for, there are multiple copies; sometimes five or six. Well, SharePoint can help you with that too. You can move all you documents into SharePoint and tag them intelligently so that even a caveman can find them. Best yet, all your documents will are searchable in SharePoint so finding them will almost be like Googling.
So you are always collecting information from people but the information you collect is all over the place; email, yellow stickies, excel spreadsheets, your (not so smart) phone, dinner napkins. With a SharePoint you can quickly create a list and a cute little web form to collect and store all this vital information in a single location.
No wonder SharePoint has become so popular right?
In a sense, anything that you do today that has to do with data/information, documentation, process tracking, projects, communication, newsletters, announcements, calendars, photo and video storage, can be accommodated with the right SharePoint solution. These are just a few highlights of what's possible with SharePoint. Be sure to come back and see what other gems await your arrival.
Here are a couple of Tutorials:
- List Tutorial
- Grouping Tutorial
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