Part 3: Is Email an Outdated Form of Business Communication? Email’s Replacement.

Posted by Eric O. Schueler, Senior V.P. of Information Technology

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this blog, I have made cases for doing away with business email, and I presented businesses with alternative programs that can clear your inbox and increase productivity and efficiency. In this blog I will continue to make a case for replacing email with a toolbox of programs that can better business communication, and I will introduce the document collaboration application SharePoint.

Part 3: Is Email an Outdated Form of Business Communication? Email’s Replacement.

In previous blogs, I talked about reducing your inbox using social networking via Yammer and instant messaging via Lync. If you missed these, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Today, we are going to talk about a third technology that will reduce the e-mails in your inbox, and this is document collaboration. Consider how inefficient it is to e-mail a document for someone’s ideas or input only to get an e-mail back containing said changes or worse, the body of the e-mail containing the changes that should be made. If there are multiple people in the mix, the amount of documents in circulation which are different can quickly spiral out of control, and then some poor soul will have to compare them all and merge them into a final document.

A Document Collaboration Solution

Introducing Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint makes document collaboration easy while always maintaining the most current version. This is because with versioning turned on, you can always step back in time if a change was made incorrectly.

In SharePoint, you can also add metadata to your document libraries, so that additional information can be seen about the document such as status or stage. Users can make comments about the document as it progresses to completion. If you wanted to be alerted as to when a change is made to a document, you can subscribe to it. If you want to comment about a document, you can do that too. Sharing a document in SharePoint is a snap and even sharing a document with a customer or client outside of the organization is possible.

I’m really just touching on the surface of what is possible with SharePoint.How Can You Get SharePoint?

It’s available in several packages of Office 365, and it can be installed on premise with one or more servers. Contact me for assistance with choosing the best way to deploy SharePoint for your business.

If you want to learn more contact me, Eric O. Schueler, Senior V.P. of Information Technology. (757) 399-3350

Stay tuned for Part 4 of this series, where I will go over how to get all of these programs in a “Modern Office” package.

Posted by Eric O. Schueler, A+, MCP, MCSE, MCTS, CSSA, ACSP – Senior V.P. of Information Technology at HRCT. Eric has been in the business of providing IT and consulting for small and medium business for more than 15 years.

Hampton Roads Communication Technologies (HRCT) provides quality business telecommunications solutions, like Microsoft Lync and Office 365, computer and IT support and managed service agreements to companies and organizations throughout the United States, Mid-Atlantic and the Hampton Roads Virginia cities of Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Newport News and Hampton, north into Williamsburg and south into the Outer Banks of North Carolina. HRCT keeps your company connected with 24/7 emergency service.

Call today. (757) 399-3350