Before discussing the pros and cons of the SharePoint Intranet, let’s briefly look at how it relates to technology and the business world. In recent years, the remarkable progress of technology has brought about a total change in the business world. Advancements in technology have made it possible for anyone with the right skills and a laptop to start any digital business quickly.
While many technological advances could not survive in times past, the intranet has not stopped evolving since its inception. Intranet hosting software has revolutionized the world of business. Intranets have changed the way a business works today. So managers and executives are often surprised to see how fast their companies grow.
Although we already sense that you know what an intranet is, we will make sure about it, briefly explaining its meaning. An intranet is a private network that allows its employees to collaborate and share information securely and determine resources.
That definition of the intranet is enough for us. However, this article will shed light on the benefits of SharePoint development services and their drawbacks.
So, without further ado, let’s get started!
Hang on a minute! Before we jump right into discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the SharePoint intranet, it would be good to look at what SharePoint development services are and their features.
What is SharePoint?
Microsoft SharePoint development services is a highly configurable, customer-facing, web-based platform integrated with Microsoft Office for file storage and sharing.
In simple terms, it is a content and document management system. It provides organizations with secure workspaces and helps their employees coordinate and communicate with their teams. This includes creating tasks, keeping track of schedules, and looking up any details related to your daily jobs or projects.
SharePoint intranet features
- Collaboration: Different teams working on the same project can collaborate across apps, and developers can build their apps and customize them.
- Extension: Applications can be deployed in the cloud through the SharePoint Online service. You have to sign up for Office 365 and get advanced capabilities.
- Interoperability: SharePoint integrates MS Office documents and web-based documents and allows customers to build advanced custom solutions using the latest technologies.
SharePoint development services offers various features. For example, one can build a website for clients or create a functional internal team site using the intranet. It also allows you to share and send external business partners (Extranet) information.
Let’s move forward by looking at the pros and cons of the SharePoint intranet.
SharePoint Intranet – Pros and Cons
Pros (Advantages)
- Wide range of features
SharePoint offers variable features, including task management, resource library, document management, and security information management.
The wide and diverse features that SharePoint offers ensure that developers don’t have to code every feature from scratch. Instead, they have everything in place, and they need to work on customization, improving it according to the company’s requirements.
- Office 365 integrations
SharePoint is now part of the Office 365 suite, making it look nicer. Since Microsoft has exclusively built all products on Office 365, there is no doubt that all products work in perfect harmony. Therefore, organizations can take advantage of all the products offered through Office 365 by connecting them to the SharePoint intranet platform
In addition to this, new versions, features and enhancements to Office 365 are regularly offered to SharePoint Online customers at no additional cost. This way, customers never have to wait for SharePoint on-premises versions to be introduced.
- Integration with other systems
There’s no denying the fact that SharePoint offers a wide range of unique features.
This makes it easy for organizations to access information in a short time by connecting different systems from available sources.
- Personalization
Many organizations started using SharePoint because it was designed to be moulded to meet different business requirements. It also provides the foundation for various business solutions, including portals, intranets, collaborative workspaces, and many more.
It offers many opportunities for integrations and customizations. Developers can quickly create anything from a simple custom plugin to a complicated application to meet specific business processes and requirements, such as collaborative intranet solutions.
It is an end-to-end solution for building different processes and platforms, making it an attractive option if flexibility is sought.
Cons (Disadvantages)
- Complex to maintain and use
Without a doubt, SharePoint is the best intranet platform and serves as an umbrella for interdepartmental collaboration and different processes. The platform offers a wide variety of features, but apparently, SharePoint is difficult to maintain.
According to a report published by AIIM, two-thirds of SharePoint organizations say the primary cause of low adoption rates is inadequate user training and complexity in using the platform.
The platform was built to be customized instead of being used directly “out of the box”. This clarifies that advanced technical knowledge is required to develop and manage the platform.
Users must be highly technically trained, or the company must have its SharePoint developer(s), a professional IT consultant, and an intranet service provider to help maintain the platform.
This requirement of an IT team, professional SharePoint developer, or external service provider can be time-consuming and costly, as the internal team could focus on more valuable work. Additionally, relying on a third-party service provider may delay platform content updates.
- Expensive implementation and customization
SharePoint pricing depends on the chosen model: subscription, on-premise, or hybrid. Being its flexible price, the cost remains an obstacle for many companies.
The platform requires a high level of customization and must be built to meet the specific needs of organizations, which can eventually break the budget of some organizations. The hybrid solution or the on-premise solution (local server) is not only affected by the cost of the license since there is a cost for the deployment, customization, migration, infrastructure, operation of equipment and software, training and administration.
Even if you get a free SharePoint Online license with your Office 365, you’ll still have to bear the cost of additional customization, implementation, training, and administration.
The high cost of introducing SharePoint often causes delays in its implementation. Therefore, achieving a positive return on investment can be a longer journey than expected.
- A wide range of features can create a mess
We all know that SharePoint comes with several features, but those features can also make it difficult for an organization to choose the ones that are a good fit for their business needs. In addition, if all features are enabled at once without prioritizing, then a messy intranet can hamper user activities in the long run.
To prevent that, organizations will need to analyze organizational processes, collaboration habits, and employee activities to ensure they prioritize the most relevant and necessary features.
Apart from this, many features require extensive customization to fit each business’s requirements, so organizations have to spend time adapting them before introducing them for general use in the organization.
- Integrations require additional development effort
As already mentioned in the benefits section, the SharePoint intranet integrates with Office 365 and other systems. Each integration will have its particularity.
Integration issues need to be considered beforehand, as they can add additional time and cost to the project. In addition, employee productivity could be affected in the event of failure.
Is SharePoint Intranet Right for Your Business?
We have discussed the features, pros and cons of the SharePoint development services. We hope you are now more familiar with the many aspects you need to consider before choosing the best platform for your organization.
That decision will depend on your company’s needs, size, and budget. However, SharePoint is equally suitable for small, medium, and large companies with many teams and collaboration programs. Also, setting up SharePoint development services for an organization with an IT department is quite simple.
At the same time, small businesses can opt for Office 365 or SharePoint Online solutions.
We hope that this information has been of interest to you, that it has added value to your company and that you get to benefit from it as much as you can.
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