What Can a SharePoint Intranet Do for My Business?

A more correct way to rephrase that question may be, "What do you want a SharePoint intranet to do for your business?"

According to Microsoft research, nearly 80% of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint but their use cases differ. SharePoint, in conjunction with the Office 365 suite, is an extremely powerful set of applications that can be configured to do pretty much anything you want. Which is what many of these deep-pocketed Fortune 500 companies have done—custom developed a SharePoint Intranet to do just what they like. But I since most of us don't have limitless budgets, what can SharePoint do for your business?

High-level, SharePoint is a browser-based platform—a backend system that unites your employees so they can easily share, organize, collaborate, discover and connect anywhere, at anytime and on any device of their choosing. Used by more than 160 million users and 75,000 organizations worldwide, SharePoint is hands down the leading choice for your companies secure intranet.

Here's why...

Keeps You & Your Business Organized

In 2015 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data was created on the daily. We live in a time in which knowledge workers are producing information at rapid pace making it vital to keep documents organized, up-to-date and accessible. In fact, research shows that businesses lose up to $5000 per employee annually on work duplication, simply due to the fact that knowledge workers are not aware that the information already exists.

Document Management in your SharePoint Intranet will ensure you can intuitively find, manage and control your mission critical documents. This can be achieved via a designated document portal and/or departmental pages that provide the documents, policies or procedures they want you to access.

Makes it Easier to Collaborate & Communicate

Just as easy as it is to find the documents you need, it is easy to manage who can access and edit them. When we work with clients who want to move from SharePoint On-premise to SharePoint Online, it often takes them months to figure out which documents need to be moved over. Why? Simply because there are so many iterations and versions of a single document.

Within your document portal, you have detailed tracking of who made what change when, so you are accessing the most current and audited version.

Your SharePoint Intranet also provides you with simple content authoring so your department can share news organization-wide, or targeted to certain audiences. This makes it easy to communicate important announcements to large groups, sans the pesky reply-all emails.

Makes it Simple to Connect

This is especially true for large organizations, or companies spread across multiple offices. Or even more commonly, businesses that employ remote workers. Knowing who knows what in your organization, and whom are the subject matter experts, will ensure that your knowledge workers can connect and collaborate to create innovate work.

A social directory in your SharePoint Intranet, will provide your people with the opportunity to share their work and update their profile with new skills, accomplishments and fun facts about themselves. Social features allow others in your organization to follow employee feeds to receive notifications on their recent activity. Users can also like, share and comment on content their colleagues create.

Makes it Fast to Discover Content

Imagine a world where the documents you need to see appear, before your co-workers know you need to see them. Well, lucky for you, that day has arrived. There are a few ways your SharePoint Intranet will do this for you.

The first being your document portal, where machine learning technology predicts the content that is most relevant to you. The second way is through deliberate content targeting by the authors of the content. You have the option to publish news stories to audiences of your choosing—locations, positions, departments or groups. The third way is through advanced search which allows you two quickly locate what you're looking for.

The net-net...a SharePoint Intranet will make your organization run that much better. It will remove bottlenecks, decrease inefficiencies and help your team operate like a Fortune 500 enterprise.