Sharepoint Online - Anyone Using It??
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We are nearing our one year anniversary of being on Exchange Online having some on the Office 365 Enterprise E1 Plan and some on Exchange Online Plan 1. It has been a major win for us in stability and maintenance.
We also have SharePoint Online that I've not touched at all. I've poked around in it but never have found a use for it.
I was curious to know if anyone here uses it regularly and how you use it...we really don't need much file sharing as our main file server does that. But didn't know what else we can do with it and if we can make it point back to our main, local file server.
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Yes, NTG has been on SharePoint Online since going to Office 365 and has been on SharePoint itself since 2003. We implemented it on the preview version of Windows Server 2003!
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SharePoint is one of the top tools that I recommend. If you are already paying for it, it is time to dive in and poke around! So many great ways to use it. One of the toughest things is finding a place to start!
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I'm about to take a 6 hour Lynda.com course on it just to get an overview and see if has some use for us...might as well use it in some was since we pay for it...
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We are using some features of it. We just implemented the contact list. I will be moving to the the shared calendar as well. Aside from some funky-ness when going from a public folder to the SharePoint alternatives it has worked pretty well.
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You don't have to use it for files. You can use it as a intranet type website.
Most places I've worked we have not used it as it was up to the departments to manage and they would spend to much time working on it for little return. This wasn't an IT decision of course. I've never cared if people used it or not. One place I've worked used it but it was useless they way they did it.
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File storage is really worth looking into. Just because you have a file server today doesn't mean that you might not want to move to SharePoint. SharePoint has two key storage features. One is the standard document repository which is really ideal for things like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and similar files which can be displayed, and with the right licensing, edited online. SharePoint adds versioning, backup, remote access, online display and editing and other features which are pretty awesome. NTG uses SharePoint as our core storage system. Not good for storing CAD files or other large files, but for documents, nothing will touch it.
Non-shared storage through OneDrive for Business is awesome. It's personal storage for each user with features like DropBox has, for free, with a lot of capacity that users can use. This is very handy and can replace a lot of traditional file server usage.
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If you do anything with Access, Access databases can be moved up to Sharepoint with the database being hosted live on SQL Server (which is behind SharePoint) with a web interface. So Access can really take a big leap forward.
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We use SharePoint itself as a direct, web interface to MS SQL Server. We can create tables and expose them throughout SharePoint to be able to leverage them from different tools. It's very handy.
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Hosting OneNote files on SharePoint is a very useful tool. We use that extensively.
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One of the best features of combining SharePoint with the online storage features and programs like OneNote, Word and Excel is that you can do collaborative editing with multiple people using the same file at the same time and editing it live with everyone able to edit and see the edits in real time. It really takes document editing and collaboration to the next level.
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The core of SharePoint is the wiki engine. Pretty much everything is displayed in a wiki. This is a very powerful wiki with great editing tools. Perfect for making documentation whether IT docs, HR docs, anything that you need to share with teams and edit easily. Using the wiki is one of the best features.
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There is a built in picture repository feature too. Perfect for uploading a collection of company photos which can be easily referenced elsewhere in Sharepoint, like in the wiki.
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Shared Calendars are a big feature. Lots of people find that to be really useful.
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Task Lists / To Dos are not something that we use, but are available.
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Discussion Groups are a huge feature. Imagine havine MangoLassi as an internal system just for your company. A system like a forum is built in. Very useful for internal discussions.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Discussion Groups are a huge feature. Imagine havine MangoLassi as an internal system just for your company. A system like a forum is built in. Very useful for internal discussions.
Actually I would like to implement NodeBB as the forum for my D&D campaign. Just keep being too lazy to do it around everything else I need to do.
The site is WordPress with a gimpy WP forum plugin at the moment. I want to keep WP but change the forum to NodeBB
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@scottalanmiller said:
Non-shared storage through OneDrive for Business is awesome. It's personal storage for each user with features like DropBox has, for free, with a lot of capacity that users can use. This is very handy and can replace a lot of traditional file server usage.
IMO It will be awesome when Microsoft fix the sync client. I lost track of the hours lost due to OneDrive problems, corrupted libraries, 5000 library item limits, ugh.
OneDrive is the annoying cousin of the 365 family, everyone else are rock stars, OneDrive is the travelling clown. Not it's biggest fan.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Non-shared storage through OneDrive for Business is awesome. It's personal storage for each user with features like DropBox has, for free, with a lot of capacity that users can use. This is very handy and can replace a lot of traditional file server usage.
IMO It will be awesome when Microsoft fix the sync client. I lost track of the hours lost due to OneDrive problems, corrupted libraries, 5000 library item limits, ugh.
OneDrive is the annoying cousin of the 365 family, everyone else are rock stars, OneDrive is the travelling clown. Not it's biggest fan.
Another one of the "renamed" products that MS was ashamed of. Formally known as Groove.
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Wow...it does do a lot...adding this thread and my training resources to my study list...
