How to Use Sharepoint as a Communication Tool

 

Microsoft Sharepoint is about more than documents and annual leave requests. It can function as a highly effective internal communication tool that encourages collaboration and relationships within and between departments, closes the gap between management and workers and provides a centralised, lasting knowledge base.

 

Let’s take a look at a few of the features, and how they can be used to improve communication within an organisation.

 

Announcements

 

Announcements are usually placed on the front page, making them the perfect place for making company-wide announcements – staff meetings, birthdays, important company updates – without clogging up employee inboxes with frequently ignored updates.

 

Used in combination with team sites, more targeted announcements can be made within departments or project groups.

 

Internal blogging

 

Sharepoint can be used to foster an internal blogging culture that encourages the exchange of ideas and information crucial to innovation.

 

Firstly, senior managers and CEOs can start blogs to close the gap between management and workers, giving an insight into the processes and goings-on higher up the chain, whilst also inviting direct feedback and discussion through use of the comments.

 

Secondly, it can be used by knowledge experts across the company to share innovations and ideas within their departments that may be of use elsewhere in the company.

 

Thirdly, by the same token, internal blogging can create a real, tangible culture of collaboration both within and between departments. Workers may collaborate on authoring content and discussion prompted by posts can produce innovation or even counter-posts. It’s all about encouraging an ideas culture.

 

Blogging provides many advantages over traditional content dissemination such as email newsgroups: workers can use RSS feeds to subscribe only to what they want, users can interact through comments, and everything is stored permanently rather than disappearing from inboxes.

 

Community sites and news feeds

 

Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 comes complete with its own social computing functions. Community sites operate much like a forum, with users either voluntarily subscribing or being automatically assigned by virtue of their profiles e.g. all sales personnel are automatically subscribed to the sales community.

 

Users can pose questions to experts elsewhere in the company, or find previous threads to answer their questions, much in the manner of tech support knowledge bases you may have seen online.

 

Meanwhile, MySite operates like a company Facebook, where users can stay up to date with all of their subscribed content through the news feed – discussion threads, documents, blogs, colleagues – as well as using familiar social networking functions like micro-blogging and tagging to have quick discussions with colleagues; enabling the kind of quick, ongoing discussions that build vital relationships across the company.

 

Innovation rests on communication. Speak to us today about how Sharepoint can get your company talking.

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