One of Microsoft SharePoint’s newest features in the 2013 edition is the way documents are shared across the platform. Now, with cloud technology, documents can not only be shared between users within a workgroup but from anywhere the users can access the cloud. This has completely revolutionized the way that workers are able to access information for work and where they can perform their jobs.
In The Past . . .
Before cloud technology, users had to share documents physically or carry them in some way from one location to another. What this means is that a document was stored on some form of portable storage that the worker carried from point to point. Most of us remember carrying “flash drives” around our necks or on our key chains as we moved from one place to another; a few of us even remember carrying “floppy disks” from one place to another! However, those days are now gone with cloud technology.
“The cloud,” as it is collectively known, is a series of virtual servers that is accessible anywhere there is an Internet connection. Cloud technology allows users to store information remotely rather than on their computers or on removable storage devices. Documents shared in the cloud are available anywhere the user can access the web. To retrieve a cloud document, users simply go to a web site and “pull” the document down to a computer.
Revolutionary Technology
This technology has created a revolution in the way people view document storage. No longer is it necessary to have access to your documents on a particular drive or device. Now, everything can be stored in the cloud, giving workers access to virtually unlimited documents from any location.
SharePoint has made cloud technology even more useful by allowing users to share documents in “real time” as well as simply to store and retrieve them. Workers across any number of locations can simultaneously pull and work on documents so that everyone’s changes are made at once.
Finally, Share Point uses cloud technology as the foundation for both real-time and online social interaction. Yammer, SharePoint’s exclusive internal social network for businesses, and the many other features that integrate the Microsoft Office Suite, allow SharePoint users to communicate across platforms, share information and images, transfer files back and forth and generally perform any type of work that needs to be done no matter where they are.