Document Collaboration is a fact of business
Many corporate documents, files and publications require the skills and input of many people, before being considered complete.
Whilst permissions can be assigned via Network Shares, multiple saved copies and numerous emailed revisions of documents are both unweildy, inefficient and hard to manage. Revisioning is left to individuals to enforce, allowing scope for error and lost changes. Using Network shares and emailing revisions, document authors can struggle to reconcile versions and may need to resort to manually merging and coordinating changes.
Sharepoint is a more effective solution for collaboration; the greater the number of people working on a document, the more effective it can be. Sharepoint solves many of the problems encountered when people share and edit files together, including:
Storage Structure
Sharepoint helps obviate the problem of users creating their own versions of pre-existing folders and files, created when they didn’t realise something similar already existed.
Document Revision Accountability
Sharepoint can keep the history of who made which changes to each file.
No more overwritten revisions; you know who made each change — and when.
No more accidentally overwriting the latest version with an older one.
Easily revert to previous versions, should the need arise.
Note that Major and Minor versioning can be configured to allow greater or lesser granularity of versioning control.
Sharepoint Document Check in / Check Out
Prevents the situation when more than one person finds they cannot save changes to a document on a network because it’s in use elsewhere. If they save a new version, they will be missing the changes made by their colleague(s).
It’s impossible to overwrite someone else’s edits, because only one person can check the document out to edit it (other users can open and view the document, but not edit until safe, unless co-authoring is used)
Document Security
Sharepoint provides less scope for documents to be deleted.
Sharepoint Document Co-Authoring
Sharepoint can allow multiple people to simultaneously edit, review and comment on documents in a controlled manner. This helps in situations where multiple people simply must (usually due to time pressures) work on a document atthe same time. Find out more about Sharepoint co-authoring here
note:only available in some versions of sharepoint (e.g. 2010 but not in 2007)
Ask Intersys about how Microsoft Sharepoint Online can help you.