Sharepoint Services Maryland
Project Collaboration – Anywhere!
Cloud Resources for a Successful Project
When working with our clients to plan new technology projects and understand long term technology goals, a recurring topic is the need to increase collaboration and efficiency of their growing remote and disparate workforce or teams. Currently there are a wide range of technologies aimed at addressing just this goal and more recently thanks to ‘the cloud,’ small and medium sized businesses can take advantage of enterprise class solutions with zero infrastructure costs.
Long ago, large companies adopted complex solutions and applications (at a very hefty cost!) to solely manage and deliver projects across remote teams and resources. Many small and medium businesses could not justify such a costly tool and instead relied on email and their file server to ‘collaborate’. Fast-forward to today and these email/file servers are aging, growing in size, and in need of help – sound familiar? Add on the fact that your team, company, or resources are doing more and more ‘remote’ work and it is easy to see where productivity and collaboration are lost. One answer to this conundrum is to utilize a ‘cloud’ based technology platform such as Microsoft SharePoint to manage, maintain, and deliver resources anytime and anywhere there is an internet connection! Our team uses these resources every day to deliver client service and support.
Here are just a few ways your business could benefit from this technology:
File Sharing, Versioning, and Control:
Too often we see companies using email for sharing and distributing critical project team deliverables, notes, and documents. This process of ‘back-and-forth’ emails is what I refer to as the ‘death by attachment’ approach. While this may seem like a fast way to share a document it can slow your email server, hog critical disk space, and require costly upgrades/expansions.
SharePoint technology helps avoid these issues by allowing teams to create shared libraries for documentation, restricted access documents, version management, and custom workflows. No more waiting to download that 25MB attachment!
Anywhere (Secure) Access (even via your smartphone):
Project teams and employees are now scattered around the country, working from home, or on-site at a client’s headquarters with little more than a smartphone and laptop. If you rely on everyone accessing your office file server then you most likely have employees using VPN connections from home or the road. While these connections work well they also ‘steal’ your company’s’ on-site bandwidth (i.e. 25 employees remotely accessing your server through your firewall – at one time!). Such solutions also require setup and do not help when needing to grant third-party access (i.e. contractor, auditor, etc.). SharePoint technology addresses all these issues by providing access to all of your team anywhere there is an internet connection. The connection is secure, user roles provide granular access permissions, and no longer rely on your corporate server!
Scalability and Adaptability:
Teams, and companies in general, are working shorter deadlines with narrower margins and cannot afford lengthy downtime or drawn out install, configure, and training for a new tool. Additionally, project and company resources vary across sites, making flexibility a priority. Again SharePoint technology offers a solution to all of these issues through scalable sizing (i.e. add storage as you go), pre-built templates and quick-start workspaces, and no limit to the number of projects or project team members.
Along with these key advantages, a SharePoint based project and collaboration solution offers many other great tools to keep your employees and team members working at their best. If you or your teams are looking to increase collaboration, better manage project and team resources, and be productive in and out of the office, visit our SharePoint services site at WWW.XPERTECHS.COM/SHAREPOINT or call our team (410.884.0225) for a free trial!
