Effective collaboration can be a challenge for large enterprises because their departments are usually isolated from one another and have their own tasks and goals. So, to enable healthy company-wide collaboration, enterprises need to choose a strategy and tools carefully. Many enterprises opt for SharePoint as it’s one of the most popular platforms that offers multiple capabilities for collaboration. SharePoint is not a static platform, it always forges ahead. Virtual Summit and Ignite 2018 announced new capabilities of the platform that can bring even more value to enterprise collaboration.

In this article, we explore SharePoint’s
current offering for enterprises in terms of collaboration.

SharePoint new features for enterprise collaboration

Below, we list the most important
innovations that help SharePoint to transform employee collaboration.

Erasing physical boundaries between employees

Besides providing 24/7
accessibility on all mobile devices, SharePoint can erase physical boundaries
between employees even more due to introducing SharePoint Spaces, a feature
that brings mixed reality into the collaboration environment. SharePoint Spaces
puts employees into virtual reality with specialized headsets to create vivid immersive experiences. This leads to more effective collaboration
between employees in different countries, for example, those who work together
on designing car parts in 3D. Also, due to a strong emotional impact on people,
SharePoint Spaces can make employee communication more personalized regardless
of the distance between them.

Streamlining collaboration on content

Productive enterprise collaboration
is impossible without sleek managing of diverse data types, and SharePoint
offers the following new capabilities to facilitate collaboration on content:

• New pages. They are built using web parts that can be customized according to a company’s needs.
  Users can add documents, embed videos, images, site activities, Yammer feeds,
  etc. into them.
• Mode
  lists & libraries.  New document libraries and lists allow users to easily
  and quickly create, organize, and edit SharePoint content that is mobile-friendly.
  With this mode
  experience, users can easily copy and move files using the
  command bar, pin documents to the top in a document library to highlight them,
  add files as links. They can also resize, sort, filter, and group columns, create
  custom views, improve the display of lists with column formatting, etc.

Making collaboration smart

Microsoft introduced Artificial Intelligence
(AI) & machine lea
ing into SharePoint. These technologies bring new
collaboration experiences to an enterprise’s employees by improving
files’ accessibility and search.

• Automated
  transcription & face recognition. Adding the Microsoft
  Stream web part into SharePoint Online enables automated
  transcription services for video and audio files. Transcription captures spoken
  words and converts them into text that is shown in a separate window together
  with relevant time marks. This allows users to
  easily navigate through a video or an audio file. It can be useful, for
  example, for getting key takeaways from video or audio conversation with a
  customer. Microsoft Stream also allows detectinghuman faces in a video automatically and provides a timeline for
  each person. Сlicking on a person’s timeline directs a user to the point in
  the video where that person is shown.  
• Content personalization. SharePoint offers web parts that support
  personalized recommendations powered by the intelligence of Microsoft Graph, a
  developer platform used for building APIs to connect various services with
  Microsoft products. Such recommendations are the result of insights provided by
  Microsoft Graph that analyzes users’ activity and content they work with
  (files, messages, conversations, tasks, etc.). Recommendations can depend on a
  user’s role in a project or their position. For example, if a user is a
  financial analyst, a news web part will filter out financial news for them.  What’s more, these SharePoint web parts provide
  for easy access to relevant content by displaying personalized lists of recently
  viewed sites, documents, and news.
• Intelligent search. SharePoint provides a mode
  search experience that enables users
  to see results as they start typing, and the results update as they type.
  Besides, SharePoint search functionality allows displaying search results from
  across the enterprise. For example, within Word, a user can find not only other
  Word documents but also their PowerPoint presentation.
  Also, due to the abilities to determine where
  photos were taken, recognize objects and
  extract text from audio, video, and images, AI enables searching such files by
  keywords and metadata like text documents. This can help employees to quickly find
  documents and other materials to fulfill tasks under a project and share
  information with other team members.
• Chatbots. Integrating chatbots into the SharePoint environment (for
  example, an intranet) helps users to navigate, search and work with it more
  effectively. Thus, chatbots can act like employees’ personal assistants. They not only provide quick access to
  information but also notify users about document updates, policy changes or
  events. Also, chatbots can book a meeting room, schedule a vacation, run a survey,
  or kick off a workflow, upon a user’s request or provide a user with a relevant
  guide.

Improving data security, integrity & compliance

SharePoint offers strong security capabilities,
like multi-factor authentication, that help to protect collaboration-related
information from ransomware. SharePoint also helps to retain data
integrity by protecting it from accidental file deletion or
corruption. For example, Files Restore, a new self-service recovery solution
for SharePoint, allows restoring files from any point in time during the last
30 days.

Moreover, SharePoint offers
intelligent compliance, which facilitates adhering to compliance regulations like
SOX or HIPAA when collaborating on audio, video, and images. It’s possible due
to SharePoint’s capability to extract text from these types of files and apply
compliance policies to them automatically.  

Limitations

Although new smart capabilities can
bring much value to businesses, it’s important to take into account their
limitations, too. Of course, the main limitation is their cost. Implementation of
mixed reality and AI is very expensive and small companies can hardly afford
these technologies. For example, a basic AI project can cost as high as
$300,000. Besides, these technologies lack flexibility as their capabilities
are restricted to only the algorithms that they have been trained for. So, they
require ongoing maintenance to adapt to new business goals and other systems
and platforms, which is also costly. What’s more, implementation of smart
technologies is always time-consuming.

New opportunities for collaboration

The recent updates of the platform have made SharePoint-based enterprise collaboration more advanced by bringing about features like chatbots. The new functionality of SharePoint enhances collaboration due to the immersive experience, content personalization, smart search and compliance, and more.

About the Author:

Sergey Golubenko manages ScienceSoft’s Office 365 and SharePoint projects on consultancy, configuration, migration and custom development.