Document management is a critical aspect of running any business. Without a centralized system for storing and sharing documents, information can become scattered, disorganized, and difficult to find. This is where SharePoint comes in. SharePoint is a powerful tool that can be used for document management and collaboration, making it easy for teams to work together and access the information they need.

In this post, we’ll explore some of the key features of SharePoint for document management and collaboration, and how you can use them to streamline your business processes and improve productivity.

Document Libraries

At the heart of SharePoint’s document management capabilities are document libraries. Document libraries are containers for storing documents, and they can be customized to fit your specific needs. You can create document libraries for different departments, projects, or document types, and configure them with custom columns (known as metadata), and views to filter information. This makes it easy to find and organize documents based on specific criteria.

Permissions

You can share document libraries with specific audiences and control access permissions to ensure that only the right people can view or edit the documents to protect sensitive information.

Versioning

One of the challenges of document management is keeping track of changes to documents. SharePoint makes this easy with its built-in versioning feature. When a document is uploaded to SharePoint, it is automatically versioned with major versioning, (1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc); allowing you to restore previous versions if required. You can also change the default to major and minor versioning if required.

Content Approval

You can QA documents that are uploaded and approve them before the rest of your staff can see them. This is a great built-in feature to help keep your data clean.

Collaboration (CoAuthoring)

SharePoint is also an excellent tool for collaboration and includes real-time co-authoring that allows multiple people to work on the same document at the same time. This can be a huge time-saver for teams working on collaborative projects. It also removes the need for saving the same document with multiple draft statuses as everyone can work on the documents at once.

Alerts

You can set built-in alerts on document libraries to be alerted if new documents are added; existing documents are edited; any documents are deleted – or all of the above. You can get this alert instantly, or on a daily or weekly summary basis. The alert defaults to you, but you can also add other users to the alert. That way, SharePoint proactively brings information to you.

Conclusion

SharePoint is a powerful tool for document management and collaboration, and it can help your business improve productivity, streamline processes, and reduce errors. With its document libraries, versioning, check-out/check-in, collaboration, and workflows, SharePoint provides a comprehensive solution for managing documents and working together as a team.

If you’re interested in learning more about how SharePoint can be used for document management and collaboration, please contact us. We’re SharePoint strategists based in South Africa and we’d love to help you get the most out of this powerful tool.