Most large organisations have large isolated departments that form discrete silos within the company. A major challenge is trying to break down these barriers between the departments to enable users to collaborate and exchange ideas and work together across these departmental boundaries. Finding a collaborative environment that allows small teams to exchange ideas, documents and discussions can be quite a challenging issue in a corporate environment.

One of the greatest benefits derived from SharePoint is the ability to enable collaboration. By utilising the tools available to you in SharePoint, your project teams and departments benefit by having a central location to share information and ideas.

One of the most basic functions that SharePoint provides is “Team Sites” that can be used to enable users to collaborate and exchange information together. These collaborative team sites can be used to organise projects or business operations. SharePoint also provides collaborative workspaces for managing meetings and document reviews. You can create a “Meeting Workspace” to track and organise a meeting, attendees and action items. The “Document Workspaces” can be used to manage the review or creation of documents. The advantage of using Workspaces is that information can be used to aggregate information into a central workspace. As new members join your team they can find all the information they need to become an active member of your team.