We can sometimes seem a bit jaded about SharePoint. A lot of our blogs discuss the limitations of SharePoint, as well as challenges associated with the user experience and user interface.
While these are all valid concerns, and we share them in good reason, SharePoint is a great product for enabling collaboration, and it offers many benefits to its users. (It’s why we do what we do.)
So read on to learn the top three reasons for I love SharePoint – and why I’ll continue to use it in spite of the challenges it presents.
1. SharePoint Is a Great Tool for Organizing Information
SharePoint allows me to organize information and create my own metadata. By letting me painlessly search for, sort and classify information in this way, SharePoint makes it easier to share ideas and collaborate. (Personally, I love sharing my ideas with others.) In addition, SharePoint helps me keep track of my own content, so I waste less time searching for the information I need and have more time to be creative and productive.
2. I’m Not Alone
I’m not alone in recognizing the many benefits of SharePoint – to the point where a diverse and expansive community has sprung up around the platform. Every month, people across the nation – and even the world – meet at SharePoint conferences to discuss this one product and its many applications. It’s great to feel that I’m a part of this vibrant community, which is full of people who are always keen to share their ideas around the use of SharePoint.
If you use a niche product to manage your content, then you can feel a bit abandoned when you need support and have no experienced users to ask for help. With such a large and active user base, SharePoint has a community that can always offer the expertise I need.
3. SharePoint Is a Really Cool Product
Fundamentally, I love SharePoint because it is a really cool product. It allows me to collaborate with other people, create websites with ease and accomplish a countless number of other tasks. Best of all, SharePoint is extremely versatile. Whatever I need to do, I can be relatively sure that there’s a way to accomplish it in SharePoint without writing any code. What’s more, SharePoint is continually improving, with new features being added with each new release.
Final Thought
To those who think that SharePoint is not worth the effort needed to set up the environment, I’d ask them to think of SharePoint like the iconic Swiss Army knife. It does many things well, but expecting it to accomplish all of its functions as well as a specialist tool is not realistic.
Ultimately, SharePoint meets 70 percent of the needs of most businesses for a reasonable cost and a relatively straightforward set-up. For the majority of people out there, that’s a good investment. If you’re considering SharePoint, you need to ask yourself how important it is for you to get that last 30 percent of usability, which may require a complex combination of specialist tools.
Despite all its flaws, the many benefits of SharePoint have helped me enormously in my career as an information management practitioner, allowing me to share and collaborate with others. That’s why I love SharePoint, and why I’ll continue to use it no matter what the naysayers may think.
