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Why Does Your Business Need SharePoint Customization

Posted by Kevin Booth on Jun, 17, 2022 01:06

You may be wondering why your business needs custom software and SharePoint development. After all, the average Fortune 500 company uses it daily.

As an owner of a business, you often find yourself doing long or repetitive chores that divert your attention away from the broader picture. You should concentrate on software such as SharePoint. that can help streamline your business’ various processes, improving your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness.

SharePoint is powerful, but it has its limitations. It can’t address all business needs out-of-the-box. You’ve probably scanned the list of off-the-shelf software trying to find the right solution but found yourself disappointed. Although powerful, SharePoint has limitations, which can cause many issues and leave your team running inefficiently.

SharePoint Customization Components and Features

SharePoint’s customization capabilities allow businesses to create various solutions adapted to the company’s already established processes. These solutions include intranets and portals, contract and document management systems, learning management, knowledge management, ticketing and help desk systems, and more.

Below are some instances of modification from recent projects:

Theme Customization
  • To construct a performance management system, customize the portal.
  • Cloud intranet customization and redesign, including a new user experience, new fields, added content types, and a fresh look for the home page.
  • Intranet customization to build a project management solution, adding custom fields, custom content types, and a new home page with other information about the company’s goals.
New Pages Addition in SharePoint

The following are the critical SharePoint components that you may customize:

  • Page Content: SharePoint Customization is a way to create custom layouts for web pages, as well as add custom Web Parts (Events, News, Bing Maps, File Viewer, Image Gallery.). It’s also possible to customize a SharePoint page by adding custom Web Parts (Events, News, Bing Maps, File Viewer, Image Gallery.). You can create custom SharePoint add-ins, for example, to show employees’ workplaces on an official plan or supply a weather snapshot of a given location. Besides, due to customization, a SharePoint solution can offer multilingual support, advanced analytics and reports, intelligent search, and other valuable capabilities.
  • Workflows: SharePoint workflows enable you to build custom workflows that are unavailable out of the box, for example, for tax calculation. You can also use SharePoint workflows for approving SharePoint page content. You can use tools such as SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Flow, and Visual Studio for creating custom SharePoint workflows.
Web Parts
  • Forms: Forms are a fantastic way to collect data from your users. Microsoft Forms can be used for forms, for example, collecting customer feedback, measuring employee satisfaction, or organizing corporate events. You can embed these forms in SharePoint pages, which can be customized using the Office 365 apps.
  • Design: SharePoint branding is the process of changing any features like logos, styles, colors, expert pages, and page layouts to create a unique look and feel that promotes corporate culture across the company.
Logos and Design

Why Does Your Business Needs Custom Software and SharePoint Customization?

You may be wondering why your business needs custom software and SharePoint development services. After all, the average Fortune 500 company uses it daily.

As an owner of a business, you often find yourself performing lengthy or repetitive tasks that can take valuable time away from the big picture ideas. It would be preferable if you concentrated on software like SharePoint that can help streamline your business’ various processes, improving your organization’s efficiency and effectiveness.

SharePoint is powerful, but it has its limitations. It can’t address all business needs out-of-the-box. You’ve probably scanned the list of off-the-shelf software trying to find the right solution but found yourself disappointed. Although powerful, SharePoint has limitations, which can cause many issues and leave your team running inefficiently.

Customizing the New Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint: 4 Options

When using SharePoint, there are several ways to customize the platform depending on the deployment type of a SharePoint Customization solution, the customization budget and scope, the security requirements, and other factors.

Farm Solution

Farm solutions are a wonderful way to customize SharePoint. They’re a traditional way to customize SharePoint that involves server-side code. Farm solutions have full access to the server-side SharePoint API, which means a wide range of customization options with few limitations.

SharePoint Framework (SPFx)

SharePoint Framework is a set of tools for creating SharePoint Web Parts for developers. It was designed with contemporary SharePoint sites, although SPFx modifications will also function on traditional pages. To access SharePoint data, SPFx components can use all client-side APIs.

Power Platform

SharePoint Online has been the platform of choice for many organizations for years, so it’s no surprise that there are so many tools and options to customize your site.

We’ve developed several tools to help you get started with SharePoint Customization Online and make it work better for your business. PowerApps will let you create customs forms in SharePoint Online sites, making sharing data with colleagues or customers easier.

Out-of-box customization

Out-of-the-box functionality is the first customization choice in SharePoint. This process is the first possibility In SharePoint Online, as well as SharePoint 2019, SharePoint 2016, and SharePoint 2013, which we may use to edit lists, libraries, and sites.

How to Automate Business Processes with SharePoint Customization

SharePoint can automate business processes. SharePoint is well-suited for this purpose because it allows users to connect workflows and other components to business processes.

The following sections describe the different components of SharePoint Customization workflow, as well as how you can use them to automate business processes.

  • The workflow is a collection of actions that are needed to complete a specific task or achieve a goal. A typical example is the monthly billing process, where a salesperson sends an invoice for their customer’s purchase. In this case, you should add all new orders to the Billing List holding all past and unpaid invoices from previous months.
  • You may also want to automate other processes within your organization, such as approving new suppliers or handling customer complaints in real-time so that they don’t have to contact each other manually through email or phone calls every time there’s an update on your system.
  • It allows business managers to assign employee tasks and set start and end dates. Tasks become fully visible with their implementation steps, time and assignees displayed, making them easy to plan your activities and prioritize tasks when needed.
  • You can create a workflow to automate business processes, and the approval workflow allows setting up an approval process for documents (contracts, invoices, policies.), lists, and libraries in an organization. Adding a record to a list, library, or content type is simple. Settings enable specifying workflow participants, several approval steps, and other parameters—for example, a purchase contract, a procurement specialist, CFO, and CEO.
  • You can use these workflows to streamline repetitive tasks and make them more efficient by assigning them to certain users or groups of users, who can then carry out the assigned tasks without manually entering them.

SharePoint Customization Best Practices

SharePoint Customization Is Easy in The Right Hands

The possibilities for SharePoint customization are endless, but if you host your platform, you’ll have to be ready to deal with the consequences of this openness.

SharePoint is a potent tool to help you build your business processes and integrate with other applications and services. You can also create integrations with databases and other applications and help with endless possibilities.

Office 365 Simplifies SharePoint Customization

Many organizations had to rely on this in the past SharePoint consultants or in-house SharePoint administrators to customize SharePoint. That proved to be costly, time-consuming, and often resulted in poor results.

Many classic SharePoint modification services have become more accessible with Office 365, thanks to tools like Power Apps and Flow and connection services. In various businesses, the end-users themselves are setting them up from scratch!

The Risk of SharePoint Customization

SharePoint Workflows allow you to build customizations on SharePoint pages, so you don’t have to use code or set up complicated workflows. In SharePoint, you must show a process and add the scripts you want to run as part of the workflow.

SharePoint Workflows also give you access to all the information stored in SharePoint lists and libraries. For example, if employees cannot access a document or list, they can create a workflow to retrieve it from SharePoint. This process allows them to work from anywhere worldwide and still access their confidential data on any device with an internet connection.

Conclusion

More organizations are taking advantage of SharePoint Customization for their business needs. SharePoint is powerful, but it has its limitations. It can’t address all business needs out-of-the-box. A custom software solution is a crucial process that can drastically improve productivity and efficiency in your business.

We offer SharePoint consulting services at EPC Group for every step and milestone necessary for a successful installation and to meet your business issues. We’ll be there for you, from the early planning to design, implementation, configuration, customization, go-live, post-go-live maintenance, and long-term SharePoint Managed Services.

About the Author

Kevin Booth

Kevin’s role at EPC Group is Director of Operations where his experience ensures EPC technical team have all the required information, tools, and knowledge to exceed client expectations. Another aspect of Kevin’s daily task’s is to course correct an entire division keeping up with best practices alongside the latest technological threats.

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