It’s clear that the future of business efficiency is wrapped up in socially charged collaboration tools. If you’ve been paying attention to enterprise-class social collaboration space for any amount of time, odds are you’ve heard about SharePoint and how it can do wonders for your business. While the latter is very true, you may have taken a quick look at the SharePoint platform and felt incredibly overwhelmed. In this post we’ll tackle some quick and easy ways to get more out of your SharePoint platform without pulling too many teeth in the process.

1. Centralize Important Tasks – With SharePoint’s easy-to-use dashboard, you can centralize all tasks within your platform. In fact, it can serve as a single portal for creating and assigning specific tasks to individual team members. These tasks will all show up in your Outlook to-do list. From there, you can click on links that will take you to specific projects within the SharePoint system.
2. Leverage Collaboration Tools – Take advantage of the collaboration tools built into your SharePoint environment. This allows you to seamlessly access and share documents with team members throughout the SharePoint platform. If you lose a specific version of your product, you can easily restore and share older versions of a file. This can all be done in real time so you don’t have to skip a beat in your business process chain.
3. Streamline Project Management – Since the SharePoint platform serves as a centralized portal for all business tasks, you can easily manage all major projects from a single dashboard.
4.  From here you can easily assign tasks to team members and view progress based on sophisticated data delivered to your administrative SharePoint account.
5. Boost Communication Efficiency – With SharePoint, collaboration and communication isn’t necessarily based on geography or time schedules. You can easily communicate changes and updates to mission-critical business processes without having to be in the same room.
6. Sync Documents, Email and Calendars – Create centralized documents that can all be accessed by team members within the SharePoint environment. This includes everything from documents to company-wide email messages to company calendars and everything in between. If someone has a question about locating a specific document you can refer them to this portal within the SharePoint environment. This reduces all potential instances of confusion and business processes become more efficient as a direct result.

It’s important to acknowledge that training goes a long way. This is especially true if you and/or your employees are new to the platform. You may even benefit from having a certified SharePoint educator come to your office and do a quick training day. The big idea behind SharePoint is that it should make business operations flow easier and more efficiently. If this isn’t the case with your company, it may be time to take a deeper look into your SharePoint configuration to ensure you and your team are getting the best possible results from the platform.