Seven reasons for using SharePoint Online
Out with the old, in with the new! Top features and reasons for using SPO
SharePoint Online (SPO) has been available at Oxford University since November 2020, bringing many benefits to those who use it. With its versatility and great features, SPO is widely used for a wide variety of information management, automation and data gathering purposes across the University as well as for intranets, committee sites and much more.
Seven reasons you should use SPO
Using Microsoft’s 'modern experience', SharePoint Online is easy to use and has lots of features to help us all work better together. Here are seven ways that SPO is making a difference at Oxford University:
- Look and feel: SPO is user-friendly and has a clean, responsive, modern look on both desktop and mobile. You can choose the layout that best suits your needs, or pick one of the site templates from the 'Apply a template' menu.
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Structure: With a simple, easy-to-use structure, it’s easy to move content around within sites using the move or copy features in the context menu.
- Finding content: No more lengthy searches for something you ‘filed safely’. You can easily search for documents across all your SharePoint Online sites.
- Collaboration: SPO is ideal for co-authoring documents at the same time as your colleagues, whether they are internal or external to the University.
- Security: Permissions are easy to use in SPO, helping you share content and collaborate securely whether ‘read only’ or with editing rights.
- Storage: Each site comes with up to 1TB of storage – that's 40 times more storage than the average SharePoint On-Prem site. SharePoint Online at Oxford currently hosts 10.62 million files!
- Integration: SPO integrates well with other Microsoft tools such as Power Automate, Teams and more.
How to get SharePoint Online
Firstly, find out if your department or college already has a presence by checking the list of Departments and Colleges already on SharePoint Online. Then get in touch with your local Site Network Administrator (SNA), listed alongside each unit on that page, to discuss how your proposed site might fit into the existing structure.
If your department or college is not already on SPO, a Business Owner and SharePoint Network Administrator will need to be agreed, and an onboarding request submitted. Consult the Get SharePoint online page for more information on this process.
SPO training, help and advice
The best way to keep up to date with what’s going on in SharePoint Online is to join the Nexus365 User Group (NUG) on Teams, the code is LNJVOFR.
Through the SharePoint Online User Group channel, you can share your experiences or tips and tricks for using SharePoint Online with others across the University and find informal support.
Lots of information about how to get SPO help, advice and training is also available on our IT Help website. The SPO guidance is a great starting point for finding out how to use this versatile software and getting the most out of it.
Top tip
Did you know that you can schedule your news items in your site so that they are published on a specific date? See The SharePoint Maven’s blog for this and thousands of other useful tips.
You can find lots more tips and advice on Microsoft’s SharePoint Next steps tips as well as our quick reference guides and training information on the IT Help website.
