Helping to find your content in SharePoint

How Do You Visualise Your SharePoint Content?

There is no getting away from it, SharePoint is a common tool used in business for storing content and facilitating collaboration.  It has been one of Microsoft most successful products and is a core component of Office 365.

However, one of the challenges for users is to be able to find and view the content within SharePoint that is relevant to them.

A common challenge that I see in businesses, especially when working across multiple projects, that are using various Line of Business Systems, like project management, risk management, cost and commercial management, quality, health and safety, is being able to get and see the right content quickly and easily.

Typically, people are sending emails with attachments to share the content.  What happens if you forget to add someone to the email, or the content changes after you have sent it?  People get frustrated if they were not included or have out of date content.

You get frustrated because of the continual, non added value task of updating and resending content to people who need the information.

One way to help solve this problem is to be able to link your SharePoint content to a single place, so that people with the appropriate security settings can get access immediately within a one or two clicks.

An example of this is to embed your SharePoint folder or file url into a SharpCloud HTML panel.

Frustrated woman with laptop trying to find digital content.

SharpCloud – a visual collaboration tool

If you are not familiar with SharpCloud, it is a visual collaboration tool/platform that enables you to create multiple types of user case solutions/apps.

A common user case/app is Project Portfolio Management.  As mentioned before projects may use different Line of Business Systems to manage and control various parts of a Project, Programme and Portfolio.

Being able to see all the key data from these systems in one place and link to other digital content located on systems like SharePoint, simplifies complex decision making and saves a lot of time, money and frustration!

SharpCloud has multiple “panel” types, one of which is a HTML panel.  This means you can paste in a url so that the web page/content can be displayed in the panel.

Effectively creating a portal to other systems and content.

See your SharePoint and Digital Content

Linking your SharePoint site or any other online business system to a SharpCloud panel, improves your data collaboration and provides a complete and integrated view.

Here are a couple of examples where I have used this to help clients to see their data and digital content in one place.

IT Financial Management System Roadmap

One project involves delivering a new financial management system to 46 countries.  Each country has its own SharePoint Project Site that stores the specific project documentation.  Using Roelto R- DBR (Dashboard Reporting) app, all 46 countries can be seen.  Within in each project there are several Project Panels – two of which are linked to SharePoint site that displays a Word document and a Excel spreadsheet.

The user can navigate and view the document/spreadsheet as if they were in the application itself.  No more sending emails, or links to to sites and file locations.  People can simply click on the country, click the panel and see the content immediately, facilitating collaboration and enabling people to make informed business decisions based on real time, up to date data and information.

Linking other business systems together

Another project included a major energy organisation showing the overall status of major capital projects and a link to their contractor online subsea management system, which could be viewed through a HTML panel using the security credentials to allow it to be viewed only by people who had access to it.  This saved up to 2 days/week of multiple emails and reports.

Integrating existing Power BI Reports

Just because you have a new system, does not mean you get rid of the existing one.

In another Project Portfolio Management System managing hundreds of project across multiple programmes, existing Power BI reports was embed into a SharpCloud widget view (instead of an Item panel).  Again, the security credentials were maintained where only users who had access to the Power BI reports could view the reports in SharpCloud.

html panel sharpcloud word document

Examples of SharePoint content being displayed in a SharpCloud HTML panel

Benefits of Visualising Other Digital Content

To be able to visually see information for your projects, strategies/roadmaps  from your SharePoint sites, that provides you with a both the high level information and the ability to see more of the detail easily is very powerful.

It saves time, cost and is quick and easy to set up and use (done in minutes).

No more asking Fred or Mary if they know where a file is or can they send you a copy of that slide deck.

If you want to discover more how you could use this in your organisation or have a question or comment, just email me directly –