5 Top Tips on Using SharePoint Effectively in Your Company

How to ensure you’re getting the most out of the highly versatile SharePoint platform.

Whether you’re a new Office 365 subscriber investigating the flexibility of SharePoint or already an avid user, we thought you’d enjoy a few tips on how to more effectively use SharePoint within your company. Whether you’re a novice or a pro, learn how to get the most out of SharePoint in the cloud or on-premises.

1. Ensure your documents can be found

SharePoint’s search functionality is an incredibly valuable feature, and there are a host of ways that you can improve upon this already robust tool.

One of the best ways to ensure you and your users can find what you’re looking for when using SharePoint is to give each document a meaningful title. The title field is what is first displayed in search results, so if you repeat the same title, or don’t offer a unique enough title, it could be lost among all the other documents on SharePoint. You can also use metadata to tag documents with optional attributes when searching to improve results.

2. Learn to use SharePoint alerts

One of the most underutilized features of SharePoint is SharePoint alerts, which allows users to receive email alerts when anything changes in a library or list. You can be notified of updates to a folder, document, or item like a task or event. In fact, you can even use SharePoint alerts to notify you of calendar changes, because your calendar is actually a list within SharePoint.

3. Create lists in Excel and import into SharePoint

Some avid Excel users love the ability to use the spreadsheet tool to enter large amounts of information. Thankfully, with SharePoint you can easily import spreadsheets as a SharePoint list. Simply populate data into your Excel spreadsheet, open SharePoint, select More Options from the Site Actions menu, and then click Import Spreadsheet from the List section. Now you’ll have your data in a SharePoint list to access from anywhere.

4. Focus on training to encourage SharePoint adoption

The SharePoint platform simply has too many features for anyone in your company to know them all, so it’s critical that proper training is provided both during a SharePoint migration as well as once the platform has been fully adopted. This will allow employees to continuously gain new insights into helpful SharePoint features.

5. Look into SharePoint Add-Ins

Another way to get more out of SharePoint is to use one of the many Add-Ins that have been developed to meet the needs of a wide variety of different businesses. Browse the SharePoint Add-Ins directory to see if any of the tools could make the daily lives of you or any of your employees much easier.

Reach out to MessageOps to learn more today

We hope these SharePoint tips and tricks will have you wanting to explore more in this popular platform. Should you have any questions about how to get the most out of SharePoint for your team, feel free to reach out to us.