Best Practices: Team Productivity, Regardless of Devices or Storage Services

2015 was a big year for a number of business trends, as collaboration, the cloud, mobile working and productivity made statements on their importance in the enterprise. With technology evolving at such an impressive rate, 2016 has continued on from where 2015 left off, and pushes us further into the fabled “office of the future”.

A lot of these prevalent business trends are at the heart of SharePlus; many of the app’s core features involve maximizing team collaboration, working outside of the traditional office space and on mobile devices.

Continual quest

Despite the fact that roughly half the adult population owns a smartphone, mobile is still in its infancy in terms of its influence on customer behavior. Of course, the smartphone will no doubt mature at an astounding rate given how quickly it has started off (that current 50% is expected to rise to 80% by 2020) and as such the enterprise is doing all it can not to get left behind.

SharePlus is available on iOS and Android devices; optimized for the mobile support of SharePoint and Office 365. Offering a mobile user experience with the ability to access, edit and share all your files, images, documents and more, you’re able to connect to several SharePoint portals without the need of your IT department.

No Wi-Fi? No problem!

The appeal of mobile working stems from the ability to work from any location; you’re no longer chained to your desk if you want to be productive. We’ll admit that working in any location may be a bit of a stretch - it would prove difficult to continue responding to emails if you were inside the Krubera Cave, for example. Difficult, but not impossible. Offline capabilities mean you can stay productive without a Wi-Fi connection, adding, editing and deleting files which will re-sync when a connection is reestablished.

The power of social

It’s difficult to think of social as a new trend due to its monopolization of the web, but in terms of the enterprise it’s still seen by some as a novelty. Its value should by no means be overlooked, however, as it has become the new standard for companies of all sizes to communicate quickly and freely. SharePlus’ Social Module brings social to SharePoint, allowing you to share ideas, start conversations and keep up to date with your colleagues. Access both your public and private document libraries from your personal SharePoint storage to collaborate with others on documents.

The Documents Module

As the rate of data creation grows with no sign of slowing, 2015 saw the beginning of the battle for Cloud storage with heavyweights Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon all staking their claim. The latest update which came to SharePlus improved upon the Documents Module – created to facilitate access to all your relevant documents. Your files can be accessed from a number of different locations: your personal cloud storages, a private local storage on your device or a shared location across your network. The cloud content sources that are available are:

• OneDrive for Business

Office 365 or SharePoint personal cloud storage (this will be pre-configured if you are using SharePlus Enterprise and have Social features enabled).

• Google Drive

Cloud storage

• Dropbox

Cloud storage

As we create more and more content, storing it somewhere that’s easily accessible becomes more of a necessity than a want. A centralized location for your documents is another step towards a more mobile, collaborative working environment.

Accessing your files from content sources is a simple task, with a varying list of actions (dependent on the content source). For Google Drive and Dropbox (as well as any Network Drives) users can create documents using Local Files or your Photo Album, add folders to organize your files, as well as record photo, video and audio from your device.

For those of you using OneDrive for Business, the above applies, plus a few other features stemming from Office 365 compatibility. Along with creating documents or folders, users are also able to add their own ReportPlus dashboards. In the settings menu, users can alter the way SharePoint lists are displayed – switching between the SharePoint list view or the SharePlus list view. SharePlus also allows for ad hoc sorting and grouping: by dragging list columns to the ‘Group By’ and ‘Sort By’ sections, you can specify group criteria and sort criteria respectively.

Best practices

With the addition of new content sources, there are more ways than ever to work on your files and documents with SharePlus. As we are likely to create even more data and content every day, having a centralized space to store it all is critical. SharePlus provides you access to more of your content than before, meaning you can enable your teams to be work anytime anywhere while mobilizing your SharePoint investment.