Sharepoint Online

For many organisations operating SharePoint and Microsoft Office on-premises, up to 80% of IT budget can be consumed by low-value maintenance and integration. There are significant upfront costs for hardware and the space to keep it, as well as an IT team to maintain the server, to add updates and patches. SharePoint Online on the other hand is part of an Office 365 plan and is billed monthly per user.

The high cost of comprehensive enterprise systems can put these out of reach for small to medium businesses (SMB). Fortunately, the rise of software-as-a-service and cloud-based applications have given organizations more financial flexibility. Companies can subscribe to enterprise applications instead of making significant outright purchases, effectively shifting digital workplace costs from a capital expense to an operational expenditure.

Because cloud computing pushes the burden of maintenance over to cloud vendors, companies can free up huge portions of their budgets and reallocate them to projects delivering growth and customer engagement, as well as being more interesting and challenging to their IT staff. At the same time business users are able to share and manage content, knowledge and applications to empower teamwork, quickly find information, and enjoy seamless document collaboration across the organisation.

In addition to monopolising budget, the traditional IT operating model can be challenging from a security point of view with IT environments made up of many separate components patched together, each piece requiring its own unique security protocols. In the cloud, organisations have the opportunity to move from having many security exposures to a unified cybersecurity stack where the cloud vendor shoulders that burden.

Despite the advantages of operating Office 365 in the cloud, many enterprise IT workloads are still hosted in enterprise-owned data centres. Organisations like banks and other financial institutions still use mainframes because of data protection and regulatory requirements, making SharePoint 2016 On-Premises the logical choice for these industries.

A hybrid cloud offers the best of both worlds, so you can take advantage of external resources when it makes sense for your business and enable greater business mobility. Companies want to maintain control of some back end functions on-site, and migrate other solutions to third-party cloud providers. A hybrid approach allows you to empower users while keeping IT in control and meeting your organisation’s standards for security and compliance.

SharePoint 2016 has the ability to stay on-prem while leveraging Office 365’s capabilities. Creating a SharePoint hybrid environment is about leveraging both Sharepoint Server on premises and Office 365 SharePoint Online to achieve your business goals.

A hybrid environment enables enterprise users to be connected from almost anywhere to the resources and content they need. A hybrid solution can help your company get started in the cloud, taking a first step to explore the cloud functionality at own your pace. With the Hybrid functionality in SharePoint Server and Office 365, extend your on-premises investment to the cloud by integrating services and moving workloads to the environment that meets your organisational strategy.

For more information or to speak with one of our consultants about your business needs, contact us or call 0452 184 227.

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Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 is useful for programmers who are editing SharePoint.   already. It’s not for end users, readers or even site authors. It’s for folks who are managing the sites and creating workflows, branding and more.

The best people to use this application are site administrators, power users, and developers. Once you start using SharePoint Designer 2010, you find out how much time you have saved by not having to enter code directly all the time.

Not just for Design

The Designer word in the product name confuses people who first hear about it. People thing that it must be for people who create branding or web styles in SharePoint. Yes SharePoint Designer lets you create and apply CSS and HTML to your SharePoint sites, edit or create new Master Pages, page layouts and site templates, this is not all it does.

We use SharePoint Designer in many ways for example:

  • Create solutions using functionality using the Data View Web Part,
  • Use Workflow designer to generate approval workflows for example
  • Change around Web Part zones
  • Create page layouts
  • Generate External Content Types
  • Create Business Connectivity Services to hook in to other databases and systems

SharePoint Designer 2010 is…free!

Microsoft decided to make SharePoint Designer 2010 free so that all developers could customise and extend SharePoint to a huge reach. Besides using Visual Studio, which is more for hardcore .Net development and not specifically for SharePoint, SharePoint Designer offers a lot to developers. From creating BCS connections to generating workflows, reviewing content, creating master pages, page layouts and site templates – SharePoint Designer 2010 gives you all this and more.

So if you have access to SharePoint 2010, and would like to dig deeper and use more indepth tools and functionality, start learning about SharePoint Designer 2010. It also has a user interface for you to drag and drop to, unlike SharePoint 2013 which only provides a code view.