SharePoint is a staple application used around the world by millions of customers. Days of creating a SharePoint farm , spending £000’s on infrastructure and software is long gone. We can get a SharePoint environment provisioned for your business pretty quickly. These blog posts will outline some of the great features of SharePoint. So if your thinking about SharePoint hopefully these features will help you in your decision.
SharePoint Document Libraries
Put simply the name says it all, it’s a library where documents are stored. These libraries provide so much more than just a folder in your mapped drive.
For example, we can have a document library called ‘Product X’ this is where our sales literature for our top-secret product will be created and collaborated on.
As shown above we can have a separate area where our documents can be collaborated on, as this a top-secret product this library can be locked down to specific members of staff.
Check in / Check Out
When a document is created it is defaulted as ‘Checked Out’ .If you look at the authors document library
You can see the ‘Product X Description.docx’ document has a red arrow on the right hand side. This means the document is checked out. If you now look at another user (who has permissions to the document library).
You will notice the document is not visible (you will need to be admin / or the author) because the document is not checked in.
The author then checks in the document and adds some info about the document
Then other users can see the document and then they will see the document.
Then if we go to version control on the document , you will see the comment that was added to the document version.
If another user wants to update the document. They check it out, then work on the document and then when they have done their updates, they can check it back in and create another comment.
Version Control
People make mistakes and version control provides the safety net. Version control allows you to store , track and restore versions. So if a mistake is made you can easily restore back to the correct version of the document.
So if we look at the ‘Product X Description Document’. Chris Johnson has updated some figure for the material used – later on we find that information is incorrect so we disregard his update.
So now when we open the document it is version 3 and this is just like the original. We can now publish this document as a major version.
Although we can keep all the minor versions in the version control. There is no need to delete the original versions, but as we have done in this example – we can see without a worry they have now been moved to the recycle bin – so easy to bring back.
If we then restore both versions back we can see now
Version 0.1 and 0.2 are now back and the major version (which we published) is still number 1 and the default document that will be opened.
Metadata columns
On a normal document library , you may have these basic columns
We can add a metadata column which will tag a document with extra data. So at the moment we can see who these documents have been modified by. We could although do this :
So you can see now that each document is relative to a product. With metadata we can customise search so you can enter a metadata tag and view documents only with that tag, or we create document library views. You can see how powerful metadata can be.
Live Collaboration
If two or more people are editing the document at the same time, you can see live who is changing what at the same time. So for example on the screen below you can see I am logged in as CJ (top right) and you can see that a user called Jason Hough has written ‘this is a wrong figure’.
With the comment button on the top right you can send a message direct to Jason and then it will appear on the users screen
silverlimes is a Microsoft Partner specialising in SharePoint , Power Platform and Office 365. Contact us today for an initial consultation. Part 2 of the best SharePoint features coming soon.
