KnowledgeWave Blog

An End-User Introduction to SharePoint Online

Written by Dan St. Hilaire | March 23, 2015

  

As an IT professional you understand that businesses deploy SharePoint for many different reasons. Intranets, document management, collaboration and workflow automation are a few of the most popular reasons. End-users on the other hand, often times are confused, unwilling or have little to no desire for change. Providing users with some basic knowledge about SharePoint can assist businesses with user acceptance.

 Let them know that SharePoint lets them easily create powerful websites that provide users with collaboration and storage tools. If your company is deploying SharePoint Online via Office 365 let them know about the other benefits like Online Office Apps, the possibility of having the latest Office Software on their home PC’s, hosted Microsoft Exchange and Skype for Business, all things that provide businesses and users with productivity solutions for many different collaborative needs enabling that enable users to work from most any location.

In this post and with the videos selected, we are focusing on the basic understanding of SharePoint from the end-user perspective. We’ve included some short videos that touch on what SharePoint can do in order to help users better explain why an organization would deploy SharePoint. We highlight the fact that users within an organization often use SharePoint differently and will often times have a defined SharePoint roll within their company or department. We take the mystery out of the term Team Site, so that the end-user has a better definition of how SharePoint may be used by them or their work group. We also give a basic introduction to libraries and lists. The videos in this post are pulled from KnowledgeWave’s SharePoint Online Video series. A complete video list is at the end of this post.

KnowledgeWave hopes you find this post and these videos useful and we encourage you to share this post with end-users in your organization or consider a low cost membership to KnowledgeWave.com for the complete series to assist with user adaptation after your deployment.

What is SharePoint and Why Do We Use It?

The end-user of SharePoint often has specific needs and goals in mind when working in a SharePoint environment. In this video we define the five primary rolls that SharePoint end-users would fall under. Owners, Designers, Editors, Contributors and Members/Readers.

SharePoint Users Roles Explained.

You have SharePoint and you've heard of Team-Sites, now what? SharePoint Team Sites are like private websites for your company, departments or teams. It provides private access based on permissions for secure collaboration. Team Sites provide a central storage and collaboration space for documents information and ideas. It’s a great alternative to shared drives or flooding email boxes with messages and attachments.

Understanding Team Sites on SharePoint

Libraries, lists, apples and oranges we know they are similar, yet different. SharePoint Libraries are like a container that holds documents or files. Lists are a great way to house information in rows and columns. You can sort, filter, add items, and very easily edit the list. Libraries are also lists that allow you to set various views based on columns and even dynamic data.

Learn About and Start Using Libraries

Learn About and Start Using Lists

If you found these introduction videos helpful consider a membership to KnowledgeWave.com. We offer individual memberships as well as access for entire organizations. These videos above were pulled from our SharePoint Introduction series listed below.

Diving into the world of Microsoft SharePoint is like discovering a whole new layer of office based computing. This powerful, web-based platform integrates everything that's offered in the Office Suite of programs along with Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage solution. The ability to create sites, pages and shared workflows using SharePoint opens up a brave new world of organization, collaboration and centralization. This video series has all the info you need to understand and utilize this powerful platform. If you're interested in making this content available to your organization please try it free, we'll provide you with access to review this series and also show you how you can track usage and measure ROI on your training for your company!

A Complete List of Our End-User Introduction to SharePoint Series