Long gone are the days when staff showed up to a cubicle at 9am and sat diligently at their desk, working away solo until the clock struck 5pm.

Nowadays, people are empowered to work anytime and from anywhere – on the train while commuting to work, at a client’s office, in the evenings and on weekends if it suits them. Furthermore, with the dramatic increase in remote work during the pandemic, more and more individuals are working from home. This means that organisations have had to reimagine the workplace environment so that staff are empowered with the digital technologies necessary for them to continue remaining productive and collaborative.

So, while legacy document management solutions housed in on-premises networks might have worked well in for decades previously, they’re no longer fit for purpose to support a modern workforce.

In seeking out a viable replacement for on-premises file shares or other document storage facilities, you want a solution that has been purpose-built to take document management well beyond storage. Your new solution needs to empower your people to work when, where and how they want so your business can achieve greater efficiency, engagement, and productivity.

Microsoft’s SharePoint Online platform is designed to do just that – helping staff to seamlessly share and manage content and knowledge. As a cloud-based service, SharePoint Online can be accessed from anywhere and at any time while offering the latest in cloud security features to keep your company’s private data safe, managed and compliant.

If you’ve been searching for the ideal document management solution, here are 5 reasons why SharePoint Online is your next solution…

1. It’s built for collaboration

SharePoint is a native document management system which delivers a huge variety of features, such as:

• Intuitive structure and storage of documents for fast and easy retrieval
• Advanced search capabilities, based on file name, metadata, and content for precise results
• Real time co-authoring, versioning and auditing to support collaboration on documents
• Advanced, dynamic security features that work natively with Active Directory
• Automated workflows for ease in collecting approvals, feedbacks, and signatures
• Built-in compliance features to support retention, archiving and deletion
• Customisable functionalities to suit organisation’s specific requirements
• Templates for a “running start” when creating new sites and documents

In addition, SharePoint Online has a rich interface which is highly intuitive to use and easy to maintain. It can also scale exponentially to accommodate your business needs whether you’re managing less than 50 employees or more than 50,000.

Purpose-built for collaboration, SharePoint Online empowers your staff to share and co-author documents; create pages, lists, charts, surveys, forms, and more; and leverage document libraries to logically store document collections – all within a highly secure environment.

2. SharePoint is the back bone of Teams

According to usage statistics, Microsoft Teams grew from just 2 million users in 2017 to almost 150 million users in 2021. When remote working became a must-have, Teams became the go-to platform to enable business continuity during COVID.

With your people likely already using Teams to connect, SharePoint as your document management solution removes the time and cost associated with implementing a completely separate system that may also be difficult to integrate.

With a single lens through which to connect and collaborate, you can streamline staff workflows and save them time so they can focus on more valuable business activities.

In addition to Teams, SharePoint also integrates with all other Microsoft apps – ranging from Word and Excel to Skype and Yammer.

3. Everything you need…out of the box

SharePoint Online equips your staff with powerful search capabilities, configurable workflows, and built-in security and compliance features which make it easy to maintain governance over your business’s vast array of documents.

This enterprise-ready platform can be configured and scaled to meet your business’s changing needs – with regular updates from Microsoft to keep the platform at the cutting edge of new AI and machine learning innovations.

Once deployed as your document management system, SharePoint Online can also be adapted to meet a wide range of other business requirements; such as hosting your new company intranet .

4. It’s built for mobile

SharePoint Online is accessible anywhere at any time, with customisable security boundaries to meet your company’s unique ways of working.

The platform is accessible via desktop, or as an app on a tablet or mobile phone where staff can still perform a wide range of functions to maintain productivity while they’re on the move.

Most importantly, SharePoint Online is engineered with mobile usage in mind and incorporates specific security features that protect your data whenever people are outside the office (including 2FA, location-based policies, role-based access controls, user behaviour alerts, and more).

5. It’s a rock solid investment

When looking for the best document management system, you want a solution that is:

• reliable
• secure
• frequently updated
• cost effective
• well established

As the back bone of Office 365 and Teams, SharePoint is one of the safest investments you can make.

It’s been around for more than 20 years and is continually upgraded to stay at the very forefront of intelligent document management. Put simply, you’ll never have a reason to invest in a more modern solution. Not when 80% of Fortune 500 companies rely on SharePoint as their digital gateway.

How to deploy SharePoint as your new document management system

If you’re considering implementing SharePoint Online as your new document management system, it can help to have SharePoint experts by your side to assist with planning and migration.

At Antares, our skilled consultants can support you through the entire process including:

• governance
• migration planning
• configurations
• pilots and testing
• go live and training

Our goal is to help you get the most out of SharePoint Online as your document management solution – so your business can reap the benefits of a more collaborative and productive workforce.

To find out how our SharePoint experts at Antares can support you in deploying SharePoint as your new document management system, simply contact us.