Collaboration tools are in high demand by businesses across markets as a way to boost productivity and manage information. Companies use collaboration tools to increase teamwork and ease communication efforts. This reduces the risk of bottlenecks in a workflow process where only one employee or department is able to perform a task due to a lack of shared expertise, shared tools or shared goals.
SharePoint has distinguished itself as a business-enhancing collaboration and information management tool. More and more companies are even opting for third party add-ons to SharePoint to enhance functionality and reap the most business benefit. SharePoint allows employees to share ideas, manage documents, publish expertise, and efficiently find the information they need. As businesses strive to connect their departments, tools like SharePoint have become a necessity.
Joe Shepley, a collaboration and content management business consultant, warns against thinking of collaboration as “something organic and spontaneous.” Collaboration for collaboration’s sake does little to promote business goals or efficiency. Successful collaboration, which encourages innovation and growth, needs structure and facilitation to be productive. Without the right incentives for your employees to use SharePoint, such as appropriate features and useful add-ons, installation is not going to produce the hoped-for returns on investment.
Implementing a complicated communication and collaboration environment, which is supposed to change and alter many of the ways employees complete their day-to-day tasks, requires particular focus on making sure the technology meets all of your company’s needs. If you predict that most employees will need to contact others quickly and efficiently to work on the projects shared through SharePoint, for example, then using SharePoint without an integrated email or chat client may not produce sought-after results.
The easiest way to customize SharePoint for your company is to find add-ons and features which cater directly to what you would like to do with SharePoint. For example, if your company would like to streamline the viewing of documents uploaded to SharePoint, an integrated document viewer reduces lags in efficiency, as employees no longer have to load another program in order to view documents. Check out Prizm Content Connect’s SharePoint Viewer as an example. Or, if your company would like to be sure that all documents are uploaded to SharePoint in an easily accessible, standardized format (say, PDF), a converter tool would be right up your alley. There are many possibilities, with more being created every day to bridge the gaps in SharePoint’s feature set.
For more information on the benefits of adding features to SharePoint, download the whitepaper The Role of Collaboration Tools for SharePoint.
Why do you use, or not use, SharePoint in your company? Thinking about switching to SharePoint and have questions, comments or concerns related to the adjustment? Share below in the comments!
