SharePoint Online For Small Business: 11 Benefits Entrepreneurs and Business Owners Will Love
Small-to-midsize businesses are especially vulnerable to the struggle of getting it all done with so many competing tasks, to-do lists and needs.
And it’s not for lack of tools. There are a wide variety of tools out there that can help streamline nearly every process imaginable, however, not every small or medium business owner is taking advantage of these options.
Discover how SharePoint Online can benefit your small business—and be sure to leave any questions in the comments below:
1. Rapidly Broadcast Information
Whether a team is large, small, or somewhere in between, SharePoint is one of the most efficient tools for sharing documents and any other communications out to a small group or an entire organization.
Everyone gets the information they need, when they need it, quickly and succinctly. No more disjointed chat channels, physical notices or email blasts here, just an efficient way to reach the right people.
2. Prioritize Tasks
Users can vote on ideas, tasks, and projects making prioritization (and employee empowerment) easy. Leaders and organizers can quickly see the whole team’s input at a glance, making faster decisions with crowdsourced input.
Even in small-midsize businesses, the process of identifying what’s most important used to take hours. With SharePoint Online, it can be completed in minutes.
3. Share During Meetings
Today’s meetings are still being held online with participants joining in from various locations—and it doesn’t look like it’s going away soon. SharePoint Online allows anyone in the meeting to share documents in live time so everyone can collaborate in the moment, making geographic gaps between employees disappear for engaged collaboration and discussion.
4. Gather Employee Feedback
Hearing from employees and taking their ideas, feelings, and opinions into account is one way to ensure the culture of a workplace remains healthy, from minor decisions like where to get catering for lunch on Friday up to the benefits package they prefer.
With SharePoint Online, it’s easy to manage feedback requests and view responses, customizing feedback gathering from specific team members, teams or the entire organization.
5. Assignments and Task Lists Management
Task management issues don’t just affect larger businesses. They can be a problem for small teams, too, especially during busy seasons or during employee transitions.
Thanks to SharePoint Online, assignments and tasks don’t have to be sent to individual employees because they can be published directly on the platform, a centralized point for everyone to know what’s being worked on, who is owning the process and what the status is.
Keeping everyone on the same page throughout a project is an invaluable time-saver—and you’ll love not having to follow up on tasks.
6. Employee Knowledge Base
Files and documents stored on SharePoint Online are easy to find with the powerful search engine’s ability to locate the most pertinent information within the docs—even with tricky naming conventions, like LogoFinalVersionFINAL.png or massive documents.
Lean businesses, especially with remote teams, use this information base instead of wasting time searching for information or asking coworkers for what they need.
7. Document Sharing and Collaboration
This feature may be one of SharePoint Online’s biggest benefits.
The document sharing and collaboration functionality allow multiple users to work on a doc without writing over each other or interfering with the other person’s work. Edit press releases, update the pitch deck or have multiple people completing a complex compliance document without confusion or waiting.
It’s streamlined, efficient, and sets the standard for collaboration for both large and small teams.
8. Company-Specific Intranet
Remote work is here to stay, which can cause challenges for keeping everyone on the same, safe system. That’s why many businesses trust SharePoint Online as their internal website to securely access task lists, project files, resources, and a host of other internal documents, utilizing multi-factor authentication and frequent security updates.
Subsites can also be created for specific teams or departments with need-to-know data, and, it’s easy to set up who has access or rights to certain files.
9. Personal Organization
While SharePoint Online is a top-notch tool for sharing, it’s also a user-friendly place for individuals to organize and store their personal documents and notes. With more integration between work and home, SharePoint allows your team to safely keep anything from their kids’ soccer schedules to grocery shopping lists.
Not only can team members work easily on multiple systems and platforms for better work/life integration, they don’t have to worry about personal work documents being moved from the company’s server.
10. Portals for Customers and Members
SharePoint Online isn’t just for internal use. It can also be structured to allow customers and/or members to have access, creating a user-friendly and ready-built portal for a cost-effective solution.
This capability opens up opportunities for improvement in:
- Project management.
- Customer relations.
- Member relations.
Plus, SharePoint Online can provide members-only sites for contact management and resources for associations and nonprofits, a smart way to create a great experience while working smarter.
11. Satisfy Compliance Regulations
SMBs are not immune to the ever-changing regulatory compliance landscape. Now more than ever, organizations of all sizes have to be able to keep documents secure and protected, especially to avoid potential lawsuits or litigation related to unsafe data handling procedures.
SharePoint Online’s auditing policies, security settings, and storage policies help businesses stay in compliance with regulations without a second thought.
Additional Ways SharePoint Online Helps Small Businesses
If this isn’t enough to consider a closer look at SharePoint Online, here are 3 other big benefits you’ll want to know about:
It Can Grow With the Business
Every healthy business expects to grow over time. SharePoint Online offers solutions that are flexible enough to grow as the business scales so you never “outgrow” the critical systems and infrastructure you’ve adopted.
Plus, there’s no need to worry about spending on licenses and services that aren’t necessary – or not necessary yet. It’s all about offering the right options for wherever the business is in terms of size, even through seasonal business changes or economic downturns.
Consistent UX
SharePoint Online integrates with the desktop applications, email platforms, and web browsers that businesses are familiar with, providing a seamless experience when interacting with content, following processes, and handling data.
The integration of familiar tools with SharePoint functionality means there’s less of a learning curve and more time to get down to actual business. Instead of focusing on driving adoption and leading extensive training, SharePoint Online makes it easy to hit the ground running.
No Developer Needed
It’s common for small businesses to not have an in-house developer. SharePoint Online has built-in features that offer quick and simple solutions without the need for anyone on the team to have development experience, nor do you need to outsource tasks to an external developer.
Customizing background images, fonts, logos, headings, and site layouts can all be changed to match the business’ branding without a developer’s help, giving your business an on-brand, customized platform.
SharePoint Online offers plenty of flexibility, cost efficiency and features that most any small or midsize business will love—especially if you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem.
