Need a better way to keep your company organized? Try SharePoint!

May 13th, 2009 by Jason C.

Many of us use email as a way to distribute documentation or keep employees up-to-date with news and upcoming events, but is email really the best tool for this type of communication in your business?

Consider these two scenarios:

Internal Communications

The old way: To inform employees of company news, upcoming events, and policy changes, alerts are sent via email. Everyone in the company constantly gets bombarded with these emails, and important emails may be overlooked due to inbox clutter.

The SharePoint way: An intranet portal site contains news updates, upcoming events, and policy changes that are posted for everyone to see. An expiration date can even be assigned to these items so they are removed automatically. Now you have a “one-stop shop” for internal communications that everyone has access to without the clutter.

What if some of your employees still prefer emails? SharePoint’s Alert Me feature sends an email alert whenever a change to content occurs.

Document Sharing

The old way: Suppose you need to share documents (spreadsheets and such) with your co-workers, superiors, or teammates. When you’ve created a new document, you either email it out to the others or save it to a shared file server somewhere and email to let everyone know the document is there.

But what happens if you need to modify a document you’ve already emailed? You send another email with the updated document—not very efficient!

The SharePoint way: You don’t want these documents open on a portal site where everyone can access them, so how can SharePoint help in this situation? Easy; SharePoint allows you to assign email addresses to a document library. When you attach files to the document library, everyone with access can login to the portal to see all of the files in the library, as opposed to only being able to look at one document—that might be outdated—in their email browser.

As with the last example, employees who prefer emails can still get updates using Alert Me.

These are just some of the ways that SharePoint can help your company manage information more efficiently.