Microsoft SharePoint: What It Is (And What Your Business Can Do With It)

August 27, 2025

How much does your business value communication and data security? The answer to that should be “A lot.” Microsoft SharePoint, a web-based platform for storing, organizing, sharing, and accessing information, can help businesses that use Microsoft 365 work more effectively. Today, we’ll cover three of its best features and what your business can accomplish with them.

Centralized Document Management and Version Control

There’s nothing more frustrating than doing work multiple times, yet this happens frequently when teams don’t have a centralized document management tool with version control.

SharePoint provides a secure, central place where your business documents can live, and with robust version control, you can know when documents are last edited or saved. Additionally, you can revert back to a prior version of a document if you need to. There won’t be any confusion over which version is the final draft, and you’ll have a clear audit trail to know who has made changes and when.

In total, all these features allow businesses to avoid errors and maximize the probability they’re operating from the most current versions of documents.

Real-Time Collaboration and Co-Authoring

How much time do you waste sending documents back and forth via email? What about waiting for feedback and manually entering in changes?

All of this can be avoided through the use of SharePoint. When it’s integrated with solutions like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, it allows users to co-author documents and collaborate in real time. You can have multiple team members working on the same document and see each other’s changes, making collaboration seamless.

When used well, SharePoint enables better teamwork on projects and makes finishing them faster and more efficient.

Customizable Team Sites and Intranets

Imagine if you had a centralized location for internal news, company resources, tracking project updates, and so much more. That’s the power of an intranet solution.

If you need a central digital hub for your business’ resources, SharePoint delivers. Instead of having information scattered across emails, chat apps, and shared drives, your organization can use a SharePoint intranet to create customizable team sites. You can even make department-specific sites to help your team know where all of the important files are at any given time.

You’ll find your business enjoys better internal communication, less email clutter, and easier access to information on demand.

Ready to get started with SharePoint and other technology tools to support your business success? First Column IT can help. To learn more, call us today at (571) 470-5594.

‍

4 Security Topics to Keep In Mind During the Onboarding Process for New Hires

All companies have policies in place which govern how their employees use their technology, so it makes sense that any new employees should be onboarded in accordance with these expectations. Let’s go over how you can make sure your new employees know and understand your organization’s policies as they relate to business technology.

April 14, 2023

IT Has Changed and Your Business Can’t Afford to Lag Behind

IT support is crucial to the success of any company in today’s fast-paced technology-focused business environment. Some organizations have an internal IT administrator, while others choose to rely on outsourced resources. Both of these are perfectly acceptable responses to the problem at hand, which is guaranteeing you have access to IT resources to keep your business running effectively.

April 12, 2023

What is Downtime Costing You?

Business owners try to avoid downtime like the plague, but it’s often a challenge to do so. The impact of downtime can be devastating for even the most stable business, and this is even more so the case when you bring profits and bottom lines into view. We’ll take a look at how you can calculate the cost of a downtime event.

Welcome to the First Column IT Tech Blog