Introducing new and improved SharePoint

Since its inception as an intranet portal for employees, Microsoft SharePoint has evolved to become more than just a document management tool in recent years.

Its latest iteration, SharePoint Online, is now part of Office 365 for Business and has been bolstered with a host of corporate social networking features that Microsoft picked up from its acquisition of the enterprise social network Yammer last year.

In addition, companies can now use a range of apps in SharePoint Online. The Access app, for instance, makes it easy to create an Access database to power a website.

In this overview, we take you through some noteworthy features in SharePoint Online.

Newsfeed

New to SharePoint Online is Newsfeed, a Facebook-style social networking feature that lets employees of an organisation view and "like" one another's status updates, share videos and comment on posts. Hash tags and @mentions are supported too.

In addition, you can track a document by following it.

SharePoint will then notify you when there are changes to that document. Microsoft has also built Newsfeed apps for Windows Phone and iOS devices that you can use to stay connected with colleagues.

OneNote integration

Microsoft OneNote is a great note-taker that project teams can use to record minutes of meetings and sketches or diagrams of ideas.

You can insert images, capture screenshots and even record voice annotations in OneNote notebooks.

With SharePoint, you can share these notebooks with others on your SharePoint team site, which is commonly used as an intranet site for colleagues to access documents related to a specific project.

Outlook integration

With Office 365 for Business, you can now connect your SharePoint site's calendar and contact list with Outlook. This is particularly useful if you spend a lot of time in Microsoft Outlook and want to see your team's calendar alongside your personal information.

Best of all, you can search and edit SharePoint content offline without an Internet connection and then synchronise the content with SharePoint once the connection is restored.

However, SharePoint calendars and contact lists are not enabled by default. You or the site administrator will need to install the Calendar and Contacts apps through SharePoint's Site Contents.

This brings us to SharePoint Online's next key enhancement: Apps.

Apps for SharePoint

With Apps for SharePoint, you can extend the capabilities of your team site beyond its basic role as a document repository.

One of its most useful apps is Access, which lets you create a simple database using Access 2013 and save it to the cloud. For instance, the database can be used to power a product catalogue that customers can browse on your website.

Another notable app is Issue Tracking. This lets you create a list of issues related to a project and prioritise efforts to resolve them.

For instance, a software development team could use this app to prioritise glitches in terms of severity and allocate more developers to work on the most serious ones that could derail the project.

If you have used Wikipedia, then you would appreciate its power in bringing people together to contribute to a specific topic. With the Wiki Page Library app for SharePoint, you can tap wikis in your organisation too.

Potential uses of wikis include brainstorming ideas, collaborating on designs, creating an instruction guide, gathering data from the field and tracking call centre inquiries.

SkyDrive Pro

All Office documents and OneNote notebooks are housed on SkyDrive, the underlying document storage service in Office 365 for Business. You can download and edit files on your personal SkyDrive storage, as well as files shared on your SharePoint team site.

But be sure to check out a document before you start editing it, so that others cannot make changes to the file while you are using it.

After the file is checked out, you can edit the file, close it, reopen it and even work with the file on your hard disk. Other users cannot change the file or see your changes until you check in the file.

Site templates

Microsoft has also made it easier to create a new SharePoint site than before. You start off by choosing a title and description of your site.

There is a slew of ready-made templates to design your site. They include project sites, document centres or even a workflow site that lets you manage, say, procurement processes that require several levels of approval across an organisation.

All sites can be customised to your needs, thanks to a range of formatting tools and colour schemes.

Public sites

Apart from team sites, SharePoint Online now lets you create public-facing webpages for your business. This is useful for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which lack an existing website or wish to enhance their sites with modern features.

Like team sites, a public site can be built quickly and customised with templates and tools.

After you have selected a design, create your content and navigation links. If you already have an Internet domain name for your company, point your domain to your new public site and you are ready to go live.

SMEs with some web design experience can customise public sites further by editing the HTML source codes of their webpages. You can even apply cascading style sheets to your existing website design to create a unique navigation experience with your own icons and interactive elements.

Companies can also use apps from the SharePoint store to enhance the visitor experience. The Facebook plug-ins app, for example, allows visitors to "like" or "share" a page with friends on their social networks.

Also, if you are using an analytics service such as Google Analytics to track activities of visitors on your site, the Web Analytics Integration app will let you connect your public website to that service.

aarontan@sph.com.sg

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