What do a library, a meeting room, a construction set and a safe have in common?

It is a way of describing the main things SharePoint brings. There are more of them, of course. Let us look more closely at this part of Office 365.

More than 20 000 new users worldwide find out every day how SharePoint changes a workspace. In medium and larger companies the tool opens up communication with no borders to speak of. Not everyone deciding whether to bring something new into a company knows precisely where the benefits lie. The points below try to look at them in plainer terms.

SharePoint as a library

Picture a library where all your important documents and files are stored safely and are easy to reach at the same time. This central store of information makes collaboration and access easier, which saves time and cuts the chaos of hunting for documents. You can co-author documents and connect securely from anywhere at any time without losing the latest information. SharePoint also brings document management well beyond the basics: automating a document's lifecycle, templates, full-text search, versioning, integrated electronic signatures and an audit trail of every change.

SharePoint as a meeting room

Nothing builds a team like a shared space. Instant messages, discussion forums, blogs, sharing ideas, a calendar. Creativity here has no borders, quite literally. You can comment and contribute from anywhere. You can build custom pages for individual projects or teams. Think of SharePoint as a creative virtual space that takes teamwork and productivity somewhere new. Treat it as the place where your team meets and works without having to be in the same room.

SharePoint as a construction set

SharePoint is adaptable and it scales, and those two qualities are what make it particularly attractive to medium-sized companies. They let a company extend the environment to fit its own needs as demands grow. SharePoint is like LEGO. It is built to work hand in hand with the other Office 365 applications such as Outlook, Teams and Excel, so you can use all of them together, which makes work more efficient and less interrupted. You can build workflows and forms, and even integrate other external applications. And as your company grows, SharePoint grows with it.

SharePoint as a safe

Picture SharePoint as a safe, where all your data is stored securely and also protected by serious security measures. Attackers often assume medium-sized companies are less well defended, which is why those companies are a frequent target. For them SharePoint is an attractive answer. The tool offers fine-grained access management, data encryption, layered security, auditing, data loss prevention and regular updates, all of it in a friendly and intuitive interface.

Part of the package is that this is a sophisticated answer and an economical one. Because SharePoint is part of the Office 365 cloud, you do not have to invest in expensive hardware or software. That can cut your capital spending considerably and simplify IT administration. It also helps that Microsoft looks after the regular updates and the security work itself.