Selecting SharePoint to build your Corporate Website

Quick Summary: For over two decades now, SharePoint has stuck to its place as the most popular base technology for developing corporate websites. However, with so many new technologies available in the market and offering many new and advanced features, is SharePoint still the best option for website development? Well, this blog will answer this question in detail. Along with it, you’ll also learn about some important aspects of SharePoint.

With Microsoft’s announcement about public websites built on SharePoint would no longer be supported in office 365, many businesses are wondering what would happen to their SharePoint websites.

However, on-premises SharePoint platforms are still available to build your website. Now you must be having a question why would you build your site on SharePoint. For that, let’s first understand what SharePoint is.

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What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a highly flexible collaboration and management tool for Cloud-based content that enables the team to work together or remotely. It also increases the performance of enterprises by streamlining data storage and access.

With SharePoint, businesses experience increased productivity and visibility for information. SharePoint enables you to handle all of your company content (from RFIs to marketing documents to financials and more) and develop blogs and business intranets to keep your customers updated on current tasks or progress.

It also enables you to create business processes by automating some of your more tedious activities (such as daily workflows) and create tailored applications that can make your teams more efficient.

SharePoint for Content Management

We see a great surge in the market for CMSs (Content Management Systems) in recent years. It brings a wide range of choices to the companies while selecting the platform for their website. Most of these platforms are created to target some specific features.

Still, overall these CMSs provide a gamut of features and functions, plus lots of features can be developed additionally using the base programming language. Whenever an organization selects any of these platforms, they consider various factors like nature of license fee structure, readily available resources to extend them, ease of use etc. to mention a few.

SharePoint provides various ways to add metadata to files to sort, organize, and keep track of business-owned content. More specifically, as a portal – SharePoint will push tags onto content as business users upload them to collaboration spaces. As part of this process, they can also make end-users provide metadata regarding documents.

Apart from achieving one or two important tasks at a lower cost or more easily, one of the major reasons for selecting the platform are external to the CMS itself. Two of the major criteria are: user familiarity and easy integration with existing systems and applications.

If we consider SharePoint development in particular some of the needs of large organizations can easily be taken care of. Some of the flexible features necessary for websites with lots of information and data within them can easily be enabled.

The site features like advanced search, extensive document library, and easy integration with other MSFT products such as MS Office, Outlook and Dynamics CRM or ERP and readily available developers in the internal team make it the best choice.

Understanding SharePoint farm

SharePoint farm is basically a collection of servers that performs multiple tasks to fill up SharePoint roles. To better understand the concept of SharePoint Farm, here’s a real-life example.

You planned to open a cafe, for that you require a person who can take orders (waiter), a person who preapers the order (chef, cook).Now if the person who prepares the food is not available, then the customer won’t receive the order. And if the person who takes the order is absent, then customer never gets to place the order. Think of every cafe crew members – as a server.

Well, a single person can obviously perform all of these tasks of taking the order, preparing it, and then serving. But this is only possible when the cafe (business) is small. Once visitors increase, you have to hire a crew for better management.

Your SharePoint farm servers operate the same way, where all the roles can be played by a single server, or alternatively, you can divide the tasks/roles for better results over several servers.

Let us discuss some appealing features within SharePoint:

Licensing and its Integration with MSFT environment

Many organizations create SharePoint websites as they have agreements with MSFT that cover almost all the licensing fees, which makes SharePoint a free tool for them to use, apart from costs associated with development, hosting, etc.

SharePoint web development is also suggested in situations when it’s easier to incorporate in an environment composed mainly of other Microsoft tools. E.g. for instance, if you are already be using an MS SQL Server database, which can be used for the development of workflows that rely on information flow from sources like MS CRM to the website. SharePoint also seamlessly integrates into your existing security models.

Easy Integration of Document Libraries and Staging Environments

Integration and SharePoint programming for the websites, not only offers powerful document-sharing tools, but more importantly, it allows seamless workflow creations, so that all the documents uploaded or downloaded from within the website can go through the proper approval processes anytime they are revised.

After all, SharePoint is one of the most popular collaboration platforms. Hence it works well for websites that require many developers and content creators to work together at the back end. It also works very well in conditions where a lot of approvals are needed, as out of the box, it provides a staging environment that can be used for development before going live on the Internet.

Sharepoint Web Design

With Microsoft SharePoint development, businesses can easily share information, publish news, promote essentials solutions, build up a community, or show within company.

SharePoint web design offers greater control and versatility than its cloud-based equivalent over design and architecture. Some organizations will prefer the more hands-on security approach the platform provides. With limited SharePoint web design experience, SharePoint users may create their own Intranet (internal website). These may include personal sites, team-based sites, or general, company-wide websites, depending on their intent.

SharePoint Online vs. SharePoint Server: The Difference

To manage their data and knowledge, many organizations rely on SharePoint, and many more are considering taking the leap. SharePoint is available in either local (SharePoint server) or cloud-based (SharePoint online). Although they provide very similar sets of features, each offers specific consumer advantages.

SharePoint Server is a platform hosted locally that is managed and controlled by your company. Companies are accountable for most aspects of the network with SharePoint Server, including active directory, file storage, and server architecture.

SharePoint Online is a Microsoft-direct, cloud-based service. That takes care of Identity management and architecture, which are especially appealing to small companies. SharePoint Online substitutes a per-user payment model for your equipment and software license costs. Microsoft manages updates, monitors the operation, and handles maintenance.

It’s Familiarity due to existing Implementations

As SharePoint has Microsoft written all over it, it’s obvious the UI is similar to all other Microsoft products.

Since it’s obvious most of the corporate rely heavily on MSFT products. Hence, the best website developer companies are well-known with SharePoint’s tools and interfaces and are already practicing it as an internal collaboration platform.

Using your corporate portal’s existing internal implementation and building a website on it may be the simplest way to move ahead with the right CMS. The IT staff are already acquainted, while the non-IT personnel will have an easier time understanding the platform and managing/using the features.

ConclusionThere was a time when designing and developing your company website on SharePoint was not considered an option previously because of its earlier version, which faced a lack of refined UI/UX capabilities and other concerns like Search Engine Optimizations. However, with the advancements in on and off-page optimization options and infinite design options, SharePoint faced a tremendous surge in corporate website development numbers.And to help you develop websites on SharePoint, you can always rely on Radixweb. Our experts will empower your business by managing costs, optimizing efficiency, and driving innovation and business value while developing SharePoint websites. We build enterprise-grade business solutions backed by time-tested tools, methodologies, and a considerable pool of Microsoft technologies.Contact us to find out more!