Focus on SharePoint | Office 365 (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Ziad: Hello, and welcome everyone to our webinar series for Office 365. Today’s topic will be focusing primarily on SharePoint and what you could use SharePoint for as a, you know, collaborative platform that integrates well with your Office Suite. Before we begin, just a light, you know, kind of introduction to who we are as an Encore team. We’ve been around for, you know, 30 years and have been a trusted gold partner for Microsoft. And, you know, we offer a whole bunch of different services outside of even the Office Suite, including Dynamics, which is traditionally what we’re, you know, great with and adviser for. We also do Encore Care. That is for our clients and the goal really is to provide unlimited support, you know, for our customers and our clients. So, you know, feel free to kind of scope out some of our websites here by just going to on Encore Care. And you can see some details on our web support features and the prices that go along with each of those kind of tiers that we have set up.

Now, we will go in right to our SharePoint demo today. I didn’t want to, you know, put too much time on the presentation because SharePoint has been around for quite some time, though it has transitioned and moved, you know, quite a bit of since its launch, I think, in 2001. But SharePoint, basically, is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with not only your Office Suite but, you know, it provides a great source for document management. And though there is some collaboration or collaborative aspect to it, however, it’s a little bit more static compared to something like Microsoft Teams. So within SharePoint, just to kind of, you know, ease some of the confusion that exists between SharePoint and some of the other applications that Microsoft has, within SharePoint, you can collaborate with users internally and externally and, you know, store some documents. But if you really want the popularity, you know, from the tools such as, you know, the ability to chat or the ability to comment on content with someone or within team members, there’s no capacity to do that on SharePoint.

You know, though there was a time that Microsoft tried to make SharePoint a tool that is used solely for collaboration and communication, and it did that by adding some features that I’ll show you today like newsfeeds and other features like that, but, generally, SharePoint is not a social collaboration service. Rather, that would be something that Teams would be able to do through its chat-based communication platform and be a more social collaborative tool. Now, the best part is, you know, within your Office 365 license, you actually don’t need to purchase SharePoint or Teams separately. It actually comes and it’s all-inclusive within that license.

Microsoft really has two fundamental foundational technologies within Office 365 that it utilizes. One being the Microsoft Exchange, which is, you know, the server behind the scenes for emails and contacts and all of that stuff. And then, of course, SharePoint, which is your file and data management. So the confusion really comes as, well, you know, what does Teams do and what you should be doing on SharePoint. So what Teams really is is a replacement, somewhat a replacement, of your emails. And it has a whole bunch of different other capabilities, but, you know, Teams is not a separate entity. It actually resides under or within SharePoint and it’s meshed together through groups.

So, you know, when you create a regular, you know, SharePoint, you just get a regular SharePoint site, but when you create a Teams, you actually, in the back end, create a Teams…a SharePoint site as well. So, you know, we won’t talk too much more about Teams and SharePoint, but if there are any more questions regarding what your organization should be using Teams for compared to what you should be using SharePoint for, feel free to reach out to me and I can kind of clarify that and maybe even build out some strategies for you.

So SharePoint has its own app and, you know, you kind of see that it’s, you know, seamlessly integrated with the rest of the application as well, right? So, not only the same with Teams but also like, for instance, with Yammer, when you create a group with Yammer, you’ll get a SharePoint site created and so on and so forth. But, you know, SharePoint is intended to provide some sort of an organizational, you know, or a structure, I guess, for an easier user experience. And so it’s the backbone of a lot of these applications. Now, traditionally there is the SharePoint classic. There is the SharePoint server on premise. And then there’s the most latest and improved, modern SharePoint experience, which is the online version included in the Office 365, right? So you could just go to portals.com, portal.office.com, and you’d kind of be landed to this page for your Office 365 licensing.

And then it’s a simple, you know, click SharePoint and then get, you know, routed to a new tab and to all your SharePoint sites. Now, when you access the SharePoint, you know, you’ll see… So this is just a demo [inaudible 00:05:39]. That’s why it’s a little bit different, but you will see, you know, you go to portal.office.com, you click on SharePoint, and it’s hosted on the Microsoft server. But it has your organization that you wanted, right? So for us, it’s just SharePoint right now, but when you land on this page, you will see the news items. This what I was talking about from all the different sites that are created. So this is from, you know, this site compared to another, you know, site that’s there. You could see the news items that are there that are trending the most recent.

Then you see the frequently visited sites that have been previously created. Now, if you haven’t created any other sites, we’ll kind of walk through how you can do that as well and get to this level. But I wanted to kind of show you the experience that you most of you guys would be at right now is by having some sort of team sites or some SharePoint sites created already, right? So, from here we can, you know, kind of go in and create an edit Teams sites as well. So if you were to create a site, there is just a little plus icon right here on the left side. If you click that tab, it comes into your, you know, what type of site you’d actually want to create, whether it’d be a team site, which is very, very common when you want to have conversations within your team and, you know, keep track of all the different things that happen within that site or within that group, or you could create a communication site, which really goes…is kind of like an organization-wide site, that you can, you know, give latest updates or organization updates or things like that for a lot of people.

Most people will actually go in here to create a team site. And it’s simple as doing that and getting the site name in, setting some description up, and then you’ve got a site that’s connected through groups, right? One note as well is there is actually a mobile app for SharePoint. So you can actually edit, create sites, and do things on the goal as well through the mobile application. It’s a very easy experience on that platform as well, which is great. So that’s how you, you know, typically, create a site and then you would, basically, build out that site. And I can show you some examples of how that looks. What you can also do is create a news post, right? So that would be similar things like this. You could create a news post. You could see where you want to publish. So if it would be on one of those sites, for example, the sales and marketing sites, you want to create a news post or, basically, an update or you could do some of the sites that you are following as well.

So if we wanted to create a news post over here, it opens up to a new tab. It allows you to build that news post and you can, you know, name your news post, “I am, you know, the administrator.” You would have, you know, different people who would be creating that would be there. And then, of course, when you click on that, you can kind of see all the different contacts and information and what files I’ve worked on and, you know, my LinkedIn and more on my contact id from there. Similarly, within this particular group, the sales and marketing public site, you could see the number of members that are involved. There’s 24, and if I click on that, you could see all of the different members and their access or permissions that they have. For instance, I am the owner, but, you know, Alex is just a member.

There are other people who are… Actually, all these look like they’re members, but there are some other owners like, for example, Megan would be another owner. she would have full access to this site, whereas members have a little bit more limited access. They don’t have as much of an administrative access. What I can do is actually change their permissions on that as well, so I can at any time change the…as an owner, I can change the permissions on this as well or remove them from the group if they’re no longer required to be there. So those are a couple things that you can do.

This star feature here can actually favorite your sites. So you’re able to click that, for example, and it would favorite your site. Then it was favorited and now it’s not, but now it’s favorited again. And that will actually appear on your main page on the following or your favorite sites, right? And I could see all of them or unfavorite them from here as I go as well, right? And then they’re no longer there, and then, of course, all the recent ones that we’d opened and what we’d featured and so on and so forth. So let’s get back into, you know, what we could do here within the site. So this is one of the news posts, but if we go to the home of this site, which will be the sales and marketing page, this is the landing page that you get, so this is in one of the sites that we have. You could see it was recently published and we can, you know, edit this site on the fly as well. So as an owner, I can come in, I can edit. You know, move things around as I need to.

There’s these templates that I can follow. I can, you know, see the different details that are there for my news feed, but maybe I want to just drag that around and move it somewhere else. They’ve got quick links that are linked, right? I’ve got documents within the site as well on my main page and then you just simply republish. But what I really want to do actually is take a look at what I’ve already built in this site. So let’s go into the documents or the document library. And when you go into the document library, you can see that there are files that are stored and I can organize them through different folders as well. So you’ve got, you know, PowerPoint, Word and so on. I could actually click and work and operate out of, you know, the browser version of these applications or open in a separate app, right?

I can also see or preview the documents, share, or copy the link and share it that way. I can manage access for these 24 members that are there just within this document, who has access and what level of access they may have. You can download and work offline. Obviously, we can delete. I won’t speak too much about flow, but you can actually create flows to see what, you know, how you can configure this document to work there and make things a little bit more automated. These are pretty standard, you know, rename, pin to the top, move, or copy. But what’s really cool is the version history. So if I wanted to see the version history, it’ll actually pull up all the different versions, so version one and version two, who modified it and when it was modified and, you know, what the different sizes, you know, of that document now have become. So you could see and edit and restore those documents, you know, and those versions from here. And I think that’s really cool. And you can have multiple different versions and people who worked on them, right? As you can see, there’s two different authors that modified this within this team as well, so that’s really cool.

What I can also do here is instead of opening a file, right, I can simply create new ones, right? So I can create new folders and reorganize the tabs or I can create different files from within this application itself. Okay. I can upload as well files from, you know, my desktop or my hard drive. I can also, you know, synchronize it. So if I sync this with my OneDrive, for instance, my personal storage files can also be created here with one of the sites, which I won’t do at this time. So OneDrive really I use for my personal documents whereas SharePoint you could use for, you know, corporate sharing of those documents or once they’re, you know, kind of done and I’ve, you know, finished editing them on OneDrive, I can kind of link them back here.

And then, of course, you can export documents and, again, that creating flow as well. So that’s the document library, you know, on a very high level of what you can do. You can also… You know, there are some if you, for example, want to look for a document particularly, there’s some, you know, ways that you can find, you know, metadata through metadata here or you could just search the library. So if I just search within this library, marketing, all the documents that are within, you know, here, I could see pop up here, right? And you could do, you know, wild card searches, to an extent here as well, and have content from within as well or you could use [inaudible 00:13:28]. We have a webinar on that as well that you can take a look at and work out of.

So that’s the general idea with the documents, at least now. There’s also documents that are shared with us that you could see here. In this case, we don’t have any. Products lists are great as well. This is where you can kind of see all the different, you know, product lines that you may have and what, you know, items that you have. So it’s great to kind of store over here, at least. Pages is another one. So, basically, within the site, there’s the multiple pages that are created or you can create and this is where you would do that, right? So you can actually create a site page, for instance, for this particular SharePoint site. And you’d be able to, you know, change the, you know, create a new site and a new page within the header. You can actually change the image and how it looks and edit all of that and then publish that page. And it would be published within this site, right? You can keep track of all those pages through this ribbon on the left side, and see all of that show up here and the history of that.

What else you can do is see all the different sire contents that it entails, right? So these are all the different documents and contents that it has within it and, of course, there’s subsites that you can have as well and create those as well. Now, within this particular area, you could see the usage of the site. You could see some workflows that are created and some of the settings of this particular site. Now if you don’t want to just look at this site, you can actually see the settings of, you know, multiple areas and just on a… If you go on the top right here within SharePoint, you can, you know, add a page and do some commands from here as well, like, for example, add an app.

You know, and apps are great way… For example, you’ll have the document library being one of the apps. You’d have tasks that you can create within there as well. You can have a picture gallery that within there, you know, and so much more. They’re just about 16 pages like this of different apps that you can include within your site that make it a little bit more easier to view and work with, but you can also, you know, change the themes and, you know, change the look and all the different things that you can do, right? But what’s really cool is within these sites you can actually see all of the different features that you can manage. For example, there is the ability for you to… If I go back on these sites here, you can, for example, change the permissions from here.

You can change and restrict certain things that you’d like to do from here as soon as it loads. I can show you a couple more of that. Come on. Okay. Here we are. So, for example, if you have site permissions, you can click over here and see all the different permissions. You can have, again, someone has full control, whereas you only want them to have, you know, a read-only or an edit-only view. You can also invite people now internally and externally to this as required. And then, again, change their level of permissions as well, right? So these are site members. They can edit and then these are site owners who are people who actually own the site. And so it’s kind of integrated and seamless in that way and it really brings about a great experience within SharePoint.

But, again, it’s, it’s only intended to create these sites and for you to be able to use it for that purpose. If you’re, you know, wanting to do conversations like chats and other things like that, that would be a Team’s activity. So you can actually create video conferencing and audio conferencing calls from there or communicate in a chat-based form. Even here, if you actually look at the contact cards of these people, when you, for example, for Adele, I can actually send her an email from here or go through, you know, a separate application to be able to do this stuff, right, where, you know, that’s a little bit more clean on Teams. The same thing, you see the different site designs. From here you can, you know, all the different contents from here as well.

That’s, generally, a very high-level introduction to what SharePoint is or can do. You know, you could create sites for your HR team, for instance, where all the marketing and on-boarding stuff can happen. You can see, you know, what documents are corporate-wide and share within everyone in your organization, take surveys like, you know, they have and other things like that and there’s apps to do that within SharePoint. So I think that would be one application you can use or one, you know, method you could use SharePoint with as well, you know, and you could see a few different ones. Now, keep in mind that every…again, the confusion comes when you build…when you create a team site or, yeah, a team’s project, that you actually get a SharePoint site as well, right? And it restores all the information and content and integrates that, you know, on the back end here as well.

And then, you know, people start saying, “Well, I don’t really need to use Teams. I can use SharePoint.” Again, there are things that, you know, SharePoint wasn’t able to ever do that Teams now is able to do and vice versa. So that kind of concludes what I had for today. If there are any questions or concerns or comments that you may want to have, feel free to speak or type them out right now and, Melissa, will let me know or reach out to him personally, with my contact information. And I will have this blog posted on my website as well, so you can come back at any time and take a look. And be sure to visit our other blogs and, you know, around, Delve and other products that we’ve done such as Teams and things like that. If there are any questions, I’ll take them now. Otherwise, thank you very much for attending. Okay.

Melissa: I’m taking a look at the questions pane, but I don’t see anything coming up.

Ziad: Sure. It sounds great. That’s fantastic to hear. We will stay in touch and, hopefully, it was great learning for all of you.