Site Administrator | Why You Should Conduct a SharePoint Environment Assessment

All the significant fortune 500 companies today depend on SharePoint to manage work for their workforce. While this dependency on SharePoint is massive, the users still don’t know what goes in their SharePoint environment and they struggle to drive benefit from it.

SharePoint needs constant attention and a regular assessment of SharePoint environment, to align it with your business needs. While this process is followed at the time of deployment, this should be included in the yearly audit plan too. In-depth knowledge of the SharePoint environment will maximize a business’s opportunities by opening doors to avenues and resolving the unresolved challenges. Here are some advantages of a regular SharePoint environment assessment:

Health and Performance Review: Analyzing a SharePoint environment will help you understand the system better, empowering you to take necessary steps of its optimization. This is the only way an organization can fully capitalize on its investment. In simpler terms, this SharePoint health check can be understood as getting your car for a regular serving to mitigate risks, causes of poor performances and improving reliabilities. Health Analysis will be your opportunity of fixing issues before they occur to hamper work, check that there is no security leakage or strengthen its scope for better performance.

Improved Governance Plan: SharePoint governance is not a theory. It is something that needs to be explored and developed with a thorough assessment. It includes all the aspects: people, processes as well as policies. There is a need to lay a formal governance plan for a better administration of SharePoint environment, which cannot be built in one go. You need to lay down a set of guidelines and update these with new strategies which have a better impact on the overall: data security, access management, operational or functional challenges.

Security Regulation:

SharePoint is a crucial aspect of every business that contains critical data. To secure the confidentiality of this data, it is essential to conduct regular SharePoint assessment and ensure that just the right people have access to it. This is going to determine how safe your data is from unwanted access. Besides, every SharePoint assessment is an opportunity to revise the permissions for day-to-day activities and include someone is a new addition to your core team, and exclude someone who is not a contributor anymore.

Usability Assessment:

Besides delving deep into a SharePoint environment, a thorough analysis should also include discussions with the organization’s SharePoint users. It will help you understand what the pitfalls are, and how you can improve work on it. These discussions will lead your way through the alleys of possibilities, helping you improve collaboration, push adoption further, and enhance the overall business. This approach can be brought to completion by looking at the situation from the user’s standpoint.

Determine the Need Of Training: Your team might be resisting SharePoint since this it is complicated. The only way to determine whether it is being used is through SharePoint assessment. While this situation can be quickly dealt with a little bit of training, the primary step is to determine whether the users are embracing it or not. There might even be incidences where the users might be struggling to achieve targets on SharePoint, spending too much time on a task. These scenarios can only be addressed through training.

SharePoint’s success depends on how an organization’s SharePoint users perform on this platform and well this platform is utilized. If organizations aim at minting profits from it, it is crucial to assess the performance regularly and take necessary steps for continued benefits and security.