Why Choose SharePoint Over Other Business Software Like Google Business Apps
As a business owner and dabbler in all things technical, I am always curious about what technological solutions exist that could unclutter my business and my life. Before embarking on my own journey into the business world, I had no clue as to how I would go about managing the ins and outs of business and knew that I would eventually be dealing with a great deal of information and misinformation every day.
In fact, our business is purely information based and the services we offer depend on efficient storage and management of data. A major factor of how well we perform in the market is the speed and accuracy of the service delivered, and that depends solely on how organised we are in terms of processes and communication within the team.
I have had a fair share of experience in programming and creating custom built software for business applications, but having to develop software for myself would take so much time that it would make more sense to change our service offerings and redefine our company as one that specialises in software development. But that was not my mission. I needed to have a reliable and robust software system that could back us up and let us focus on what we really wanted to do.
We had looked at some solutions that were available and popular like SAP, Oracle and Syspro. Although each one of them are excellent and were proven in the market, we were not at a stage to take on enormous development costs on what we could only perceive our businesses would need in future with regards to software, without ever having any previous experience in such a business, leaving a whole lot to guess work. Meaning that we would probably paying for parts of the software that we would never use and would have to pay even more thereafter for any additions and amendments to the already heftily priced system.
In walks Google Business Apps and the future looks bright. It had everything I need in terms of storage and collaboration. A basic system for basic businesses. I had adopted and it served to be a useful tool for some time. Then I got busier and realised that I was spending a whole lot of time trying to convert documents back and forth between Google document format and MS Office format. It had a bunch of basic and useful apps but the problem was that they weren’t so well integrated, leaving the user having to hop from one app to the other. It was just not as synergistic as I knew other software systems were. In a manner of speaking, I was looking for more of a CEO but had settled for a PA. Things were getting faster paced and I needed a solution, although I didn’t know it.
At the time of hearing about SharePoint, I was already in too deep with Google Apps and was growing weary and disillusioned with the “next best thing”. An authority on the system was trying to explain its concept to me but my head was spinning. I was becoming the old man that I said I would never become, with the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” kind of attitude. Trying something new at this stage would mean me having to do more work on restructuring and I just did not have the resources for it.
After some research I saw that anyone who’s someone in the business world uses SharePoint. And then I saw the pricing. From just R95 per month which includes SharePoint and 5 licences for the Microsoft Office Suite! This was worth looking into further, since that was a great price for the office suite alone. I took on the one month free trial, and spoke to a developer to help me through. Within a week I had migrated all my information from Google Apps to SharePoint. My team was loving the fact that they could now edit all documents offline and save back onto the cloud server, on which SharePoint exists. This saves so much time given the slow internet speed we experience when editing online. SharePoint had also allowed us to provide different permission levels to individuals, groups and departments. This meant that we did not have to worry about sensitive information getting into the wrong hands. And best of all, everyone was looking at one space rather that different apps at a time. Google Apps was exactly what the name suggests, apps, but SharePoint was the whole smart phone, which allowed you to have more control over the entire system of apps. It was a perfect solution to the integration dilemma, as SharePoint had apps with similar functionalities to Google but with seamless communication between apps. With all this up to date information in one place all the time, we had created work flows, which are sort of like those chain reaction domino setups but a whole lot more intelligent. Everything was connected and talking to each other, making decisions, taking actions, the CEO. We could easily pull up statistics on how those decisions affected the whole system. With all this automation going on I was wondering what I was going to do with all my spare time.
The best part was the cost effectiveness. We had only added what we needed to it, when we needed it and there was an abundance of apps to play around with at no extra cost. It had so many pre-developed systems available for free that developers would charge an arm and a leg for in development costs.
Everyone in the business was synched all the time and the SharePoint had its little elves taking care of all the details. We could work offline when necessary and communicate on any device. “Why do so many people not know about SharePoint?” I thought. I felt disgruntled with the fact that I had waited so long for something like this. Then I had remembered how even the expert could not do justice in trying to explain SharePoint, let alone how powerful it can be. But I was given the spark, and I had kindled it into a tiny flame, and from that flame spread the forest fire. As cliché as it sounds, I had to experience it for myself to understand it and have never looked back since.
