SharePoint is a game changer for growing organisations...

Microsoft SharePoint is a powerful collaboration platform that streamlines document management and organisation enables secure storage, promotes collaboration, and makes files easy to access and work on.

With its customisable workflows and automation features, seamless communication and knowledge sharing, SharePoint enhances team productivity and efficiency and fosters collaboration and innovation. Its robust security measures protect sensitive data, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. Aiming to do the heavy lifting for you, its integration with other Microsoft tools enhances overall productivity and offers a comprehensive solution for modern businesses seeking to optimise collaboration, streamline processes, and drive productivity.  

Migrating to Sharepoint

We are being increasingly called upon by organisations, either busy planning their migration to SharePoint, or finding their migration challenging due to SharePoint’s versatility (or complexity!) Consequently, we’ve developed our SharePoint Training courses to ensure users are trained appropriately, and in control of new processes (such as ensuring data integrity and overcoming data migration issues, or formatting discrepancies). Once trained, users can use take advantage of everything SharePoint has to offer, whilst avoiding the difficulties something this complex can cause. Maintaining user productivity during the transition is key, and training is essential to reap the rewards that SharePoint offers. 

We recently spoke to our expert SharePoint Trainer, Nikki Peters and asked what the most challenging aspect of SharePoint migration tends to be for newcomers. Her answer? Making full use of metadata 🏷️ 

What is Metadata? 

Metadata is basically data about your data, as Nikki explains:

“Imagine shopping on Amazon. You type 'TV,' and you're swamped with choices. What do you do? You filter by the brand, size, and features you want - that’s metadata in action helping you to narrow your choices down. 

When it comes to business documents on Microsoft SharePoint, you can add custom metadata tags to indicate important info; for example, which team they belong to, what project they are associated with, or approval status. Then, just like on Amazon, users can find the documents they need by filtering using these tags."

Using MetaData in Sharepoint

Nikki has noticed that when people switch to SharePoint, they quite naturally stick to the comfort of traditional folder and file systems - however these can quickly turn into mazes when team members need to find documents. Additionally, because SharePoint is online, there is a limit to the URL length, and you may run into issues with this - making you unable to share documents without restructuring. 

Moreover, because Sharepoint works in the Cloud, URLs will need to be 400 characters, potentially leading to challenges where document sharing becomes impossible without restructuring files that have exceeded this limit. 

There are clear business benefits to using metadata as intended, however, it’s impossible to think about them all ahead of time, unless you’re trained on SharePoint’s features. For instance, you can organise files into custom views and lists, and create Power Automate workflows to automatically do something with a file based on its metadata. You can also use Sharepoint to classify content for compliance purposes, ensuring that documents are retained, archived, or disposed of accordingly, we could go on... 

SharePoint Training

 At Skilltec Training we don’t just teach Microsoft training courses; for something as powerful as Sharepoint your trainer needs to understand the complexities of your business, your goals and your current obstacles to achieving them.  Our three levels of SharePoint training are designed to not only help you steer clear of migration issues, but also empower you and your team to master its myriad of features, unlocking the full potential of this powerful platform.  

Visit our website to read the course outlines or get in touch to find out more. 

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