SharePoint 2016 Helps You Work Better Together, In the Cloud
The next iteration of SharePoint is right around the corner, but you don’t have to wait until Microsoft Ignite to start learning how SharePoint 2016 will factor into your evolution as a digital business and help IT continue its journey towards becoming an innovation factory.
This blog will look at how SharePoint 2016 fits into your platform of choice, what additional insights it can help you harvest from big data and how to make your team more productive. And lastly, how do you fully leverage social and mobile with SharePoint 2016 to give your audience a personal, fast, reliable experience. How will SharePoint 2016 enhance your employees and customers’ digital experience? Can it provide what they need before they ask or search?
Choose Your Own Platform
SharePoint 2016 will ride on the platform of your choice and has Cloud “built-in” to make integration and access to data, easier and faster. Hybrid is the new normal so you choose when and how to go Cloud on your terms.
On-premises continues to dominate the SharePoint community and SharePoint 2016 is ready to take you to the next level if that’s where you plan to stay. Feature enhancements will be covered further down, but migration from previous versions of SharePoint on-premises will be greatly simplified in SharePoint 2016 to both on-premises and Cloud options such as Azure, AWS or managed hosters like Fpweb.net. Installing SharePoint 2016 will have fully automated builds available on Azure, AWS and Fpweb.net.
It’s becoming increasingly important to efficiently manage SharePoint and its interactions with your other systems and clouds. A “single pane” of glass is the holy grail for IT admins. Look for System Center to integrate tightly with SharePoint 2016 for automation, endpoint security, backup and other tedious tasks. 3rd party control panels are also available to help span on-premises, Azure, AWS, Google, Rackspace and others. Wrangle disparate networks securely yourself or with the help of a managed services provider.
Security is greatly improved in SharePoint 2016. Standard functions you’re used to seeing in Exchange will now be available so Legal can hold documents as needed. With Azure, AWS or Fpweb.net, you can also freeze the entire SharePoint 2016 VHD for Legal and archive it.
Common Use Cases for SharePoint 2016:
Business Continuity
Run SharePoint 2016 on-premises and have it natively replicate to Azure/AWS and managed by Fpweb.net. Continue to transform your data center by virtualizing SharePoint 2016, automating it and extending it to the Cloud for admin support, management or infrastructure scale out. SharePoint 2016 will also play a part in your infrastructure modernization with improved application development to readily span clouds for easier and faster data access.
Insights
Give your customers the best experience possible and manage your business better by using SharePoint 2016 to gain better insight into the things that matter most. Harvest insights from your big data; make better real-time decisions; mitigate risk with more accurate and current analysis; get new customers and grow them faster; service the customer well with a full 360 view of their needs – now and in the future, to deliver the best customer experience possible!
Big data risk analysis is critical to the financial and insurance industries, and SharePoint 2016’s Business Intelligence capabilities help these industries wade through mountains of data quickly and efficiently. Companies can further push this capacity down to their users by leveraging their Office 365 subscriptions and its Power BI feature. So at any level of the digital business, the individual doing the analysis can have the work done on their terms.
Qualified Data
Making better business decisions is all about having the freshest and most relevant information available to weigh benefits and risks. Stale data increases the risk of making a poor decision. Irrelevant or non-contextual data can make a seemingly simple decision, complex. SharePoint 2016’s BI, partnered with SQL and Azure Machine Learning can help you garner better business intelligence and use that information to make solid, game changing decisions in real-time.
In order to give your customers a better experience, you first need to get closer to the customer. Learn what they need now and in the future. Anticipate those needs and deliver when the need becomes “top of mind.” Tools like Sitecore and CRM are key to delivering an exceptional experience. Sitecore optimizes the prospects’ experience on your website and CRM helps you service and grow the customer once you garner their business. SharePoint 2016 integrates with Sitecore and CRM so you can leverage the data already housed in SharePoint, allowing your team to quickly search across your network and connect the dots to paint a fuller picture of the customer and their needs.
Productivity
Getting more done in less time is the name of the game in productivity. Fewer meetings, less training needed and more doing, leads to a healthy bottom line. SharePoint 2016 along with Office 365 are key pieces to your team’s productivity. These tools, along with OneDrive enable your team to mobilize, increase sales, service customers better with personalized insights and collaborate socially to get more done faster.
Office 365 is the Microsoft Office suite that you can use on virtually any device from anywhere with Internet access. It enables your company to leverage the Office programs that everyone already knows how to use. Hybrid allows you to build a bridge between your on-premises SharePoint 2016 data and Office 365 data so your teams can collaborate in real-time and move your company forward, faster.
OneDrive is your team’s “Dropbox” but with seamless integration into Office 365 and SharePoint 2016. And best of all, there is governance, enterprise security and rights control built around it so you can make sure that your Intellectual Property remains yours. Say no to USB keys and yes to the OneDrive storage cloud. Not to mention, storage constraints have now been eliminated by Microsoft with unlimited OneDrive storage for Office 365 subscribers.
Your users are mobile and need access to their peers, projects and data wherever and whenever they choose to work. Whether that means picking up their device of choice and walking to a colleagues desk or connecting to the plane’s WIFI on the way to meet with a customer, mobility is now a must for maximizing productivity. Your mobile users may be on an iPad, Surface or laptop remotely using Office 365 to get work done.
With hybrid integration to SharePoint 2016 (and single sign on), the team can search across the network to quickly find the people or data they need. This results in saving and making money, plus you’re giving your customers a better experience.
Customer Experience
The sales team wants to focus on deals that are most likely to close, and they want to close them faster so they can get out there and find more deals. Their productivity is literally either making or costing you money. Creating sales contracts living on-premises on SharePoint 2016 via Office 365 or CRM is a common scenario for a Microsoft platform based company. Your sales workforce just wants it to work.
The power of SharePoint 2016 BI and Office 365 Delve is to give your salespeople a more holistic view of the customer’s touch points at your company – good and bad. Even the bad can become opportunities to delight a customer. Gaining insight into your customer’s future needs and nurturing the relationship to meet their needs is key. Knowledge really is power to the sales team.
Social collaboration is more important than ever as companies are finding critical resources (people and data) silo’d and hidden when needed. SharePoint 2016 helps your workforce discover what they need, when they need it. Office 365 gives them the tools to work together and get it done in real time. Collaborating on a Word or Excel document while chatting on Lync, time zones blur into common work zones. Yammer gives you the private social channels to work together in Facebook fashion to share, document and brainstorm across locations, departments and applications. Again no training needed since your users already know the tools they are using to work together.
Social
Dynamic networks connect people and ideas. Your enterprise can use SharePoint 2016 to break down silos of information and people by becoming the hub of social enterprise. Empower your teams to work effortlessly across time zones and watch ideas flow and result in faster decision making.
Today’s top performing companies have a connected workforce – the kind that SharePoint enables. They have access to each other, are informed and engaged. Leverage your greatest resource, your people, by empowering, aligning and improving company culture with social enterprise. Use Lync so your teams can instantly chat and share ideas from any device anywhere.
Yammer is a key tool for connecting SharePoint 2016 to Office 365 so your workers can follow and tag documents from both SharePoint 2016 and Office 365. Yammer replaces the Newsfeed and is embedded on SharePoint pages.
Get closer to your customer on their terms. Are they happy? Capture real time data to CRM to give customers a more responsive experience. By listening and anticipating their needs you can turn a challenged customer into an opportunity, turning that frown upside down and leaving them delighted.
In the end, social moves the company needle in two ways: First by increasing the velocity of your company to share knowledge and make better decisions faster. After all, innovation requires free time and collaboration. Second, social is how sales are made today. Customer reviews and recommendations from friends or colleagues build the trust before they contact you. Social pays.
Mobility
Empower your company to work from their device of choice, while providing both consistent access to and security of your enterprise applications and information residing on SharePoint 2016. Business leaders need enterprise mobility to deliver new products/services faster, empower employees, transform business solutions, connect with customers on their terms and delight customers by anticipating their needs and responding faster.
Mobility in the enterprise allows your workers to work when, where and how they work best. It offers your workforce instant access to all content and colleagues at anytime, anywhere, on any device. As work and life lines blur, on-the-go office productivity becomes more important than ever. The other result of mobility is the ability to get closer to customers on their terms. Business no longer happens 9-5 M-F. Responsiveness shows you care and keeps the customers coming back for more.
Employees spend more than 1/3 of their time searching and gathering information each day. Give some of this time back to the company with SharePoint 2016 and the mobile device of their choice. With SharePoint 2016, they can find the information and colleague they need to get their work done, and with a modern device, they have instant office productivity anywhere. SharePoint 2016 and modern devices can have a dramatic business impact on your business by saving time and increasing productivity.
And Back to Productivity
It may seem obvious to say that devices allow us to get more done outside the office, but they also help us get more done in the office. Get a head start on your day the night before and as you make the coffee in the morning. Get up to speed before you hit the office. Arrive prepared and ready to tackle the day.
And we can’t overlook the power of a sales team on the go. Whether responding to a customer after hours or taking an order over lunch, a mobile connected sales team will outperform a traditional team because they are by nature, more responsive. They are talking to customers on the customer’s terms. And this is truly delightful.
Why Upgrade to SharePoint 2016?
In two words: Cloud Power.
Upgrading to SharePoint 2016 lets you integrate with and fully leverage the Cloud on your terms.
SharePoint 2016 is truly “Cloud hybrid ready.” Want to seamlessly integrate search with Office 365? Or how about use Azure for replication and fail-over? How about tighter Yammer integration? Single sign across your major enterprise apps and SharePoint? And what about the Holy Grail of SharePoint search – securely searching across 3rd party Clouds? Many new hybrid cloud models will be possible with the new SharePoint 2016 version and many will revolve around SharePoint.
Expect great things from Microsoft’s fresh faced SharePoint version. As you’ve continued to evolve your business to do more with less, SharePoint has continued to optimize the workplace collaboration needed to get the job done. Much to the delight of this customer.
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