Depending on who you talk to, the SharePoint revolution has either caught on or has fallen flat completely. On a good day SharePoint is a massively powerful tool that allows you to collaborate and manage business-specific processes in real time. On a bad day it’s simply another frustrating part of the job. This is where education and optimization come into play. Still, it’s hard to ignore the major benefits every industry can enjoy by simply leveraging the virtually endless tools that are available through the SharePoint platform.

This isn’t just true for enterprise-level users. According to a recent report, SharePoint is rapidly gaining traction in some smaller markets. Research also shows that the bulk of users are most satisfied with the web development, content management and collaboration tools. In this post we’ll dig into some of the common ways departments are using SharePoint to make their lives easier.

Three Common SharePoint Uses

1.Human Resources – While not perfect, SharePoint serves as a powerful document management tool for many HR managers. How? It’s much easier to upload and distribute important HR documents to hundreds of employees in a simplified platform like SharePoint. Policy, financial and general employment documents can be updated instantly and distributed quickly to the people who need them. HR can utilize one of the many plugins and add-ons available for the platform that make collaboration easy.

2.IT – Managing web portals in any environment can be an arduous, and often complex task. In fact, many of these processes are repetitive, time-consuming and take away from business-specific processes. This is why many IT managers are integrating ASP.net with their SharePoint environments. This allows the IT department to streamline everything from technical support to sales tasks to customer support processes.

3.Collaboration – One of the most common uses for SharePoint is collaboration. Historically, collaboration was as basic as bouncing emails with attachments back and forth. But sooner or later this ineffective means of collaborating on documents slows down production, and even puts unwanted strain on your company’s server. In SharePoint, users can manage version histories and manage changes on a project in real time and without the server issues or major strain on IT infrastructure.

Benefits of SharePoint

In that moment of pure frustration, it may seem difficult to see the inherent value of SharePoint. But the reality is that SharePoint streamlines so many business processes in such an unprecedented way. It allows members of each department within your company to focus on business-specific processes without all the unnecessary tasks and steps that bog down today’s work force.

Efficiency is the name of the game, and it’s the efficient organizations that maintain that competitive edge over other companies within their industry. To be perfectly clear, SharePoint is not perfect, but it does make business life easier. At the end of the day, anything that makes life easier in the business environment massages the bottom line, and that’s what every company is after when it comes down to it.