SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service that allows seamless collaboration and unity across an organization, and it is a vital tool for the plethora of businesses that are transitioning to a hybrid workplace. It helps businesses organize content and can be integrated with a variety of applications. Although SharePoint Online is used by organizations around the globe, many businesses may not be familiar with the long list of its out-of-the-box features.
This article highlights the key features of SharePoint Online, so you will be equipped to fully optimize its out-of-the-box tools to suit the needs of your organization—and to ultimately create more collaboration between your employees and partners, save time, and reduce costs.
Intranet Sites
Your intranet site in SharePoint Online is one of the most vital features for your business. An intranet site reinforces your organization’s culture and keeps all employees informed and engaged about the news, information, events, and goals of your business. It isn’t enough to simply convey information to your employees through your intranet site; the goal is to ensure that when your employees are engaging with your intranet, they are experiencing the personality and voice of your business.
The customizability, scalability, content sharing, and collaboration of intranet sites in SharePoint Online accomplish all the above. You can integrate your intranet site with a variety of other applications, including Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, and it also offers interoperability with other sales and customer service platforms.
Extranet Sites
Extranet sites are a feature of SharePoint Online that allow businesses to share content with other partners and organizations. When it comes to granting external organizations access to your content management database, many businesses face a difficult challenge: it is important to restrict external partners from accessing unnecessary or confidential information, but this restriction may result in less collaborative potential with your partners.
Extranet sites conquer this challenge, allowing you to easily manage content that is accessible to your external partners, while also allowing integration of other SharePoint Online services like Microsoft Teams. This ensures that your content management in SharePoint Online does not inhibit the powers of B2B collaboration.
Team Sites
The collaborative spirit of SharePoint Online fully shines with its team sites. If you are looking to establish clear objects for team projects, allow access to content databases, encourage interaction between employees, or gain a deeper understanding of employee attitudes around projects, your team site in SharePoint Online is your go-to service. Employees will know exactly which projects are planned and the teams associated with each project, establishing more unity within your business as employees are able to visualize the “big picture” of your organization’s vision.
Project Sites
In SharePoint Online, project sites may be overlooked due to their similarity to team sites, but proper use of project sites can take it to the next level. While a team site promotes collaboration and interaction between employees, a project site details the specific tasks required for a project’s completion. Since you can assign a team to a project, it is important for a project summary to be on a separate site to avoid saturating the content in a team site. Project sites in SharePoint Online ensure that all pertinent information surrounding a project is only accessible to the teams assigned to those projects.
Elantis has extensive experience optimizing our clients’ processes and environments through best practices for enterprise content management, automation, business intelligence, and modern intranet solutions. In order help you optimize the use of Microsoft 365 tools in your organization, Elantis offers an assessment of your Microsoft 365 maturity (including a deep dive into assessing your SharePoint Online environment) along with a roadmap of recommendations.
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