Microsoft’s Sharepoint is one of the best online collaboration tools in the market. It offers many advanced features for data and task management, blogging, team management and more.  Sharepoint is a singlepoint for sharing data among various users. It is a single space for content management of data for different organizations. Organizations can design, create sites and give permissions to people depending on business requirements.

Categories of Sharepoint

The first is Sharepoint On-Premises. It requires a huge amount of capital investment to set up physical hardware and run costs on electricity, licensing, and support.

The other option is Sharepoint Online , which involves outsourcing the entire infrastructure to the cloud, in this case the Microsoft providers. Microsoft offers SharePoint Online and Office 365 as a cloud-based option to the SharePoint On-Premise. Office 365 is a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud computing product.

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SharePoint On-premise environment

1. The major difference between the two is that to run On-Premises you’ll need more room and an IT team to maintain the server, add updates and patches.

2. As a business, where your corporate information is stored means a lot. Some companies are unwilling or unable to store their data in the cloud for reasons of legality or compliance, for which On-Premises is the best option.

3. Privacy/Legal Reasons– Few organizations use On Premises due to privacy or legal reasons. Hospitals are a good instance. When in the cloud, the data is hosted by Microsoft, and in case of legal disputes there are no issues of privacy here.

4. Most enterprise and midsize business subscriptions (Subscriptions E2, E3 and E4) allow online editing of Microsoft Office documents. Cost-related considerations determine which of the two Microsoft Office Web Apps suits best.

5. Advanced customization– If are looking to customize and build super-advanced customizations, cloud does have its limitations since you are giving up control. Some big organizations decide to stay On Premises for that same reason.

6. Another consideration to be made is the total reliance on Internet availability if moving completely to the Cloud. Without Internet accessibility, the possibility of not being able to access your data becomes a concern. Also, you’ll want to make sure the way in which you have already and stored your data is supported by Sharepoint Online, or else you may struggle to access that data.

7. Loss of control over the SharePoint farm is also an issue. If Microsoft creates a patch — or even a new version of SharePoint — that breaks one of your Web apps, you won’t have a way to test the patch ahead of time or to prevent a problematic patch from being deployed.

Having said that, there are also numerous reasons why you should move to Online:-

1. OneDrive for Business– One of the most powerful features of SP Online is that it enables user to create a document and easily share it with others to get ideas, feedback, and add expertise to the document. OneDrive for Business gives organizations a place to put their working files and data, collaborate and share on any device.

2. Office Online Apps– You can leverage different applications that come with office 365 subscription to use more features with Sharepoint. PowerBi with SharePoint online is a really useful tool. By using Dashboards and reports there are better ways of visualizing and presenting data. Some of these applications are:- PowerBI, Delve, Flow(creating simple workflows), Power Apps(anyone can publish a SharePoint library as a mobile application).

3. Mobile Apps– Most of the above mentioned features and apps are available on mobile devices, and due to real time sync capabilities one can access the information anywhere anytime on the go.

4. With SharePoint Online you do not have to worry about the SharePoint patches and version updates which rolls out very 2- years as it is taken care by Microsoft. Even without the upgrade and patching you can use all the new features it offers.

5. You can easily scale your farm up and down. Provisioning a new user on Office 365 is very easy, just a few clicks in the Admin Portal to create a new user or assign new licenses.

In conclusion, it’s up to you to make the final decision whether it’s SharePoint Online Office 365 or SharePoint On-Premises or Hybrid, depending on the exact needs of your organization. Despite whichever SharePoint solution you decide to undertake, it’s very important to back up your data. It’s usually easier to back up to cloud using a third-party solution, which consequently backups your cloud data on an everyday basis and is always readily accessible.

To know more about Sharepoint, you can enrol for a course at Koenig Solutions . Trainers here teach all the concepts in an innovative manner, giving participants the chance to work practically on the same.

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