Microsoft’s SharePoint is a highly customizable platform. However, currently not so many people know how to use the customizations to their benefit, and they experience difficulties trying to figure it out. To help solve the problem, we will provide extremely effective SharePoint best practices that will help you optimize file management and save time while working on your SharePoint tasks.
No matter if you’re a new adopter or an experienced SharePoint maven, you should always strive to add to what you can achieve with Microsoft SharePoint Consulting Services. There are lots of improvements you can do to make your documents more secure as well as easier to understand for your users.
Here are the 7 Most Useful SharePoint best practices for end users,
- Name Your Files Properly and Uniformly
While using SharePoint, you’ll notice an obscure filename appearing in the search results just above. That’s because someone uploaded a document without changing its name. This can cause some confusion and a lot of clicking for users who are trying to find things and have to open every document to see if it’s the right one.
Some valuable tips for uniform naming conventions in SharePoint:
- Shorten names for sites, libraries, and list items.
- Avoid using special characters and spaces in library names.
- Avoid version numbers in document names.
- Autoname the documents.
- Utilize Tags to Find Your Documents
Since Microsoft Search picks up just about anything on your sites, to get more specific results, you can tag documents. So, you can search for “XYZ File” and get exactly what you want.
To do something like this in your SharePoint, you first need to go to the document library in which you have your documents and add a new field that will hold that category.
- Set Up Alerts for Sensitive Documents
Setting up Alerts can be helpful in case you want to get notified (usually via email) when someone makes changes in the SP list or library. This way, you won’t need to keep refreshing your SharePoint page to see if someone added a new file or made a change.
- Lock Your Private Documents
Often you need to make it so a document in a library is still viewable, but nobody can change it or make any update to its. In other words, you need to lock a document.
Using SharePoint permissions for this often turns into a nightmare because there is no indication for everyone except the owner that this document has special access like that.
- Control Version History
Knowing SharePoint versioning best practices (or at least some basics) is important. As you know, all changes that happen with a document on the web are automatically saved. But what if you don’t like those changes? This is what SharePoint version control is for. In case someone has messed up the document, all you need is to have your documents versioning turned on. Then you can restore the previous version.
- Use Library Views
To present SharePoint content in a convenient way, for example, as a calendar, Excel-like table, Gantt chart and more. You can also create custom views by varying the order and the number of certain columns in a view (e.g., Project Name, Assignee, Start Date, Due Date, and Project Status). It’s also possible to configure these views either for personal or public use.
- Leverage the Check Out Feature
In case you have an important document that you don’t want others to mess with, the Check Out feature helps you to prevent any alterations of a document by other individuals. It maintains data integrity and helps to avoid possible conflicts around unapproved document alterations.
Conclusion:
If you follow all these best practices, then rest assured that you can utilize the full potential of Microsoft SharePoint. Also, it helps extremely in enhancing the overall user experience.
However, if you don’t have enough resources to spend on perfecting your SharePoint performance, we’re here to help. Being an experienced SharePoint consulting company for years, SA Technologies is a well-suited option for the businesses that wish to deliver enhanced user experience, promote accessibility, and make informed decisions. Our Microsoft Sharepoint Consulting Services come with a wide spectrum of offerings. It is open to the customization’s as per the business objectives of the company.
