SharePoint is a website-based system that helps business teams work together using workflow applications and databases. It’s a popular enterprise collaboration and communication tool that companies of all types and sizes leverage. This platform’s out-of-the-box features go a long way toward fulfilling a company’s fundamental communication and collaboration needs.
SharePoint customization is the best way to incorporate modified dashboards and menus and integrate third-party software with any version of the platform. This personalization is what guarantees that companies maintain their brand and identity while promoting team collaboration and improving productivity.
The Concept of SharePoint Customization
Any organization with a Microsoft 365 subscription has access to SharePoint. Although its basic features are often sufficient for smaller companies to communicate and collaborate, larger organizations may want to explore SharePoint customization options that will better meet their needs.
There are limitless ways for businesses to customize modern SharePoint sites by creating personalized solutions that are adaptable to their established processes.
Some of these options include contract/document management systems, intranets and portals, and many others. Companies may also take advantage of SharePoint Online, which adds even more customizable features. SharePoint customization is especially helpful for companies because it facilitates branding for any type of SharePoint site.
Why Customize Sharepoint?
Companies choose to customize Sharepoint for a variety of reasons, including disintegrated workflows, compliance regulations, and many others.
Disintegrated Workflows
By integrating SharePoint with other third-party tools, companies compress and streamline their business processes, all while ensuring that the integrated systems continue to work seamlessly and smoothly. Integrating SharePoint with a CRM, for example, allows companies to automate data insertion from the CRM into a contract template stored within the platform, avoiding contract duplication and manual data entry.
Employee Resistance and Insufficient Performance
Not all employees are eager to adjust to the idea of regularly using collaborative tools, especially if these tools are difficult to learn and use. SharePoint customization helps create intuitive UI and UX that will encourage employees to want to actively use the platform.
Compliance Regulations
SharePoint customization allows the creation of hybrid environments that connect the features of online and on-premise SharePoint. Healthcare organizations, for instance, greatly benefit from this because they’re often bound to strict federal and state compliance regulations, like the HIPPA, which allows them to store patient information on the server instead of on-premises.
Site Consolidation
Site consolidation links the functional areas of separate websites, integrating them into a single platform through SharePoint. This improves operational efficiency by reducing costs, streamlining site management, and improving the user experience. This feature lets internal teams and employees easily manage and access data from various websites.
Reasons Why SharePoint Customization Is Great
SharePoint has many customization options to help companies better utilize the system for their specific needs.
Improved Collaboration
Potentially the biggest SharePoint benefit is how it supports collaboration among multiple employees. Its features allow these professionals to work together on and share documents in real-time or asynchronously within the SharePoint environment, without any confusion.
When working on a document with several employees at the same time, all changes synchronize automatically, eliminating the need to share multiple versions of the file. SharePoint does, however, save multiple versions of the document if anyone needs to see who made changes and when.
Other collaborative features of Sharepoint customization include chat rooms that instantly connect team members and enable screen sharing, with excellent accessibility. Users may access SharePoint online from any device and retrieve a file at any given time, as long as they have an internet connection. Team members may also work on their files when they’re offline as well.
Tailored User Experience
SharePoint Customization allows companies to create a tailored user experience that aligns with their needs and preferences. It is especially useful when business users want to establish a brand.
Using this platform and its assets, companies can personalize every aspect of their websites, including the site header, footer, content links, personnel bio, and navigation panel, using custom designs that will impress any potential client. Companies find creative ways to use their business’ logo, images, personnel photographs, department images, color palettes, and other components to make their brand stand out from the competition.
Streamlined Business Processes
Sharepoint workflows consist of a series of automated steps that help companies streamline their processes and reduce manual labor simultaneously. These workflow automation capabilities cover all sorts of tasks, from sending simple notifications to managing complex approvals.
Teams may also set up workflows in a few different ways, either user-initiated, triggered by a defined event, or scheduled for specific times. In any case, with SharePoint customization, companies use personalized workflows to meet their needs, automate processes, and save time.
Enhanced Data Analysis
Data management is a big challenge that greatly impacts the delivery of productivity. Luckily, by using SharePoint, data managers can easily handle multiple projects simultaneously. It is possible for them to stay organized while publishing or updating all kinds of website content such as events, blogs, presentation stacks, and news.
Increased ROI
One of the best ways to increase ROI when using SharePoint is by taking advantage of its monitoring and reporting tools to better understand employee usage. By analyzing user activity, companies identify patterns and potential issues, which they can then use to promote an effective adoption of the platform.
SharePoint Customization Options
Many different areas of SharePoint allow for customization by companies, including design, workflows, navigation, and more.
Navigation
Custom navigation makes it easier for team members to find and access information that’s relevant to their daily tasks. Through SharePoint customization, companies can build multi-level navigation menus with employee portals, navigation panels, and quick links.
This SharePoint feature makes it easy to add, edit, or remove links from any website meu, allows for much simpler management of communication sites, and also simplifies making any changes to the hub site, for example.
Design
The most obvious SharePoint customization option is the ability to modify design features across websites. Branding options include changes in styles, colors, landing pages, master pages, logos, and page layouts.
Using these features, companies can create a specific look or brand that is unique to their organization. It is also a great way to promote corporate culture across the entire business.
Workflows
SharePoint customization enables the development of new and custom workflows, unavailable to users who rely on the basic features of the platform. To do this, users can take advantage of a wide variety of tools such as Microsoft Flow, Visual Studio, SharePoint Designer, and Power Automate.
Team members never have to worry about losing workflow compatibility whenever the platform updates to a newer version. Even discontinued workflows continue to work properly if users need them.
Page Content and Forms
Companies can use SharePoint customization to create tailored layouts for web pages or take advantage of custom web parts that include News, File Viewer, Bing Maps, Galleries, Event, and many others. It’s also possible to use Microsoft Forms or Power Automate to create custom forms for polls, surveys, and quizzes, which are helpful when assessing employee satisfaction, collecting customer/partner feedback, and also organizing corporate events.
Tips On How, When, and Why to Customize Sharepoint
Sometimes, companies see the benefits of switching to SharePoint but don’t know where to get started. Here are some basic steps to begin.
1. Provide Training
SharePoint is an accessible platform, but some employees might need some extra time to adjust to a new platform. This is why it is important to provide training on how to use SharePoint and its various applications and features.
Apart from dedicated training sessions, business leaders can also leave a welcoming message on the homepage with a quick introduction to the portal. They can offer quick tips on how to use the SharePoint Team Site, how to keep the libraries organized, and how to tag, potentially leaving a link to more detailed self-training material that users can consult as needed.
2. Offer Resources
SharePoint is a great way to share information and materials internally that can help streamline collaboration and communication. Companies can take advantage of this to share different types of resources, from discussion forums to project management tools.
3. Use Alerts
With SharePoint, users create notifications and alerts to keep them updated on anything that happens on the platform. They may choose to receive an alert, for instance, when they receive a new message, when changes occur in files or folders, and when libraries update. Users decide what kinds of notifications to receive via email, depending on their work and priorities.
4. Make Your Files Searchable and Filterable
Team members should tag their content properly, making it easy to find. They could establish and follow a standard naming convention that, for instance, consists of descriptive language and format and doesn’t include any special characters or spaces.
5. Label It
Much like properly tagging documents, labeling will help keep all files organized. Using SharePoint, users can label different types of assets and group them by type into libraries, manageable folders, and subfolders.
This makes it even easier for team members to find important documents whenever they need to make quick business decisions. Instead of wasting time searching for the data they need, they can devote a larger portion of their time to core business activities.
6. Encourage Employees to Create Their Own Resources
While it is a business leader’s responsibility to provide resources to their employees, with time, team members can also develop their own resources. Companies should encourage employees at all levels to create their resources such as internal websites, pages, databases, documents, and applications as custom solutions to their daily tasks.
7. Collaborate
As previously mentioned, the main feature of SharePoint is the collaboration between team members and different departments. There is a wide variety of SharePoint customization features that encourage and foster teamwork efforts.
8. Consider Add-Ins
Add-ins are a part of SharePoint customization that help make a user’s SharePoint experience a lot better. Companies can choose between provider-hosted or SharePoint-hosted Add-ins, depending on their needs and requirements.
Some of the most popular Add-ins in SharePoint include Travel Request System, DocuSign, Time-Off Manager, Bulk Edit, Kanban Board, ShortURL, Forms Designer, and My Sticky Notes.
9. Leverage Employee Feedback and Knowledge
To fully meet the distinct needs and wants of their organization, business leaders should leverage employee feedback and knowledge. Certain employees might have a higher level of experience using SharePoint, which might give them interesting ideas regarding new ways to use the platform.
Companies should take into consideration the recommendations of different departments and conduct brainstorming sessions to figure out how else can SharePoint benefit the entire company.
10. Outsource Customization
Ultimately, it could be helpful to outsource SharePoint customization to specialists that are highly knowledgeable in the field, instead of having the internal team worrying about learning everything there’s to know about the platform from scratch.
Outsourcing providers have experience leveraging the best tools, applications, and add-ins and matching them with the different requirements of each company. By providing different alternatives for the company’s needs, they’re able to increase internal efficiency, ensuring the company remains innovative and competitive.
At the same time, the in-house team is free to focus on critical business tasks while the organization saves money due to a reduced cost of burden and the implementation of cost-saving solutions.
SharePoint Customization Best Practices
There are a few SharePoint best practices that companies should follow to make the best out of using this platform in daily operations. Some of the most important ones include:
- Avoiding hard-coding values – Doing so allows for a flexible and dynamic SharePoint environment that can handle changes without issues. Fluid environments also make it easier to use SharePoint across various devices and screen sizes.
- Using documented APIs – Documented APIs are crucial in providing developers with a secure way to alter and extend SharePoint functions that won’t break with future updates. They’re also necessary to integrate their customizations with other services. Undocumented APIs could prompt unsteady customizations that would negatively affect user experience.
- Testing customizations before deploying – Companies should make sure their customizations work perfectly across different devices and browsers before launch. Failing to evaluate compatibility issues can stop operations for days and negatively impact productivity.
- Setting governance policies – SharePoint customization will create a significant part of the client’s business which means that business leaders need to guarantee system access to employees and control their accessibility. Setting governance rules helps mitigate potential risks.
- Keeping the most frequently updated pages on the homepage – The most frequently updated pages tend to attract more end users. Therefore, keeping them in plain sight could encourage employees to use SharePoint more often. Some examples of relevant pages include the latest news, announcements, corporate events, job opportunities, and daily polls.
When to Consider SharePoint Customization
From individual content creators to large enterprises, virtually all businesses benefit from SharePoint customization. SharePoint customization helps businesses solve a wide variety of problems that basic features simply can’t handle. Companies should consider customizing their platform when they need to:
- Enhance user experience to meet organization requirements
- Enhance employee performance by adding functionality
- Streamline processes using custom workflows
- Simplify the migration of content, workflows, and features
- Establish compliance
Conclusion
SharePoint is one of the best platforms on the market when it comes to offering communication and collaboration solutions. The SharePoint online environment has been a game-changer in this regard.
SharePoint customization options, including creating custom layouts, allow for the creation of custom workflows, designs, and other digital workspace elements that meet companies’ requirements, helping improve productivity and process efficiency and save money. This platform, especially with the classic SharePoint sites, is extremely flexible. Users can also make use of the SharePoint framework for even more functionalities. This flexibility can automate and streamline work processes, giving users more freedom to focus on core business tasks and manage their site collection effectively.
However, not all staff has the ability to adapt to a new SharePoint server on time, which is why many organizations choose to outsource SharePoint customization. This way, an expert outsourcing provider can leverage the best tools, applications, and add-ins, increasing internal efficiency.
FAQ
What are the risks associated with SharePoint customization?
Some of the risks associated with SharePoint customization include:
- Long duration and increased costs – Implementing the platform, training employees, adding third-party integrations, building custom workflows, and designing new themes, to dedicated offshore software developers, is expensive and time-consuming.
- Modern customization restrictions – Modern SharePoint websites have fewer personalization options than the classic version of the platform.
- Upgrading issues – There could be compatibility issues with custom designs and workflows after updates if developers use hard code that isn’t compatible with SharePoint changes.
- Decreased performance – Making too many changes to the user interface using poorly written custom code and excessive add-ins and integrations may reduce site speed and performance.
Can I customize SharePoint myself or do I need a professional?
SharePoint customization requires a team with knowledge and expertise to ensure that all modifications are effective and flexible enough to accommodate changes and platform updates. Creating such a team is hard, so many companies prefer enlisting the help of outsourced professionals.
Outsourcing SharePoint customization helps save money by eliminating the cost of finding, hiring, training, and maintaining in-house experts and grants companies access to experts that are up to date on best practices, security, and cloud certifications.
