Moving to SharePoint is relatively easy. It is even easier if you use an IT Consulting company like San Diego Computer Consulting. San Diego Computer Consulting specializes in helping companies migrate to the cloud. Moving to SharePoint is a very big decision, but is common when the company file server is getting old. When considering the move to SharePoint, you have to look at the type of files that you use and the people that use them.

Company with onsite and offsite staff.

SharePoint is a perfect solution for companies that have onsite and offsite staff. Both on and offsite staff see the same shared company documents and same file sharing structure. The difference is that you do not need to use VPN or remote access to access the files. Using SharePoint will allow you to connect to the files directly through your Microsoft office.

San Diego Computer Consulting has many customers with SharePoint. However, it seems that after an evaluation of a company, we are often implementing a hybrid configurations. With the hybrid implementation, we are still using a file server, but, we are using it in conjunction with SharePoint. In this case, we are implementing it in two separate scenarios:

In-house server does Active Directory and Database applications
San Diego Computer Consulting does a migration of all company documents to SharePoint. All users use SharePoint for connecting to file shares via Windows Explorer.  A new smaller file server is used for company database applications and large size files.

In this case a specific set of remote shared directories are designated for SharePoint Cloud services. The File Server, however, still remains the dominate source for files and database applications. SharePoint is used for specific users, specific files/folders. The File Server is used for intra-web and not the domain place for company share files and folders.

SharePoint is a tossup solution in a full onsite staffing scenario. Under this configuration, a company may choose to keep their file server for no other reason that it just works. And, if it works, why necessarily fix it? Nonetheless, all file servers get old and have to eventually be replaced. When replacing the file server, it might make sense to save the money for replacing the physical file server and just use SharePoint for your company files. That is, of course, if you mostly use Word, Excel and PDF’s.

Microsoft SharePoint is included with Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium or E3 plans. To use Microsoft SharePoint, each user must have the Microsoft 365 suite of applications. The Business plan comes with 1 Terabyte of shared data for the company OneDrive for business. Users have 1 Terabyte of personal OneDrive along with the business plan.

This is advantageous! With SharePoint included with your Microsoft office 365 solution, there is an incentive for your company to put the file and folder shares on the web. Office 365 is intended to be a full solution for your workplace. Giving you One Drive personal and SharePoint helps you move into the cloud safely and in one of the largest cloud networks in the world.

When moving to Office 365 and SharePoint, you have to be careful in making sure that the files that you are moving are going to function well in the cloud environment. As we have stated all along, today’s SharePoint is ready for Word, Excel, and Acrobat files. Very large files like large Legal PDF’s, Graphics, databases, and engineering files are not particularly designed for SharePoint and will lag upon opening. It is very important to review and very carefully consider what files are going to be in the SharePoint environment. Contracting with an IT Consultant company like San Diego Computer Consulting can be a critical step to make sure the outlined plan to move to the Cloud is the correct move and that it will perform well.

Making the move to the cloud via SharePoint can be disastrous if not done correctly. San Diego Computer Consulting can help to carefully direct you, brining expertise and wisdom to the table to make sure there is a carefully tested and successful migration plan in place.

It’s not magic, but sometimes that is what it may seem like. Our staff at San Diego Computer Consulting has been through formal training and have done numerous SharePoint migrations. Migrating to SharePoint is typically done through a tool that we load on the file server. We configure the migration tool to specify the directories that you want and synchronize up to the SharePoint cloud service. The files are then slowly synchronized up to your Office 365 SharePoint tenant.

Microsoft Office 365 builds out a tenant for each of its customer companies. Each tenant is its own virtual world. That world typically has your email, applications, your personal One Drive, and your business SharePoint. That world is completely virtual and dedicated to your company at Microsoft.

When the folders and files are synched up to the SharePoint tenant, access from the SharePoint portal to files and folders are administrated via users rights much like one a file server The rights are all granted on the web and a weblink is generated for the file/folder share that you want to give to your staff. When a staffmembers clicks on the web link, it then builds-out the cloud directory on their computer. The files are then displayed in a mapped drive format. The user can then choose which files/folders are stored locally and which ones can just work off of the web.

Once the SharePoint mapping is rolled-out on each of staff’s computers, we turn off the SharePoint migration tool and disconnect the network share from the server. Users then are forced to look for documents under the SharePoint folder on the Windows Explorer. The “F:” drive is no longer connected, and the migration is completed.

We at San Diego Computer Consulting take great pride in helping our clients achieve their IT goals. This is done through careful, and deliberate planning. Having a local IT consulting company can make a big difference.

Word and Excel files in SharePoint are already collaborative. This means that two or more people can now open the same file and work on it simultaneously. This is best shown in an example through Excel.   Below is a picture of an Excel spreadsheet opened in a collaborative mode. You can see that each user is assigned a colored box. Items in that box can be moved, edited, and worked on, no differently then when in single mode. This is a huge new feature with SharePoint. Collaboration is a much sought-after feature. With SharePoint this is easily done.

Security is the biggest factor to consider in today’s IT computing world. Microsoft has included as an option for 2-Factor authentication. All of us already use it with many of our other web platforms including banking and finance web portals. The idea is that once you login with your ID and password, you then need a code sent to your smartphone to double-verify that you are who you say you are.

This is a very important feature because in today’s world, passwords are always getting hacked. Those passwords are found on the dark web and can be used by hackers to get into your online data. Most of us have been victimized of e-fraud at one time or another. Your credit cards have been compromised, maybe your identity has been stolen, or money was taken out of our bank accounts.

To help thwart this, 2-Factor authentications is a great feature in that if even a hacker knows your password, they cannot login without the double verification of a one-time code. Office 365 gives you the option to enable this feature. With the enablement of 2-Factor authentication, no one can get into your Microsoft Office 365 portal, including email, one drive, Skype, and SharePoint data without knowing the constantly changing code.