How SharePoint Can Increase Your Productivity

SharePoint is a web-based collaboration platform, used by staff members across all levels of the organization. It functions on the company's intranet. The platform acts as a secure place where users can share, store, organize, and access data from numerous mobile devices. It facilitates and streamlines team and cross-departmental collaboration, as well as document storage and retrieval, all within the confines of enterprise-grade security and compliance.

Thanks to its easy-to-use features and low maintenance requirements, SharePoint has become a go-to platform for diverse organizations around the world. With various customizable capabilities, SharePoint offers an almost unmatched level of flexibility to those that use it, which allows for easy scalability, and an increase of productivity, in the process.

Nevertheless, it has a high degree of customization, and many organizations aren't fully aware of all its features or what SharePoint can do for them or use the platform to its full capacity. Since every company is, more or less, unique, each can use and customize SharePoint to best suit their needs. That said, here are some ways it can help you increase productivity across your organization.

Mobility

Thanks to its new app, SharePoint can be accessed by users even when they're not in the office. So, if your businesses have employees that work remotely or are usually in the field, they can still use SharePoint to work with the same level of coordination as those who would, otherwise, be all located in the same office.

Personalization

When companies start using SharePoint, they usually do so by first utilizing its basic features. But as time goes on and users become accustomed to the platform, they can personalize it as the business develops. Similarly, they can tailor the platform's features so that it best suits the organization's processes and means of operation.

Having too many unnecessary features or access to unnecessary files and data can at times overwhelm and distract the users, decreasing their overall productivity. SharePoint does take this factor into account, allowing organizations to tailor the interface for every level, department, or each employee.

Seamless Integration with Your TechStack

Some fear that SharePoint will only add another level of complexity to their already intricate TechStack. Luckily, however, this is not the case with SharePoint. It was specifically designed to integrate with a wide variety of other software, web applications, RSS, WSRPs, email, and all sorts of commercial software and cloud applications. It implies that there are far fewer technical glitches, less downtime, and more productivity.

SharePoint Analytics

Collecting, storing, and sharing data is all fine and good, but as long as you are not adequately analyzing it, that information is next to useless. By making use of SharePoint's analytics tools, you can investigate and discover any potential issues that may be affecting the productivity of a given department, problems in collaboration, etc. You can use that information to generate the best possible solutions to fix those problems.

SharePoint is a great tool to improve a company's productivity. It all depends on how well you know how to use it and how best you customize it to fit your organization's needs. If you need any help in optimizing your company's performance, Managed Solution is at your service. Our professional consultants will answer any questions that you may have. Contact us today!

What Is SharePoint and What Is It Used For?

For those of us that don't know, SharePoint is a web-based system used for collaboration. It makes use of list databases, workflow applications, and other features as a means of enabling teams to work better together. SharePoint also gives businesses the ability to control access to information and automate various workflow processes.

SharePoint can increase productivity and visibility for IT workers across all levels of the organization. Features center around the company's private network, allowing for secure sharing, workflow collaboration, and content management, among other such features.

Due to its easy maintenance and use, SharePoint is a favorite with many businesses, big and small. Similarly, the platform also offers a high degree of flexibility and scalability, allowing companies to increase productivity and get a high ROI, based on their individual needs.

Also, SharePoint Online, which is the Microsoft Cloud version of the platform, has additional integration capabilities with other cloud applications such as Microsoft 365 or Office 365.

SharePoint truly shines when employees work together on ad-hoc projects or when they want to establish standard business processes regarding data sharing, data recording, or document publishing. It's many features that also include co-authoring, versioning, or security controls, allow users to do more work on only a fraction of the time, all the while maintaining the quality of their product.

SharePoint and Content Management

On a similar note, SharePoint makes it easy to add metadata so that users can quickly and easily understand the origins and purpose of a document without having to open it. Likewise, it also allows for the easy creation of custom databases, as well as the recording of numerous documents, which can them be integrated into business processes and workflows.

Once the metadata and content are on the platform, SharePoint can automate specific workflows such as the processing of end-user information, enabling record disposition through content lifecycle tools, and the disposal of data based on various business policies.

SharePoint and Team Collaboration

When it comes to uploading documents, users can either share it with other users or utilize OneDrive as personal storage where nobody else has access to. They can later share that document with others by granting them access. These workflow features, as well as others, can control how documents are being shared between them, as well as how they use that information within the organization.

Learning SharePoint

When you start using SharePoint, it's always better to learn a few basic tasks that will help you familiarize yourself with the platform and form some foundational skills. It's essential to remember that SharePoint holds a central role in a Microsoft-dominated environment, streamlining operations for everyone from the C-suite, all the way to customer service.

The best way to learn SharePoint is to start using it simply. The more practice you have with its essential features, the easier it will be to navigate. Some training courses will help you solidify the platform's fundamental principles and tasks. Even though the platform is intuitive and easy to use, it's numerous features that allow for more flexibility also increase its complexity. It means that, after you've mastered the basics, there remain many other ways to utilize it. Only with practice and use, will you take full advantage of what it has to offer.

Don't let this discourage you, however, since the benefits are well worth the effort. Most Fortune 500 companies have used SharePoint and for a good reason. If you want to learn more about SharePoint and how to use it, feel free to visit our website or contact us directly.

What Are the Best Ways to Leverage SharePoint and Microsoft Teams?

Traditionally, collaboration tools divide into numerous silos, based mostly on the type of communication which they are involved. When it comes to the Microsoft environment, for instance, Skype for Business is for real-time communication; Outlook is for messaging; SharePoint is for document and data sharing. All of these tools provide for all the communication an organization needs to function correctly.

The problem, however, is that all of them are separate programs that need to run independently and you continually have to flip between them. Likewise, the information is organized differently with each of them. Emails, for instance, are arranged by date, Skype messages are by person, while SharePoint is by teams or projects.

Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, manages to align all of these tools under one roof. It becomes particularly useful when it comes to team communication.

Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Working Together

When it comes to SharePoint and Teams, they both organize team sites based on project, topic, or organization. Microsoft Teams has SharePoint team sites associated with it. It means that every channel in Teams is related to a folder in the SharePoint document library. Also, every document sent outside of Teams is also stored in the sender's OneDrive business folder.

Storing Teams Documents in SharePoint

There are several advantages to storing your Teams documents in SharePoint and OneDrive. For starters, it's easy to sync all files for a Team on OneDrive since it works for both Windows and Mac. Also, SharePoint allows previews for more than 300 file types, which can also display in the Teams file tab.

SharePoint has a series of comprehensive data governance and compliance features such as automatic classification and labeling, data loss prevention, document retention policies, etc. These are also transferred to Teams documents when used together. What's more, users don't necessarily have to leave Teams to work on their SharePoint files since these will appear in their Files tab.

Adding SharePoint Pages as Tabs in Teams

When you add SharePoint pages as tabs in Teams, you will have a much easier time when building a custom website than you would with your typical approach. It is because all of the information that's on a team site home page will also appear here, making it the best of both SharePoint and Teams on the same interface.

You can also put an entire document in a tab, which can prove useful when you share a presentation or want to track information in a spreadsheet that available to the whole team. Similarly, you can use SharePoint Framework web parts as tabs in Teams. It allows for their seamless reuse and allows SharePoint developers to be in easy reach of Teams tab development.

Highlighting News and Conversations

Say, you are at a new stage of a project, or you want to emphasize a particular piece of news. Most often, this type of information will be misplaced in the Teams conversation thread, and people will lose track of them. To counteract this, you can use the News web part on a SharePoint page to make sure that this doesn't happen. SharePoint sites will include a publishing system for news pages. These appear on the web parts, Hub sites, the home page, the SharePoint app, and in Teams.

Conclusion

These are some of the best practices when leveraging SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. If, however, you need help, our consulting services team is at the ready. Sign up for our webinar to learn hands-on how you can best leverage these tools.

Managed Solution Establishes Partnership with LiveTiles

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SAN DIEGO, California – Managed Solution is excited to announce partnership with LiveTiles.

LiveTiles Design is an all-in-one solution for creating beautiful, engaging sites that foster collaboration throughout your organization, effectively managing content and seamlessly integrating third-party applications within a single platform.

As one of Microsoft’s top partners, Managed Solution is known throughout the industry as a partner friendly, full service Microsoft solution provider with expertise in Office 365, Enterprise Mobility & Security, Windows 10 Enterprise, Azure, Dynamics 365 and the new flagship Microsoft 365.

This partnership enables Managed Solution customers to create captivating sites on SharePoint and Office 365 to give their teams a phenomenal user experience, with no coding necessary. It gives them the ability to create a seamless workplace experience across devices, departments, and time zones with the ultimate SaaS offering. And it empowers teams with custom, mobile-friendly LiveTiles Design solutions so they can access what they need anywhere, anytime.

Sean Ferrel, Managed Solution, Chairman and Founder, stated, “LiveTiles makes the navigation in SharePoint much easier for end user, with ability to design it in just minutes and make changes as you go. Which makes SharePoint more accessible to our customers.”[/vc_column_text][grve_button button_text="Learn more" button_shape="round" button_link="url:http%3A%2F%2Finfo.managedsolution.com%2Flivetiles||target:%20_blank|"][/vc_column][/vc_row]

SharePoint communication sites begin rollout to Office 365 customers

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By Mark Kashman as written on blogs.office.com
During last month’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled SharePoint communication sites—beautiful, dynamic sites that let you reach a broad internal audience, and that look great on the web, in the SharePoint mobile app, on PC and on Mac. Today, we’re excited to announce that communication sites are now rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers, followed by full worldwide rollout to Office 365 customers in the coming months.

Create a beautiful communication site in seconds

Communication sites are perfect for internal cross-company campaigns, weekly and monthly reports or status updates, product launches, events and more. To help you jumpstart getting your message out fast, communication sites provide configurable templates for the sites and pages within. When you click Create site from the SharePoint home in Office 365, you have a choice of three initial site designs:

Images showing how each of the different three site design options look on a desktop and mobile device.

Communication site designs (from left to right): Topic, Showcase and Blank.
And it is easy to tell your story. Once your new site is created, simply drag-and-drop to reorganize web parts on the page to bring your use cases and scenarios to life. News and pages allow for multi-column layouts to represent your message in a meaningful, intuitive fashion.
Learn how to create a communication site in Office 365, add a page and work with column layouts.

Share your plans and updates in engaging, interactive ways

Communication sites allow people to create and share recurring updates beyond email. When you create a page on a communication site, you can embed documents and video, and dynamically pull in real-time data from across Office 365, including documents from SharePoint, Power BI reports, Microsoft Stream videos and Yammer discussions. The resulting page is a rich and dynamic communication. And the page persists on the site, so people can refer to it easily, even as the membership of your team changes, so new members can more easily get up to speed.

Image showing how a communication site displays all the data pulled in from Office 365, including news, events, key documents, resources and contacts.

The new capabilities for the rich section layouts and new web parts can be utilized on SharePoint team sites as well.

Consume, create and connect from your mobile device via the SharePoint apps

It’s easy to access, engage with and create content for communication sites from any device. The full site, pages, news, navigation, search and more are natively viewable, functional and engaging. Read a page, create a news article, engage in a Yammer conversation—all in the context of the site—from within the SharePoint mobile app experience.

Image runs through a SharePoint communication site in mobile.

You can download the SharePoint mobiles apps for iOS and Android today, and the new features will be available in the coming weeks. Learn more about the SharePoint mobile app for iOS, SharePoint mobile app for Android and SharePoint app for Windows 10 Mobile.

Communication sites help further refine and enhance your message

Beyond what we shared during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, communication sites have additional capabilities to further refine and enhance your message.

Make your home page and sub-pages look great

Continue the discussion in context to ensure reach, retention and engagement

Dynamically pull in and display data, documents and information via web part improvements

Learn more about using web parts on pages and news, which highlights all web parts available in SharePoint Online.

Mark your calendars

Join us for one or more of our events in the coming days and weeks to share and explore the value of communication sites.
Throughout the lifecycle of your projects, launches and internal campaigns, let the SharePoint intranet help you move seamlessly from concept to final product. The powerful, dynamic SharePoint user experiences let you clearly communicate your message throughout your company.

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New in Yammer—building a more connected and engaged organization

New in Yammer—building a more connected and engaged organization

As written on blogs.office.com
Yammer empowers every person in your company with an open space to connect, share and work out loud. With 70 percent annual growth in active groups, there’s greater momentum in Yammer than ever before. Yammer and SharePoint have always been natural complements, because together they deliver powerful connections and discoveries of people, content and information. Today, during the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled several new capabilities that make it easier to connect and engage through Yammer, whoever and wherever you are in the organization.

Spark conversations on your intranet by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together

Productive conversations can arise from anywhere you do your work. Last year, we enabled a more seamless document sharing capability across the Office 365 suite, including SharePoint, while collaborating in Yammer. You can now enrich your new SharePoint communication sites with a conversational layer by using the existing Yammer embed capability, triggering contextually relevant discussions and increasing the virality of your content.
Over the coming year, we will enhance the integration between Yammer and SharePoint by further improving the way SharePoint content appears in Yammer and making conversations from Yammer render more naturally within SharePoint on the web, desktop and mobile.

Share, view and discuss videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream

Companies are increasingly looking to use video as an effective way to reach employees and drive engagement across the organization. Now, you can share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within your Yammer conversations. Yammer already offers high quality, in-line viewing of video uploads or external websites like YouTube and Vimeo. These new integrations with Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream make it seamless to embed internal videos in Yammer conversations and include security controls and infrastructure to keep valuable information secure.
To share a video from Office 365 Video or Microsoft Stream, copy the URL of the video and paste it into your Yammer conversation either as a reply or post. Yammer recognizes that the URL is a video, adds a playable thumbnail and allows people in the group to watch the video in the context of Yammer. They will also see the number of views and likes. Those who don’t have access to a specific video will be shown a message that the video is private or the user is not authorized.
Whether you are running a monthly Q&A session, sharing an executive message, broadcasting product updates or releasing a campaign, your employees can now share, watch and discuss videos right within Yammer and see tallies of views and likes.

Discuss relevant information from third-party apps and services using Connectors in Yammer

You can now use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from over 90 popular third-party apps and services directly into your current Yammer conversations. Connectors allow you to configure automatic posts to groups from a wide variety of tools, such as news and social media sources like Bing News and Twitter, developer tools including GitHub and PagerDuty, and project management tools like Trello and Asana.
Anyone in the group can add or delete a connector in Yammer, as long as the group is connected to the Office 365 Groups service. Simply click Add or Remove Apps under Group Actions (on the right of your group’s feed) and then follow the instructions on how to add the connector. To learn more about Connectors in Yammer, please visit the support article.
Connectors bring relevant third-party information right to your group. For example, you can set up a connector to deliver a weekly digest of social media posts or articles regarding a specific hashtag or search term. For groups managing the customer experience, you can set up a connector with your organization’s customer support system to escalate important tickets and drive group problem solving.

Keep group membership up to date by enabling dynamic groups in Yammer

Starting today, you can more easily manage groups in Yammer using dynamic group membership. Dynamic groups are Office 365 groups with membership defined as a rule, rather than as a static list of members, in Azure Active Directory. Whether you’re looking to group people based on role, geography, department or any other attribute, once created, these groups update automatically as people join, leave or move within your organization. So you can rest assured that you are including the right people from across the company to engage and collaborate in your Yammer conversations.

To create a group with dynamic membership in Yammer, an Office 365 administrator will need to sign in to the Azure portal, select the Yammer group to configure and set up the membership rules for that group.

Group members are added and removed based on membership rules set in the Azure portal.
This new capability works well for organizations where people often change teams, roles and geographies. For quickly growing companies seeking to bring new hires into group conversations relevant to them, dynamic membership helps to ensure these employees have all the right permissions to find applicable content and make meaningful connections from day one.
For companies looking for a reliable and secure way to engage with the frontline, a group with dynamic membership can be created based on a specific role or location. Group managers can then announce major updates, sending a notification to employees’ mobile apps. Conversely, workers on the frontline can share input and escalate issues knowing they’re connected to the right people back in the central office.

Connect wherever you do your best work with new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac

Staying connected requires tools that have the versatility to fit your work style. Whether you are highly mobile, moving from meeting to meeting, on the ground talking to customers or jumping from app to app on your desktop, your cross-company conversations should be accessible, highly engaging and easy to navigate. We are pleased to share new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.
The Yammer iPad app has been re-launched with a richer navigation and group experience, as well as universal search capabilities.

With great feedback and usage of our current Desktop Notifier, we will also be delivering a more full-featured desktop app for Windows and Mac within the next couple months. The new app will enable automatic sign-in and will have a similar look and feel as the current browser experience. Organizations will also be able to broadly deploy the desktop app through central management.

Learn more and join us for our Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA)

The features and capabilities announced today represent the next steps in Yammer’s journey of empowering people to connect and engage across their organization. With several exciting announcements, we invite you to watch our latest Microsoft Mechanics video:

Also, join us next Tuesday, May 23, 2017 at 9 a.m. PDT for a special Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) in the Microsoft Tech Community. Our product and engineering teams will be available to answer questions you have about new features in Yammer. Add the event to your calendar and join us in the Yammer AMA group next week. To keep up with Yammer releases and connect with our product teams on an ongoing basis, please join the Yammer Service Updates External Group.

New Yammer features help users more easily connect and collaborate

Integrating Yammer with SharePoint - Managed Solution

New Yammer features help users more easily connect and collaborate

As written on blogs.microsoft.com
New capabilities for Yammer announced on Tuesday will make it easier for employees to connect and engage across organizations.
The changes, announced during Microsoft’s SharePoint Virtual Summit, include the ability to enrich new SharePoint communication sites, coming this summer, with a conversational layer by bringing Yammer and SharePoint together. The integration will be further enhanced over the coming months with additional improvements.
Users can now share and play videos from Office 365 Video and Microsoft Stream directly within their Yammer conversations. They can also use Office 365 Connectors to bring relevant content and updates from more than 90 popular third-party apps and services into Yammer conversations.
Yammer groups can now be more easily managed through dynamic group membership that updates automatically as people join, leave or move within organizations. And since staying connected requires versatile tools, Microsoft announced new Yammer apps for iPad, Windows and Mac.

Watch the video to learn more:

 

Introducing SharePoint content services

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Introducing SharePoint content services

By Chris McNulty as written on 
Our pivot to content services began at Ignite 2016 in Atlanta, where we presented a breakout session on SharePoint ECM. You can watch the entire session below:

Shaping and controlling content from creation to final disposition means many different things. We think it’s important to define our terms. Enterprise content management needs to adopt a holistic approach to managing the entire lifecycle of document creation, sharing, consumption, reuse, knowledge and records management, archiving and disposal.
That’s why we believe it’s time to reflect the changes in how content is created, shared, sustained and reused. Content services reflect a more focused suite of empowered capabilities than traditional ECM, and represent the next wave in ECM.
Content services is people-centric, allowing for personal management (copy, move, hashtag) and organizational management (knowledge management, record retention, information lifecycle management). Policy and security protects content at all phases of its life. It’s a core tenet that content should supply business value throughout, instead of after-the-fact management of dormant assets.
What happens when all that content comes into SharePoint? A common, incorrect impression of SharePoint has been that it’s a great tool to manage team content, but you need an “old-fashioned ECM system for scalability” or “true records management.” Neither of those are true today, with SharePoint having incredible scalability of up to 30-trillion documents and up to 12.5 EB in a single SharePoint Online tenant. OneDrive and SharePoint also inherit our Office 365 capabilities to create record and retention policy tags that can be applied to any content (interactively or by matching a known set of content fingerprints).

Principles of content services—create, coordinate, protect and harvest

Content services is as much about document creation as consumption. In many cases, content has become less about static images and reports, and more about dynamic documents that are created and edited many times in their lifespans. This trend is something we call content velocity, where the content picks up velocity as it is created, edited and reused, becoming more valuable, instead of becoming a dormant archive of little value, as was traditionally the case. We view this as an evergreen cycle of authoring, collaboration, control and reuse.

Create

Content velocity means documents need to be “born” managed. Newer SharePoint and OneDrive capabilities are designed to support this:
OneDrive for Business is the best place to store and manage your documents, giving you the “My Documents” concept on any device. As you share and collaborate with others, content evolves and picks up velocity. When final, you can easily bring it to SharePoint for publishing and permanent storage.

Coordinate

Content in SharePoint is maintained in modern document libraries, making it easy to structure graphically rich, dynamic views of content and metadata. SharePoint’s managed metadata service provides a centralized way to tag and classify information. Tagging and customizing the view can all be accomplished from the library home screen, eliminating multiple clicks to open a property editing screen.
Documents in libraries can be easily shared to Office 365 Groups, and reused in other collaborative apps like Microsoft Teams. In addition, Microsoft Flow can be used to automate common actions, like collecting attachments from email or distributing documents for team review.

Protect

SharePoint already builds on a long tradition of capabilities supporting information lifecycle governance, records management and eDiscovery. Newer capabilities, developed as part of our ongoing engagement with the entire Office 365 suite, include:
Learn more about our approach to content security in SharePoint and OneDrive by downloading the white paper “File Security in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.”

Harvest

Content shouldn’t be saved and stored and managed just to fill up storage space. Traditional ECM often concludes with document disposal or retention. We believe that modern content services are cyclical. Content exists to support a future business purpose, such as providing information on a related decision, explaining a historic context or seeding the next cycle of content creation.

Summary

We recognize that effective adoption of SharePoint content services takes some time. At Ignite, we also presented a section on best practices for traditional ECM and modern content services. Please see today’s blog post on the Microsoft Tech Community for more details.
We appreciate the consideration given to our tools by analysts—like Forrester—and are honored that many enterprises are choosing SharePoint as the foundation for content services and digital workplace transformation. We’re already at work planning our next generation of SharePoint content services solutions, and can’t wait to share more with you later this year at our SharePoint Virtual Summit in May 2017 and at Ignite 2017.
SharePoint has long been a strategic platform for collecting and servicing all sorts of content across the enterprise. As part of our ongoing reinvention of SharePoint started in 2016, we’ve begun rolling out enhancements to optimize use and management of content throughout the entire information lifecycle.
We’ll have many more exciting innovations throughout 2017.

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