6 benefits of SharePoint 2019

Tools like SharePoint 2019 can take away the pain of collaborating and easily do things that were difficult before.

If you have worked in a company, you know how it feels when you start a new project. You look for team members, hold meetings and the emails start flying. Pretty soon, a few important documents emerge, and those documents get passed around. Within a couple of weeks, they become hundreds of emails and a couple of dozen phone calls. 

People become overwhelmed. Everyone’s inbox is filled with slightly different versions of the same document, and you are never sure if you have the latest version.

Next, it’s impossible for you to see a complete snapshot of the project. Everything is spread across multiple computers and the team has different information depending on who they talk to.

Lastly, the project will impact other projects, there is no way to connect them. As a result, you spend valuable time trying to coordinate with other project leads and stakeholders.

What is SharePoint?

Most people find it hard to wrap their head around SharePoint and you might be one of them. You’ve been playing with SharePoint for a while, and you don’t really get it yet. You’re waiting for that one simple description, that one simple sentence that will suddenly make it all make sense. Well, you won’t get that one sentence from me because SharePoint is not a simple thing to explain.

That’s because SharePoint is not one thing. It is not a program, it’s a platform. SharePoint is a collection of many distinct products and technologies all wrapped up and given a name. From one perspective learning SharePoint is like learning Microsoft Office. You don’t really learn office, you learn word, then you learn excel then outlook and so on. In the same way you don’t just learn SharePoint, it’s a massive set of solutions of different things you can do with this platform and with every version of SharePoint, Microsoft has added more to it. When you learn the different things, it does, you’ll choose your own combinations, the things that are meaningful to you.

What Doest SharePoint Do?

Microsoft SharePoint is an online platform spread among small and large companies. It creates a common online internet page collecting news, documents, resources and lists to edit and share between people and groups, within your organization or external. It allows you to have deep control on sensitive information and communication; advanced file versioning and knowledge sharing through blogs and notebooks.

Microsoft talked about SharePoint as having six different areas:

• Sites
• Communities
• Content
• Search
• Insights
• Composites

I’d like to give you my version of this.

1. Sites: SharePoint makes websites.

It’s a massive website engine. You tell SharePoint, I need a website. Bang! You have one. Make another. Bang! You have another. You don’t need special programs. You don’t need to be a web designer. You don’t need to be a programmer.

What are those websites? One might be a website for you. Another could be a website for your team. Another could be a website for your company. You might be involved in creating these websites or you might just use SharePoint websites made by other people. But SharePoint makes websites. Most websites that SharePoint makes are designed for you to be a contributor; to change them, to edit them, to join it, and that takes us to the second principle; Communities.

2. Communities: SharePoint helps you work with other people.

The idea of collaboration is built into this thing. That just you and one other person working on a word document at the same time. SharePoint can let you do that. You need a companywide knowledge base or Wikipedia easily editable by a hundred people; SharePoint can do that too. It can give you shared calendars, shared task list, discussion boards. It keeps track of an immense amount of content and can let you know when things change.

3. Content: SharePoint gives you a place to put your stuff.

You can take all the content that makes up your organization's day to day operations; documents, presentations, spreadsheets, agendas, images, audio, video, take all of it and upload it on SharePoint. Instead of emailing back and forth to people, you put it all into SharePoint.

4. Search: SharePoint lets you find your stuff.

It has a massive, super smart search engine built into it. It’s an excellent, complex search engine, that not only allows you to search your content in multiple ways, but it will also help you search people, and it will do this securely so that no one gets access to anything that they shouldn’t.

5. Insights: SharePoint helps you bring all your information together, to understand it better.

It helps you organize and make sense of immense amounts of content. Taking various kinds of things and presenting it in a way that makes sense.

6. Composites: SharePoint helps you build on top of itself.

No program, no platform, no operating system can know exactly what you need. So, SharePoint has amazing capabilities to be extended and customized. Using SharePoint designer and Visio, you can build custom workflows without code.

SharePoint is accessible online with your web browser from both Windows and Mac platform and available in three main versions:

1) SharePoint Online:

It is the most common solution for smaller businesses, hosting internet sites on Microsoft servers

2) SharePoint Server:

It is the most complete version with completely customizable internet addresses and pages hosted on local private servers.

3) SharePoint App:

It is a free version which allows you to access all SharePoint sites directly from smartphones.

How to install SharePoint 2019

The public preview of SharePoint 2019 was released in July 2018.

Here is how to install it.

• Uninstall any previous server of SharePoint
• Install Sequel Server 2017. You need it up and running to have access to data base before configuring SharePoint 2019
• Go to Microsoft website to download SharePoint 2019
• Install prerequisite installer
• Run prerequisite installer 2019 as an administrator
• Once installed, restart your system
• Install SharePoint 2019 by running the setup
• Once installed, configure it.

SharePoint Online 2019

You can obtain this version with any SharePoint plan or with any Office 365 subscription.

To access your SharePoint site, just enter inside the head office website and log in. go to SharePoint Online App to enter inside your main internet page. This is hosted on a Microsoft server with your organization name as the part of the address and sharepoint.com as domain unless you have bought a custom one.

The main page is divided into two parts.:

On the left you have the quick sites list, including the starred ones you are following and the most recent ones you have visited.

On the right you have a big preview on the latest news posted on your SharePoint sites and at the bottom all the sites you have visited often.

You can also use the search in the top left corner to look for any interesting site or page.

Basic structure of SharePoint intranet

This intranet is made by several independent sites, collecting pages, news, documents, and anything you need to share inside your organization. These sites can also use subsites showing other content with dedicated options.

In addition, you have two main types of sites:

The Communication Sites

They have a modern visual layout used to communicate and share news and events with a large audience.

By default, your intranet includes just a single Communication site which is your home page. You can create a new site by going to ‘Chose a site’ and pick the kind of site to use. You can customize and share this site to your will.

The Team Sites

These can be either public or private and are used to share information and make collaborations on projects between all the users approved on a defined Office 365 group chosen for such Team site.

Team site allows to get major control on privacy and permission on the site content. This is recommended for private groups working together that need to share sensitive projects and documents.

When creating a Team site, you automatically create a Group email address associated to it that grants access to your new Team site content.

SharePoint Hybrid

SharePoint hybrid is like an extended service topology that spans on-premises SharePoint and integrated Office 365 collaboration capabilities, such as SharePoint Online, Yammer, and One Drive for Business. One can extend Datacenter into Azure to host servers and custom applications. Because Office 365 does not allow custom applications to be installed on it. Azure is available from an IaaS and PaaS tier to host those applications. SharePoint Online offers real-time document Collaboration authoring in the Cloud, SharePoint site hosting, records Management, interfacing Data from a remote source, and user profile Management. IT professionals familiar with SharePoint on-premises will appreciate the Cloud-integration investments that Microsoft has made for SharePoint Server 2016.

Removing The File Redundancy Issue

Companies have a file redundancy issue because they can easily lose files and sharing them can be a hassle. Since this is a tool for online document sharing and editing, once you put the document in there it will stay in that place for an exceptionally long time. The good thing is that you eliminate file redundancy right off the bat, and you can focus on growing your business and taking it to the next level in a meaningful and professional manner.

Thanks to Microsoft 365 you will have no problem eliminating all these problems naturally. The entire environment is designed to evolve along with your business and requirements. Even if multiple companies use SharePoint, no environment will look the same. It’s the sheer adaptability and quality offered by SharePoint and Microsoft 365 that really shines in this situation. You do need to give it a shot and the results can be extremely impressive. Plus, the migration process is extremely fast if you use a certified partner.

Why is Document Version Control Important?

SharePoint has a unique feature in the form of document version control. It keeps not only the current version of your document, but also the previous ones. With help from this feature, you can easily revert to an outdated version if someone deleted content by accident. On top of that, you can also see who made any change, something that does matter a lot in the business world.

SharePoint Best Practices For Team Collaboration Sites

There are lots of important things to keep in mind about SharePoint. One of the things is that you don’t have to worry about editing the document whenever you want. Even if someone else is already editing it, the tool supports simultaneous editing, and that solution can be extremely handy and reliable as you go along.

You can also use SharePoint to set tasks for your team. Normally that can be time-consuming since you must brief every person face-to-face. But with SharePoint you can eliminate that hassle and really focus on the things that matter the most. You need to be a team leader to set all those tasks for other people, but once you share them, it will be well worth the effort. Proper collaboration can take time and effort, but SharePoint makes this flawless and fun, which is what matters most.

Lastly, you can use SharePoint for things like shared calendars, notebooks, publishing or chatting with others. It’s an interesting, unique approach to business productivity systems and you will have no problem achieving remarkable results with this tool. It does work very well, it’s adaptable and adjustable and you will be extremely happy with the entire experience in that situation. This is a powerful computing tool, and it does integrate very well with cloud computing services. Used adequately, this can prove to provide an amazing advantage and you will be amazed with the great attention to detail and value that it can deliver. Rest assured that it will be well worth the effort if you integrate SharePoint in your business today!

Though for some organizations, the hybrid approach might be the first step in exploring Cloud functionality at their own pace. For other organizations that are making the transition to the Cloud; a hybrid environment can serve as an interim step to the end state, offering a gradual, controlled Migration. Other organizations might prefer a hybrid environment as the end state. And a perpetual topology to cater to the dynamically changing business and user Collaboration workloads.