e-Zest members share technology ideas to foster digital transformation.

How can Businesses Benefit from SharePoint?

Written by Vivek Iyer | Jan 15, 2015 4:33:47 PM

As an HR team, you can use SharePoint as a gateway to information. If HR teams provide the business users a portal which looks like Yahoo or MSN with access to not only organization specific content but also industry specific, he/she would relate to it much better. Microsoft has a superb site which is internal to the organization.

As a business group or management, you can share your experience of a recent client acquisition or how demand in a particular sector is growing and what will it need the enterprise or business group to do. And it can be a simple blog with related documents available for read or download for other teams on the same page. It doesn’t cost much to develop a couple of pages for the organization to read/comment/share.

As an L&D team, with the help of an interactive org chart, the user to click on any job role in the interactive org chart to see the competencies required and related learning activities. If the user likes the sports section in the newspaper, he/she is more likely to read about it, if not play actively. The hyperlink of the job role or courses can be linked directly to the LMS or Classroom training system or performance improvement plan system. But an interactive career path surely helps business users with the much needed clarity at one place.

You can also run a mentor program using SharePoint where you can have a person with certain competency level nominated as an expert and have business groups recommend their managers one mentor. All the progress can be tracked using SharePoint irrespective of the duration of the program.

Flash card games work wonderfully well for enterprises with employees in different locations. One of the themes I worked on was “Myth vs Facts” card game. You have cards, clues and multiple choice questions. You score is published against other players and the winner of the day wins points that can be redeemed for awards. The benefit is that you have successfully made the user remember and recall later about the myths and facts. This works wonders for licensing teams where there is a lot of doubt about what is on offer and what is excluded. You can save some money if the sales team knows it before the product is launched.

You can also use it to capture videos of “how to” (similar to How Stuff Works) and share it with the team using SharePoint. You can also animate it if necessary, but the central tenet is sharing here. You can also use specify key words, tags so that the user is able to easily find it.

Looking at topics and discussions on Yammer definitely helps business groups, L&D and HR teams gauge the sentiments of business users. There are plenty of useful features in SharePoint to facilitate two-way communication including an office communicator.

Furthermore, SharePoint allows you to conduct surveys, tag content and even use RSS feeds. You can find out more about the features here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-in/sharepoint/sharepoint-2013-overview-collaboration-software-features-FX103789323.aspx

There is even more on offer with content publishing approvals, personalized news, end-to-end integration with talent management, LMS and portals that enterprises work on. However, you can start small and connect the dots later

I hope you found this information valuable. Feel free to reach out in case you have any questions or comments.