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Reduce IT Dependencies for your SharePoint Customizations

We all know that SharePoint is a great platform for enterprise collaboration and content management. Millions of people worldwide are using SharePoint as a secure hub for storing, organizing, sharing, and accessing the information on the fly (from any device).

With periodic enhancements, SharePoint has evolved into a highly customizable platform for enterprises. Because of this nature, businesses are using SharePoint to develop powerful apps to accomplish their key critical business requirements.

However, to achieve this, users have a lot of dependencies on IT professionals and SharePoint developers. Moreover, hiring a SharePoint developer is a cost and effort-intensive task. On the other hand, the IT department is usually overburdened with their SLAs and they struggle to match the demands of the users. As a result, it takes more time for users to get the customizations and changes they want, thereby impacting their deliverables. Long waiting periods create dangers of falling behind for the businesses as the marketplace is intensely competitive and dynamic.

Though the modern-day workforce is more tech-savvy than they ever were, building custom applications on SharePoint is something that is way beyond their technology know-how.  Some enterprises rescue this situation by hiring costly professional SharePoint developers. However, even professional developers would require months to build the perfect custom solution. No prizes for guessing that this not only adds to additional costs but the turnaround time also increases. On top of this, there is a huge risk of losing exclusive organizational knowledge if your SharePoint developers leave your organization. In such a scenario your projects will be further delayed.

So, what is the solution?

The answer to this question is, you need a “Code Free” SharePoint Application Development Solution. With such a solution there will be no dependencies on the IT department or SharePoint developers. In short, you need a tool that empowers your organizational users to build powerful applications on SharePoint quickly all by themselves, utilizing a ‘No Code’ approach to application development.

However, people often get confused between No-code and Low code, though these two are different concepts. As per a recent study by Forrester Research, the total spending on the low-code category is forecasted to reach $21.2 billion by 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate of roughly 40%.

Considering this data, we can safely assume that spending on no-code solutions is also going to be high and, in the future, it is going to be in great demand.

QuickApps offers a ‘No-Code’ approach to SharePoint Customization. First, let us understand a little about what is a ‘No-Code SharePoint Application Development’. 

No-Code Application Development Solutions like QuickApps mitigates the need for scripting all those lines of code. It offers a ‘point and click’ configuration to create applications with the desired business requirement. All a user has to do is select the options and the kind of outputs required and select the right options. There is absolutely no coding involved in the entire process.

What does all this mean?

This simply means that even a non-coder can develop applications with a simple point and click.

How is it better?

A ‘No-Code’ SharePoint customization solution has many advantages. QuickApps from AgreeYa is a leading ‘Code-Free’ SharePoint Customization Solution. Let us discuss its advantages in detail-

  1. Saves time and money – A ‘Code-Free’ SharePoint Customization App empowers the users to make any desired customizations to SharePoint on their own without any support from a SharePoint developer. This makes the process faster and certainly saves a lot of time that will go into developing an App using coding. Also, it saves businesses from spending on hiring SharePoint professionals which are expensive resources. QuickApps makes application development 80% faster.
  2. Improves time to market and operational efficiency – A ‘Code-Free” SharePoint Customization App accelerates your time to market. Since developing an application without coding is much faster as compared to coding, and hence it improves time to deliver your application. It improves the operational efficiency of the users and reduces the turnaround time of App delivery.
  3. Makes business processes more structured – QuickApps being a codeless SharePoint customization App, empowers users to develop the application as per their business requirement to improve business processes, simplify tedious tasks, and enhance overall functioning.
  4. Fast and improved decision making – QuickApps offers point and click configuration to create the applications as per the business requirement. Using the App, management can take quick and informed decisions.
  5. QuickApps has a short learning curve. Using video training and tutorials, users can easily build/ customize SharePoint to meet their job-specific requirements. Apart from this, users can utilize best practices, and tips from QuickApps experts to quickly learn about various use cases of the tool.
  6. 24X7 support available – AgreeYa provides round the clock customer support for any issues regarding QuickApps. Our experts will guide you through all the steps if you are stuck anywhere

QuickApps, because of its “No-Code” functionality offers scopes for unlimited customizations, business growth, competitive differentiation, and a sustainable business model.

QuickApps caters to both SharePoint On-premise as well as Office 365. Though most organizations are shifting towards Office365, still many organizations are still working with on-premise. QuickApps offers WebApps for both on-premise and Office 365 qlistView, qchartView, qExcelView, qcalenderView are some of the most popular WebApps. Depending upon your environment, select the WebApps that meet your business need.

For free trial visit, http://quickapps.staging.agreeya.com write to us at quickapps@agreeya.com


What to include in your SharePoint customization policy?

One of the reasons for the widespread popularity of SharePoint lies in its flexibility as a rich development platform. While SharePoint comes with its list of attractive out-of-the-box features, adding some customizations makes the platform even more useful and relevant for an enterprise. However, when the same customizations go wrong it has the potential of turning SharePoint into a confusing mess, affecting the health and compliance of the platform. The simple solution to this problem is to have a customization governance policy in place.

Sounds simple right? But according to a Rencore survey on ” SharePoint and Office 365 state of development survey” about half of the businesses either don’t have a customization governance plan or don’t know if they do. So, if a breach occurs in such enterprises, the decision-makers would have a hard time explaining why the SharePoint customizations had not been governed. Even if you have a SharePoint governance policy in place, it is important to implement the same correctly.

What is SharePoint customization governance?

“SharePoint includes customizable features and capabilities that span multiple product areas, such as business intelligence, forms, workflow, and content management. Customization can introduce risks to the stability, maintenance, and security of the environment. To support customization while controlling its scope, you should develop a customization policy.”

Source: Microsoft

This means that there should be a governance plan in place for all types of SharePoint customizations – whether they are as simple as branding changes to the interface or more complex such as introducing workflows and connecting to external programs. But before drafting a comprehensive customization governance plan the key IT decision-makers need to decide on the customizations that should be allowed, a streamlined process for customization reviewing and a process to test their security and health. Moreover, the governance plan should ensure that the customizations remain useful and productive not only now but, in the future, too.

Essential Components of a SharePoint Customization Policy

When you think about Governance, it comprises of two important facets – people and processes. While processes are easy to govern once you have a policy in place, it is more challenging to govern the people who can deviate from the set norms. So, the first step into creating a successful SharePoint customization governance policy is to pick some dependable users and let them incorporate the customization best practices as a part of their work. However, your customization policy should include:

  • Service Level Descriptions: There has to be an approval process in place to monitor changes to SharePoint. This should include the review of customization costs, creating a support team, a failover strategy, among other considerations.
  • Guidelines for Customization Updates and Review: There should be a well-defined method in place to manage the changes to your customization, rules on how updates should be rolled out and a method for controlling or reviewing the source code.
  • Use of approved customization tools: IT decision-makers should research for new tools and review their existing customizations to decide whether they are safe. You can consider a tool like QuickApps for no-code SharePoint customizations which empowers the end-users to customize without any risk to the environment.
  • Streamlined Process for analysis, testing, and deployment: There should be a series of steps to analyze whether the customization is safe. The customization should be tested and deployed using the best practices.
  • The level of Customization allowed: While certain enterprises remain very strict about their customizations and only allow small changes to out-of-the-box SharePoint. Others offer a higher degree of freedom. The approach you use depends entirely on your IT and end-user needs. However, there should be a clear definition of the customizations that are allowed or not allowed in your environment.
  • Mention the Third-party plugins and apps allowed: There should be an established list of third-party tools that are deemed to be safe and secure for your environment. Of course, some level of flexibility has to be provided, but the policy makes sure that any new tool would be judged against a set of pointers. Such a practice ensures that your environment would not be put under any risk due to customizations.

Use QuickApps for risk-free SharePoint customizations

Based on the above information, organizations need to select a customization tool that empowers the power users and end-users to create applications that solve their daily tasks without risking the environment. The solution chosen should stay vital for future customizations, so that the enterprise can continue to derive value from their investment and enjoy enhanced ROI over time. QuickApps is an innovative customization tool containing a set of SharePoint web app and pre-built templates that reduces the dependency on developers and accelerates the application development lifecycle. Users can use the point and click configuration to build risk-free customizations.


How to Streamline App Development by Using No-Code Approach?

SharePoint is a lot like the block games we used to love during our childhood years. It provides organizations with a flexible platform to create an awesome digital workplace. Though SharePoint offers many out-of-the-box functionalities but they might not prove sufficient in tackling your unique business requirements. To stay relevant and drive growth, organizations need to optimize SharePoint through accelerated internal application development efforts. To meet this end, businesses are on the lookout for application development platforms that can assist them in creating, testing and deploying the essential business applications.

According to a Verified Market Research study, the global DevOps market which was valued at $3.62 billion in 2018, is projected to reach $20.01 billion by 2026!

To meet their enterprise application development requirements, most businesses are combining the DevOps approaches with No-Code development solutions, because such solutions provide tools to build essential business applications faster and with a higher level of accuracy. Such platforms are also eliminating the immense pressures placed on IT administrators and SharePoint developers, by streamlining their responsibilities and workloads. The adoption of No-Code solutions has been slashing the development cycles by ensuring a faster time to market for business applications.

How the No-Code Approach is helping Organizations?

In the fast-changing, fiercely competitive and densely populated marketplace, businesses are more pressed than ever before to build applications rapidly to meet their internal and external demands. Often business application development aims to reduce the manual efforts and manage enterprise data better. No-Code solutions offer a code-free approach to application development by providing a pre-built set of web apps to work with. With the growing demand for custom SharePoint business applications, it is important to have a solution that assists in meeting your development needs and empowers the users with new capabilities to enhance their productivity and collaborations.

Discernable Benefits of No-Code Application Development

  • Empowers non-technical professionals: As aforementioned, the No-Code platforms enable the non-technical users to build and improve applications. Business users can take control of their digital transformation efforts by building and modifying their processes, without writing lines of complex codes. The democratization of application development, helps businesses shift their developers from routine coding work to more strategic projects which are critical to the core business processes.
  • Accelerates application development: Apart from making the application development easier and accessible to less technical users, the No-Code solution also enables rapid development and deployment. As an example, AgreeYa’s QuickApps helps organizations in building applications 80 percent faster than the traditional coding approach. Faster time to market is a crucial factor for organizations as they look to outpace their competitors and get a leading-edge in the market.
  • Future-proofs business applications: Unlike the traditional development approach, which includes complex and hard to upgrade lines of codes, a No-Code solution simplifies the process of upgrading from one SharePoint version to the next. Businesses that rely on the traditional (coding) approach towards application development have to reinvest in the same applications upon moving to a newer and more capable version of SharePoint. This would be a loss of many productive hours and disrupt business processes. No-Code solutions, such as QuickApps and QuickApps for Office 365, address this problem and offer scalability to businesses.
  • Streamlines application development: No-code solutions can easily integrate into the existing application development process, meaning that the application developed by a non-technical professional can be deployed in a similar manner as the developer’s application. This consistency leads to a lower cost of ownership because it allows a low-code solution to easily integrate with the existing business processes and workflows. It minimizes the risk of disruption and irregularities.

As businesses gear up for the year ahead, they would want to embrace innovation and elevate performance through agile and accelerated SharePoint custom application development. No-Code solutions, such as QuickApps, offer businesses scope for growth, competitive differentiation, and sustainable business success.


How to overcome the Adoption Challenges with Modern SharePoint?

Recently, Microsoft released the “Modern” page experience for team sites in SharePoint online (Office 365). The modern experience is more compelling, user-friendly, flexible, and mobile-friendly. It provides a better way to utilize the platform for collaborations and other purposes. Modern SharePoint is also specifically designed to work seamlessly on mobile devices and address some of the nagging usability issues faced by users. With the release of Modern SharePoint, Microsoft has revamped many effective services and sprinkled some new feature enhancements that lead to better user experience and engagements.

Classic vs Modern SharePoint

Classic SharePoint: It was introduced in late 2002, and since then businesses have asked designers to change it so that it no longer looks like SharePoint – defeating the purpose of its design altogether.
Modern SharePoint: The sites are more compelling and easier to use and access.

Classic SharePoint: It would shrink the page to fit into the limited screen space of mobile devices, as a result, the view was too small to read clearly.
Modern SharePoint: Created with mobile devices in mind, the view saves users from the hassles of having to zoom in and out to read anything.

Classic SharePoint: It is based on site collections and consists of small hierarchies that are inflexible and pose challenges when organizations grow.
Modern SharePoint: Uses “hubs” where the sites are loosely connected, keeping your SharePoint flexible.

Classic SharePoint: It does not support the new features and enhancements that Microsoft introduces.
Modern SharePoint: Allows easy access to the new features such as site classification and labels, web parts and news feeds that can distribute across the hub and mobile app.

Classic SharePoint: Use of App Model for creating customizations.
Modern SharePoint: The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is used to render custom web parts.

Adoption challenges for Modern SharePoint

However, with all these highlights over the Classic version, implementation of Modern SharePoint would still bring with it some adoption challenges. These include:

  • Venturing into a new territory can be scary for the end-users. Sometimes it is easy to carry on with the existing system rather than opt for a new one (even if it is better).
  • While the Modern experience has tried to solve the user-friendliness issues with SharePoint, but utilizing these features still requires a high level of technical expertise.
  • Though the Modern SharePoint comes with a new set of web parts, most of them are not matured yet. As a result, customizing SharePoint to meet the role-specific requirements continues to be a costly, time consuming, and tedious affair.

How to solve these challenges?

To overcome these roadblocks, organizations need to adopt a no-code solution that allows you to customize SharePoint quickly, cost-efficiently and with least efforts. QuickApps, a set of SharePoint web app and pre-built templates, could help drive the adoption process by providing a powerful set of options and reducing the time, cost and resource investments of customization. QuickApps supports the Modern SharePoint to offer better usability and enhanced features.

Customize SharePoint with QuickApps

By adopting QuickApps, organizations can not only minimize the cost and effort associated with developing business applications but also overcome the challenges involved in supporting, maintaining and upgrading them. Thus, QuickApps ensures long-term impact and high ROI. Other benefits of QuickApps includes:

Migrating to the Modern SharePoint will enhance the user experience, and a tool such as QuickApps can help organizations overcome the adoption challenges involved in the process.


Benefits of No-code SharePoint Application Development

According to a recent Microsoft report, more than 250,000 organizations worldwide use SharePoint for their day-to-day collaboration. While SharePoint was initially launched and sold as a robust document and content management system, it has evolved into a highly configurable platform for enterprises today. It makes great sense then to utilize this platform to develop powerful SharePoint apps that fulfill key business requirements.

While SharePoint does offer some out-of-the-box application development templates, but working with them can be tedious as it requires in-depth and complicated customization to create business-specific solutions. The next best SharePoint application development approach is to custom code it all the way. While this might fetch satisfactory results yet the process is complex, costly, and time-consuming. It does not make sense to engage in this process unless in-house SharePoint development is one of your core business areas.

What is the alternative then?

The solution to this custom SharePoint development dilemma lies in adopting the No-code approach. No-code development is a trending concept among the developers’ community. But, before we discuss the benefits of No-code SharePoint application development it is essential to understand this concept first.

True No-code products, such as our very own QuickApps for SharePoint, are primarily 100% metadata-driven development platforms. As a result, all the SharePoint application functionalities created by the developer are stored in the form of properties which describes actions or behavior to be represented. When an application runs, the App Interface corresponds with defined properties to show the functionalities. This means even the non-technical personnel can develop applications with the simple point-and-click configurations. This enables the enterprises to focus back on their core business, lowers costs, optimizes user experiences, and streamlines business processes.

Top 4 Benefits of No-code SharePoint application development

  • Empowers Citizen Developers: Removes dependency on IT, and promotes the citizen developer concept. A no-code customization approach allows the employees to meet their complex business requirements, from interface enhancements to complete SharePoint software solutions.
  • Accelerates Time to Market: Since the point-and-click configuration consumes significantly less time than writing, debugging, and compiling codes, the end-user functionalities can be developed in a rapid quick time. Comparatively measured, customized SharePoint solutions can be created 6x to 8x faster. This helps enterprises meet their development SLAs.
  • Brings High User Engagement: Allows enterprises to extend SharePoint capabilities beyond what is natively possible by developing apps that fit the business needs, improve navigation, enhance the UI, and drive high user adoptions.
  • Simplifies the Upgrade Process: Mitigates the challenges associated with the upgrade process. Custom coded applications involve hard-coded references to server names, databases, or URLs which might not run effectively on another platform. As the custom SharePoint apps built with no-code development tools need the least coding, they can work seamlessly in the new platform.

Customize SharePoint without Coding with QuickApps

Now, let us introduce you to AgreeYa’s no-code SharePoint application development solution – QuickApps. This innovative product includes a set of 21 web apps which simplifies SharePoint development and minimizes the application lifecycle costs. By adopting QuickApps, enterprises can reduce the cost and effort required in supporting, maintaining, and upgrading business applications ensuring their long-term impact and high return on investment.


Signs You Need an Online Collaboration Solution

An organization is just as good as its skilled, collaborating employees. Everyone in an organization is an asset that needs to be utilized to its best capabilities, which only shall bring the true return on the investment gone into building an army of professionals.

Organizations have lived for long under the fear of exposing themselves to potential threats with collaboration. But collaboration cannot be ignored any longer, as it will leave them in a grey, vulnerable situation of incompetency. If the remotely sitting teams fail to collaborate, discuss, make presentations to each other for a rounded decision than your initiatives will always struggle to succeed at every step.

If people in your organization are unable to come together for work, they struggle between the different versions of documents, unable to locate files, these signs at workplace are a call for help:

Collaborating with the Overseas Team is a Challenge: And why just overseas? Collaborating beyond the firewall protection will be challenging and difficult if you are not running on an extremely supportive collaboration tool. While firewalls are crucial, they shouldn’t get restrictive by getting into the way of a clear communication. If this is hampering your progress, then the reason is a lack of collaboration tool.

Best way to avert the insecurities that email brings is to opt for a collaboration medium that can support internal sharing of documents, without the need of sharing any document over the mail. SharePoint is one such platform.

Facing Cases of Breaches: This can take a bigger form, if not addressed urgently. No organization can survive breach scenarios, losing business and finances. Besides, restricting collaboration is not a choice, as that in itself means restricting possibilities. This constant tug of war between risk and restriction is where you need a SharePoint solution. In such a scenario you need a powerful collaboration platform to secure your communication.

Versioning of Documents Between Approvals: Back and forth of documents for approval generates multiple versions of documents. And later in time when you will really need it, it will be hard to spot the latest version. Again a restrictive way of working pulling you back, causing frustration at workplace. Working over the entire document can go in vain, if you send across the wrong version. This is a part of collaborative weakness that your organization is suffering from.

Inability to Display Data in an Interactive Way: There are complex data and scenarios that need to be discussed. But how will you display them in a video call or a meeting? This involves collaboration capabilities to enable display in charts, graphs, images, and more. If this is a challenge for your organization, then this needs your urgent attention.

SharePoint can infuse these capabilities in your team, such as, with the help of web apps by QuickApps you can swiftly create chart flows, tables, and graphs. These web apps will help you evolve your SharePoint abilities.

It is a good idea to hire resources overseas, to control costs. But it takes a good collaboration tool to communicate work, discuss challenges, and build a solution together. If you come cross these signs, take these as a shout for help.


Propagating SharePoint Adoption in your Enterprise-Part 2

Engage Leadership: It is nearly impossible to drive a major change in the organization, without engaging the leadership. Change will be difficult even for the ones who are positive about this initiative. To drive a successful SharePoint adoption plan, it is imperative to reach out to the leaders and seek their help to drive this change. When leaders will talk to people and communicate the value that this adoption can drive, they will be more likely to adapt to the change.

Bring People Together For a Goal: A SharePoint adoption plan needs to be communicated well, to drive its adoption. Bring people together for this goal, communicate its benefits and how it will make their lives easy. This should be a solution-centric conversation, revolving around improving the whole work process of regular work, sharing content and ideas, discovering information, getting organized, streamlining of business processes, or connecting to line of business systems—SharePoint can enable a number of critical business solutions. People want to make their lives easy; they will adopt the idea when they will know its full extent.

Simplify and Take Support: While SharePoint is built to address a multitude of challenges for the users, the fact about SharePoint is that it is complex right to the root. While people adopt it afterm administrator’s efforts, they will begin to drift in absence of a legit tech support. A multitude of SharePoint support tools are available in the market that will simplify work, adding efficiency, accuracy, and speed hugely. As people move towards SharePoint, help them simplify work through support from SharePoint software such as: QuickApps (helps you build quick web applications through pre-built templates), Site Administrator (helps you administer your SharePoint by giving to insight and access to its environment), and Recovery Manager (helps you recover data lost on SharePoint).

Start with Smaller Engagement and Then Broaden Up: Starting with a small group of people and then expanding gradually is the best way to carry out this SharePoint implementation plan. A small group of people is easy to convince, track, and train. Besides, you can selectively pick those people who are excited about this technology. After working on SharePoint with your small, well-choosen group, take feedback from them and expand the adoption. This way, it will there will be lesser on stake, minimal risk and chances of damage. Moreover, spread out the success stories related to its adoption, to build a way of SharePoint adoption.

SharePoint Governance: As we begin to use SharePoint, its environment begins to grow into a huge unmanageable jungle of chaos. Reason behind this is that Microsoft frequently releases upgrades to this platform, to make it all the more powerful and ready to address your challenges. While these upgrades are good, they can also lead to chaos. Only way to deal with this threat is a powerful governance plan, which needs a complete understanding of its environment. Instead of struggling with its environment, take support from Site Administrator tool and get an in-depth understanding and access to its functioning.


4 Ways Customized-Web Apps for SharePoint Will Transform Work

SharePoint is the most robust tool available in the market today. However, it too needs a support system to run smoothly, given all the complications attached to it. One of its harrowing complications relates to coding, which at times leads to scenarios where you build entirely different results, than what you have been trying. Besides, SharePoint development requires coding, which further poses challenges such as excessive resource investment, rounds of re-work, prolonged project deliveries, and extra cost.

To overcome limitations of SharePoint Out-of-box functionalities, Microsoft offers the option of writing custom code solutions. Custom Code Solutions further poses challenges such as excessive resource investment, rounds of re-work, prolonged project deliveries, and extra cost.

AgreeYa’s QuickApps comes handy as you address these challenges. QuickApps is a set of pre-built templates that even a non-SharePoint-expert resource can use to build applications and web pages or perform customization. It removes the compulsion of going through a tedious coding process, usually needed to achieve something on SharePoint, as these pre-built templates let you drag and drop to build what you want.

Here are top 4 ways QuickApps web apps for SharePoint can change your life as an IT Support Staff:

Achieve Fast Customization – Web apps allow the user to perform point-and-click configuration instead of custom code. This speeds up the whole customization process by 80%, as there is no need to go through extensive coding and re-work the problem area. This can be dealt with a quick-fix of a SharePoint web app deletion and addition.

Empower More Users with SharePoint Capabilities – Web apps empower non-technical users with SharePoint capabilities, developing a team of independent staff, who don’t need to rush to IT for every small piece of customization work. While this work empowerment makes life easy for users, it also saves the time of expensive resources who have to spend time in this work, which does not add any real value to the business.

Deliver Projects Faster – With ready-made templates making it easy to build and deliver help desk, project management and CRM applications on the spot, there are faster than ever project deliveries than ever. With SharePoint web apps making it possible for non-technical staff to build solutions, these make work easier and faster for the knowers of this technology, leaving little or no scope for re-work or corrections. Besides, these are easy to support, maintain, and extend.

SharePoint Adoption that Brings Higher Satisfaction – You have made a good investment in SharePoint, now is the time on maximize on your investment by controlling the budget and encouraging its adoption across the teams. Web Apps make SharePoint possible for everyone in an organization that leads to its enthusiastic acceptance. A team of web app empowered resources make it possible for the project owners to complete a certain SharePoint related task on their own, and release it from their desk. While this keeps the project owner happy, as now there is no back and forth with the IT team, it also means cost containment for the business overall.

AgreeYa’s QuickApps is a collection of 21 web apps that bring different tasks to accomplishment. Users can take a free trial of these web apps and explore how this can mean business transformation for them.


6 Reasons to Use SharePoint as an Intranet Platform

Irrespective of how big or small an organization is, organizations need collaboration technology to keep its employees connected, across the geographies. Whether the employees work from on-site, off-site, or from home, it is an unavoidable call to ensure that there is a seamless flow of information, keeping everyone updated on the progress.

Microsoft has addressed this challenge the best, by offering us SharePoint as an ineasytranet solution provider for collaboration and content management. While there are several other options in the industry, SharePoint continues to win the game with its high-end sophistication which gives it the potential of being the single infrastructure and a central web-portal.

Sometime back, there was a storm of dissatisfaction blowing against SharePoint, which was majorly led by the complexities that it brings along with. For instance, the challenge of coding that demands a constant r-work. But today there is the easy way out, with – QuickApps in the market. QuickApps is an ensemble of web apps which remove the primary need of coding from the whole process of customizing and developing a business application. As QuickApps has now cleared the air around SharePoint, these points, SharePoint continues to win hearts as an intranet solution:

Can be Used for Designing

SharePoint helps in cost-saving in many ways and designing is one of them. SharePoint can be designed to meet the branding requirements of an organization. It is easy to make customization and results don’t look like they were developed on SharePoint. SharePoint has a feature – Design Manager, which lets you build pixel-perfect, customized designs of websites that are in line with your organizational message/goals.

Intelligent Search Engine

There is a consistent need for data discovery; SharePoint provides it all. Data is often all over the place and needs to be organized, to make sense of it, which is easiest with SharePoint. It lets the users discover people and content scattered all over, in a personalized way.

Quick Content Addition

Since SharePoint is for collaboration, it allows quick and swift content addition, editing, and proofreading too. Users get to create content categories, to upload different types in different sections. These columns are also re-usable.

Sharing Made Easy

SharePoint has revolutionized the way people share content today. It has made it easy to just attach a document and share it with people. It is also a secure way of sharing confidential documents. SharePoint also lets you regulate external sharing with vendors, customers and clients, with the provisions available on SharePoint.

Automated Work On SharePoint

SharePoint offers document management, which can also be streamlined for automation. SharePoint allows the user to set dates to expiry for documents which reduces the time to half of what it usually takes. SharePoint’s workflow automation also cuts down the hassle of remembering the chain of events, as it can be followed through the automated process.

SharePoint Has Perhaps Maximum Support Tools

SharePoint allows so many functions that it has led to a user complexity. Still, SharePoint remains unreplaceable as an intranet solution, with the number of issues it has the power to address, in – helping you build an intranet solution that your users will go gaga about, technology experts who have developed support tools that fix the SharePoint complexities acting as roadblocks. Users today are empowered to build perfect and quick solutions with tools such as AgreeYa’s QuickApps, which is an answer to your business application building vows.

SharePoint is the best solution you will ever have for intranet, as it lets you build anything to your heart’s desires. This is also why technology companies are so widely and wildly coming up with solutions that drive its adoption while helping them get more jobs done.


Propagate SharePoint Adoption In Your Enterprise-Part 1

Technology is growing exponentially, shrinking the boundaries and connecting people in a never-before way. While personal life is infused with technology, people want to be just as smart at work, as in personal lives. This means, tremendous expectations pinned to the IT, making them the most critical function of any organization today. IT is clearly under a lot of pressure, of delivering effective results in shortest possible span. To meet this, they need to transform the way they operate.

IT has the latent power to offer new way of sharing information, communications, and empowering the non-IT with the ability to build their own, quick solutions. They can realise this power by expanding their latent potential through SharePoint adoption at workplace. But unfortunately, experts avoid using SharePoint, for reasons set-deep in challenges related to SharePoint, such as:– such as SharePoint complexities, incomplete knowledge, unbaked ideas behind its implementation, unclear implementation purposes, company work culture, and ego clashes.

The key to successful lies in its adoption, going through the grind of learning, evolving, and bridging the gap between technology and its implementation. But the fact is that SharePoint can bring a smooth flow to work with appropriate adoption method. These techniques will improve SharePoint implementation and propagate a wider adoption among your co-workers drastically, by addressing their concerns:

Identify the Key Driver

SharePoint adoption can solve a lot of organizational challenges. But what will be your key driver for its implementation? Define your goal behind its implementation so that your employees can help you take right steps towards its adoption.

Identify, whether you want to breakdown the organizational silos, improve your asset management, or probably meet the compliance requirements in an unprecedented way. Propagating SharePoint adoption in good spirit can work to the best effect. Convey a clear understanding of the value that SharePoint adoption can bring to work. This is also a chance to align your organizational priorities with the business. It will inspire your employees to strengthen your idea, shaping it up well.

Execution

Bringing a functional transformation to an organization is difficult, as people tend to resist the change. Ironically, it is difficult and yet critical to have people accept the idea right at the onset to make this initiative successful. SharePoint adoption is the most critical part in its implementation, more because people are scared of it.

However, to achieve this, engage the leadership to set example for you and encourage the employees. Get the mid management support to make this execution successful, as otherwise it can be a big failure, with barely anyone showing interest in the idea. SO take the support of leadership and executives to propagate its adoption. Engage the leadership to set example for you and encourage the employees, by demonstrating the transformation that it can bring.

Moreover, facilitate this change through ideas like: SharePoint reduces burden on the resources, by mitigating dependencies, delays, and inefficiencies. Let them know how rolling out SharePoint will change their efficiency level and there will be a drastic improvement in its adoption level.

Begin with Training:

Training is pivotal to a successful SharePoint implementation, which will make or break a user’s courage to use it. As an organization, if you have invested in SharePoint, invest in training too if you want to bring SharePoint usage to the table. Training here means a quick introduction to the functionalities and a big picture of the overview. Align the users with their work scenarios by training them as for how and what to do.

Implement in Phases:

Implementation of the whole SharePoint in one go can lead to failures, emerging from unforeseen circumstances. Best the idea is to build a plan and implement it in phases. When implementation is done phases, it gives a better plan for the next stage, bringing along greater chances of winning profits.

Break the whole plan into small projects/sites as you take up this journey. Besides, users are often resistant to change, and a phase implementation will empower you with a better-prepared workforce, and you can roll out the plan gradually.

Find an Owner For the Project:

While there are several working on a project, it needs a project owner to keep the acts together. While a project owner will decide the scheduling of the project tasks, he/she will remind the users that it demands patience, so don’t push it, just take time to adapt these changes.

Besides, with a project owner, it is easier to take a break after the first phase of implementation and look back in retrospection. It is an effective way to pick the problems and work through a solution for the second phase.

Tap the Hidden Potentials of SharePoint 

While SharePoint has immense possibilities to offer, it is true that SharePoint is complicated which leaves its potentials untapped. 40% people have already given up on it as their implementations aren’t successful. Besides, 66% agree that it is too complicated and too demanding to get through SharePoint implementations.

But if your project demands lightning speed, customize SharePoint a cinch by using SharePoint customization software. For instance, QuickApps is AgreeYa’s SharePoint customization software that enables a user to develop an application at 80% faster speed with its smart technology. It removes the need for a user to be a SharePoint expert, as it eliminates the process of coding from application development. It brings SharePoint out of the box, tapping its hidden potentials.

Adopt these ways to change the way your users look at SharePoint development. Make it healthier, happier, and a promising way of building applications for your organization.