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For years SharePoint has been known as a tool to improve communication and collaboration. Most people are familiar with sharing and versioning documents, checking out, editing, then checking back in. This has always given SharePoint a leg up over the old “shared drive” approach and is how SharePoint achieved a foothold in many organizations (that and the foundation edition is free with Windows).

Here are some uses for Microsoft SharePoint that you might not have thought about:

• Document and Records Management

Many people see that you can store and search for documents in a document library but there doesn’t seem to be much structure, taxonomy, or governance to these documents. This is certainly no longer the case. With the introduction of SharePoint 2013 Records Center, you can now apply retention policies to your content types and enforce your Document Management and Retention policies. Additionally, document libraries can hold many more documents than in previous versions of SharePoint.

• Application Development

SharePoint has always allowed for the development and integration of custom application using core SharePoint features utilizing .Net, ASP.Net, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These capabilities continue to exist with the added dimension of developing SharePoint Add-ins that take advantage of standard web technologies and that can extend on-premise as well as hosted SharePoint environments. This concept is further expanded in SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 allowing for faster development and easier deployment to a wider audience.

• Data Modeling and Business Intelligence

Along with complete integration into the Microsoft SQL Data Warehouse stack, SharePoint offers Power View as an interface for Data Modeling. Power View is an interactive data exploration, visualization and presentation experience that allows for ad-hoc reporting. Data, rich graphics and visualization tools can be included in easy-to-build reports that can then be published for others to use, or as a baseline for additional modeling.

• Search

SharePoint Enterprise Search is a powerful tool for finding data both inside and outside of SharePoint. Internal content can be searched and refined through new and powerful web parts. Content outside of SharePoint can now be indexed and referenced within search results allowing for a true enterprise search feature.

• Mobile Optimization

SharePoint automatically generates a mobile friendly version of every page for phone and tablet users. The Mobile Browser View feature allows for expansion to tablet and smartphone devices with little effort required from developers or system administrators.
Some of these capabilities have been around for a while but just aren’t as well known by SharePoint users. Ask your IT department about these features or contact us and we can help you maximize your SharePoint experience.