Insights

Many organisations use SharePoint Online but only tap into a small part of its capability.

With the right approach, it can become a central platform for communication, collaboration, and governance.

At Chorus, we have successfully delivered SharePoint solutions for both global brands and ambitious SMBs across a range of industries.

Whatever your needs, SharePoint Online can unify your teams, drive productivity, and enhance communication while supporting your unique business processes and strengthening data security and compliance.

This article explains some excellent ways to make SharePoint work for your business, based on best practices and proven results.

Some key ways organisations make SharePoint more effective

If you’re already invested in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint Online included, you already have access to an incredibly powerful platform.

However, it’s about knowing how to maximise the value from SharePoint and having the expertise and skillset to shape it in a way that suits your organisation’s unique processes, company structure and technology stack.

We discuss some of the best ways you can enhance your use of SharePoint Online below.

Build a global SharePoint Intranet

For organisations with multiple offices and teams in different geographies, you should consider building global intranets using hub sites, home sites, and Viva Connections to connect your people. This can help you bring teams together with a shared identity and improve communication and collaboration across your organisation or group.

Read how we helped a global market leader in the supply of refrigerants build their intranet with SharePoint Online to become their central, go-to communication platform across five continents.

Create repeatable project workspaces in SharePoint Online

You can create project workspaces in SharePoint using templating and automated provisioning. This makes it easy to spin up consistent, repeatable project sites with a standardised information structure and documentation, which is perfect for kicking off new proposals or projects.

Learn how we helped Esri UK’s projects teams use SharePoint Online to create project workspaces, automate approvals and benefit from a centralised, searchable and filterable index of projects.

Automate SharePoint approvals

Automating approval processes in SharePoint Online, such as expenditure requests, document reviews, publishing workflows (and more) is a powerful enhancement you can make to SharePoint Online, using Microsoft Power Platform tools such as Power Automate. If it’s a manual, repeatable process that involves bringing information to people, consider automating it!

Migrate your data to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365

If you still have a lot of data stored on-premises, migrating it from legacy file servers into SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 can help you benefit in many ways, such as modern content management, improved governance, and enhanced security.

Get more value from your data

You can maximise the value of your unstructured content in SharePoint, using Microsoft Syntex. This powerful technology enables you to leverage your existing data, by automatically assembling documents, classifying and tagging files, extracting key information and even pulling text from images using OCR (Optical Character Recognition). These AI-powered capabilities ca help you streamline processes, improve searchability, and enhance your data governance.

Learn more about Microsoft Syntex and our advanced content services for SharePoint Online.

Ensure compliance

SharePoint can help you improve data protection and governance, using Microsoft’s excellent compliance tools.

Microsoft Purview is available as part of Microsoft 365 plans such as E3, E5 and a Purview Suite for Business Premium add-on is also now available. This can enable you to use information classification and protection to protect sensitive files, apply data loss prevention (DLP) to limit oversharing, and implement lifecycle management to delete or retain data in line with regulatory requirements (and much more).

Watch our webinar to learn more about solving data protection and governance challenges with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, although licensing will have changes to some degree since the webinar was released.

Get AI ready

With AI tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot entering the workplace, you can improve AI results and lower the risk of exposing sensitive information by using SharePoint and Purview effectively to improve your information protection and governance, before introducing AI and even using custom Copilot agents within SharePoint itself.

Take a look at our Microsoft Copilot and AI readiness workshops here if you’re considering introducing Microsoft AI tools.

Why Organisations Work with Chorus

• We’re a Microsoft Solutions Partner with expertise in Microsoft 365 transformation, helping you to improve your IT maturity through solutions that make IT simple, keep your data safe, and help teams work smarter together.
• We prioritise out-of-the-box Microsoft 365 capabilities for maintainability and cost-effectiveness.
• Our delivery model is iterative: discovery, pilot, and scale, with adoption support throughout.
• We combine technical expertise with a friendly people-focused consultative approach, ensuring solutions are sustainable and tailored to your unique business processes and ways of working.