In this article, we will unveil such features of SharePoint that’ll surely amaze your colleagues.
1. Processing Invoices
If your organization works with third-party clients, invoice generation and processing are the crucial parts of your work process. Most organizations depend on external tools for invoice management. However, SharePoint users can perform most of the steps from its native platform.
You can use Microsoft Forms to collect invoice data and import them to SharePoint. Creating an invoice and performing its revenue analysis is also possible simultaneously on SharePoint.
These processes require the involvement of fewer people. Hence, there is less chance of any mistake during data entry. Also, the inclusion of automated steps makes invoicing faster. You can also easily find out about the process’s progress.
2. Use During Onboarding
Recruiting and onboarding new people into a company is a cumbersome task. Everything should be in place to ensure a positive experience for the new team member.
By integrating Microsoft Forms and Power Automate with SharePoint, you can accumulate all the information in one place and create a workflow for all departments. After setting up the integration and workflow, the HR manager only needs to monitor every step.
Using SharePoint in the onboarding process offers a win-win situation for both the new employees and HR executives. While the fresh recruit can start straight away with everything available, the recruiters will need to put less effort into the onboarding.
3. Manage Inventories
Inventory management is a hectic process as it involves an array of tasks and subtasks such as procurement schedule, cost tracking, and maintenance. Also, the task dependencies can make the process lengthy and complex.
If you use SharePoint, you can integrate it with Power Automate, Microsoft Lists, and Microsoft Teams for seamlessly administering your inventory. It’ll let you manage all the processes including listing products, scheduling operations, visualizing data from a single platform.
Besides reducing the time needed for equipment management, these integrations considerably eliminate the chance of errors and duplicate data entry.
4. Share Documents With Anyone
If you work with a client or vendor, file sharing with people outside your team is an indispensable part of your work process. Using SharePoint, you can easily share files or documents with others. The permission features ensure that you have the necessary security measures in place.
Depending on the type of security you want, you can allow people to view or edit the document. You can also control who can access the file with the right kind of permission.
SharePoint lets you create file and folder templates with different permissions. It spares you from manually setting up permissions for each new file or folder you make.
5. Create Wiki Site
With the ever-growing volume of information, organizations need to have their Wiki site. Such sites can store and manage all sorts of information, like knowledge articles, general service info, item info, and business discussions.
You may not know that in SharePoint, you can get an element named Wiki Site. It can handle all the requirements of an organization regarding Wiki that a generic Wikipedia can’t manage.
Using the SharePoint Wiki site is also easy. Add the content and share it after getting approval from the administration. You can also use SharePoint List to sort and convert data in an Excel file and use it in other formats in the Wiki.
6. Integrate With Microsoft Teams
While Microsoft Teams is the ultimate tool for collaboration, integrating it with SharePoint will take your team efficiency to the next level. This integration will be particularly helpful for organizations where employees need to handle multiple projects simultaneously.
SharePoint and Teams together will offer robust functionalities by centralizing the information. Collaboration and communication among colleagues will also take place, adhering to the compliances.
7. Use as an Advanced Content Editor
Since SharePoint is a document management platform, it comes with advanced content editing features. But, do you know there is no need to use web designing tools like SharePoint Designer or DreamWeaver to edit a document?
With the help of a content editor web part, you can make necessary changes to a page. Some of the highlighted features are adding formatted text, images, tables, and hyperlinks to a page. What’s more, you can do all of this without even opening the document in the advanced editor.
8. Synchronize Schedule of the Team Members
Many SharePoint users don’t know that the platform offers a shared calendar. All SharePoint team members can add, edit, and view their upcoming schedules and events. In fact, you can also define different groups within this calendar and later add events accordingly.
Apart from the regular calendar features, this calendar supports assigning separate colors for each type of event like meetings, webinars, holidays. Thus, you can easily find an event in a calendar.
9. Automate Tasks
Work automation helps people focus on crucial tasks. As this process automates regular, mundane tasks, the productivity of a team increases manifold. Using SharePoint Workflows, you can automate your work processes to a large extent.
In SharePoint, you get five pre-programmed workflows: feedback collection, approval, publishing approval, signature collection, and three-state workflows. Each of the workflows reduces the time and labor you need to put into a project.
Moreover, the platform also offers you the option to develop tailored workflows as per your business requirements.
10. Keep Older Version of a Document
Versioning is a vital part of document management, especially if the document is part of a collaborative project that involves multiple editors. Usually, permitted editors can make changes to a document anytime they want.
SharePoint displays the latest version of a document with all the recent edits to anyone who can access it. However, that’s not all. It also saves all the versions since the creation of that file in the Version History. Anyone can access the version history to see who made which changes to the document.
Surprise Everyone With Unknown SharePoint Features
SharePoint is not only for online document management. You can use it for various other purposes. Here, you’ve come to know about some uncommon functionalities of this platform.
While many of these might surprise you, all these SharePoint features will allow you to perform tasks without switching the tool.