31 May, 2014
Technology
SharePoint 2013 is defining a new way to work together with a simplified user experience and enhanced social capabilities, which make it easier to share ideas and keep up to date with what your colleagues are working on. The most exciting areas for improvement are SharePoint apps, search and social & collaboration, cloud, web content management, enterprise content management. It introduces new ways to share, sync, communicate and organize people and content within your organization.
SharePoint Server 2013 has been optimized for the way people work, providing people with a familiar, consistent view of information, collaboration, and process, and IT with a comprehensive, easily-managed and integrated platform to meet the needs of the business.
One of the big new features of SharePoint 2013 is “apps” and the “app store”. Microsoft defines SharePoint apps as: “Apps for SharePoint are self-contained pieces of functionality that extend the capabilities of a SharePoint website”.
With Office and SharePoint 2013, you can now build a new class of apps that extend and personalize the way we create and consume information. Build apps with your existing skills, using familiar languages and your favorite web development tools. Use any hosting services to run and deploy your app. The possibilities are limitless.
Community sites in SharePoint 2013 provide an entire site focused around organizing, conversations and encouraging users to participate. Users can join or leave a community as they wish.
Search performs full-text indexing of all the words contained in the documents you store on your network drive or in SharePoint Avoid Costly Mistakes with Contracts and Documents Document Management features like Version Control and Audit Trail allow teams to work together and avoid costly mistakes (e.g. sending a customer the wrong version of a document)
Use Wikis to easily create, maintain, and locate best practices and standard operating procedures Improve Team Collaboration and Communication: Establish an Intranet Portal that is tailored to fit your organization structure and business processes
Leverage Outlook-integrated Tasks, Alerts and Notifications to track team progress Improve Business Processes: Use Workflow Automation and Online eForms to streamline business processes
Take advantage of at-a-glance SharePoint Dashboards that provide a holistic view of business KPIs
Adjust and track employee performance KPIs to motivate employees to achieve company, department, and individual goals SharePoint is ideal for internal collaboration, as well as sharing information with external customers and vendors. Contact E-Square to get help figuring out if your organization would benefit from using SharePoint.
Making good decisions is not always just about good judgment or experience. It’s also about collecting and making sense of lots of data. That’s where Power Pivot comes in: it lets you easily combine massive amounts of data from multiple sources and build sophisticated models out of it. But data alone isn’t enough—it needs to be expressed clearly to make a powerful impact on people. That’s what Power View is for. It lets you explore, visualize, and present data in compelling ways, and create exciting dashboards that you can quickly share with others in SharePoint. Now people can easily dig into your data to make great decisions and new discoveries.
Things always seem to work out better when you find the right people for the job. The problem is: how do you find the right people without wasting lots of time tracking them down? SharePoint solves this problem. It gives you a single place to connect with experts across your organization, whether they’re in the office down the hall or on the other side of the globe. Now, you can quickly get the answers and information you need to make the right decisions, avoid reinventing the wheel, and improve your work.
Your company has a unique story, but like any great tale, it needs people to make it come alive. How do you get your employees excited about your vision? How do you get them talking about ideas… and talking to each other? Yammer makes it easy to keep everyone engaged. It’s a one-stop shop where people can find the latest news and information. It can be a great place for people to have live discussions, give real-time feedback, and share experiences. It’s like a “social glue” that keeps your employees and your vision moving forward together.
First days are stressful—for both new employees and the HR department. There’s a lot to learn and a lot to tell. Where do you begin? SharePoint can be the hub for everything that a new hire needs on its first day, and beyond. You can make it easier for people to connect with their peers or mentors, understand the business, and ramp up rapidly. You can take advantage of automatic task routing and use forms built right into your site, leading to less paperwork and faster completion. Better processes, less time, smoother onboarding. What’s there to stress about?
Your knowledge doesn’t have to be limited to the people in your immediate circle. SharePoint lets you share what you know with as many people as you want, whether they’re in your department or in another country. So don’t let your good ideas, valuable experience, and expert knowledge go to waste. You can capture and organize best practices, organize them however you need to, and refine them with your peers. Now people in your organization can easily discover what you know. And sharing works both ways, too. It’s just as easy for you to discover other groups’ best practices.
Do you ever wish you could improve your business processes and help people save time? With SharePoint you can. For example, automating recurring approval or review processes is easy and doesn’t take much time with built-in workflows. With Visio you can work with others to design and model processes that run in SharePoint. Once processes are in place, you can keep an eye on how well they’re performing for your team, department, or the entire organization. Whenever you need to you can refine your processes or create reports from them.
People want to find what they need right away without digging around or being distracted by irrelevant content. SharePoint can help you make your customers and partners happy by giving them what they really want—relevant information, recommendations, and insights into their data. With SharePoint, you can build either simple and dedicated portals or public-facing websites so that your customers and partners get what they need.
People expect the same experience no matter how they access your site. To make sure they get it, SharePoint makes it possible for you to deliver a consistent, unified digital experience on laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Not only are your SharePoint sites accessible from any device, but they also deliver targeted, highly relevant content and personalized recommendations to your audience around the globe. Building a global brand is now easier than ever, and SharePoint also helps you stay in compliance with copyright and other legal requirements by ensuring consistency across all of your sites.
Deals are won and lost depending on how closely marketing and sales teams are aligned. That’s how important communication is and that’s why SharePoint gives people a better way to stay in sync. SharePoint is the place where sales representatives can access the most up-to-date marketing information, even when on the road, so that messaging is consistent. It’s also where sales and marketing teams can have conversations, share ideas, and refine content together. Best of all, they can share best practices and knowledge on customers, competitors, or sales processes so they can act on new opportunities and close deals more quickly.
Crunching the numbers doesn’t have to be difficult. SharePoint lets you gather a lot of information from different people and different departments into a single spreadsheet. Best of all, you can work with more than one person—even your whole team if you want—on the same spreadsheet at the same time. Crunching the numbers together doesn’t just make your life easier, but it also helps boost productivity and can lead to more insights that can be easily shared with anyone in your organization.
Trying to make sense of all the rules, laws, and regulations you need to follow is hard enough without retrofitting your whole IT infrastructure to comply with them. You won’t run into this problem with SharePoint because it’s built to make compliance easy and straightforward. In fact, with SharePoint you can automate many of the processes for managing, protecting, and preserving critical data, and even create retention schedules to manage the entire life cycle of your organization’s digital assets. If you ever need to respond quickly to litigation or audits, you can use self-service eDiscovery to help get what you need immediately without involving IT.
SharePoint can help you take your IT support beyond the telephone—way beyond. Think of it as a virtual helpdesk. A one-stop shop where people can get in touch with IT, browse through a shared knowledge base, and submit ticket requests to get help. The result? Quicker answers to common problems. Better system maintenance with regular health checks. And faster, more focused conversations between people and IT—all without ever being placed on hold.
It’s a common dilemma: How do you strike a balance between the needs of IT and the needs of users? IT needs centralized control over security and compliance to better manage risks. People want more flexibility in SharePoint to work together. So who’s right? With SharePoint, everyone’s right. IT can make SharePoint more open and provide a safety net so that people’s sites comply with IT controls, permissions, and policies. It’s a win-win situation.
Embracing the Future – Harnessing the Power of Generative AI in Business
Six Steps to Successfully Integrate Generative AI into Your Business
Understanding Generative AI and the Emerging Landscape: How businesses need to embrace.
[recaptcha]