Collaborating in the Cloud

You and your co-workers have been collaborating on a lengthy proposal for the last several weeks. Scores of versions clog your inbox and outbox, each with a different set of comments and changes. Now, it’s time to send the document out to the potential client, and you’re frantically trying to deduce whose inbox has the most up-to-date version.

If that sounds familiar, you may want to look into SharePoint 2010, a powerful cloud-based collaboration and content management tool from Microsoft. SharePoint offers a central location for the storage, access, and management of numerous document types. It features intuitive tools for setting access permissions as well as managing versions, and it integrates smoothly with Microsoft Office.

The content management system provides simple methods for tagging content, enforcing retention schedules, declaring records, and applying legal holds—items especially useful for businesses subject to regulatory compliance.

SharePoint takes advantage of cloud infrastructure to provide users with access to centrally stored content from just about anywhere, so long as the user has an Internet connection. It manages far more than just Word documents, however. SharePoint can handle dynamic Web content and multimedia with equal ease, and it can handle several documents as a single entity (called a Document Set), which comes in handy for common processes like RFP (request for proposal) responses or sending marketing kits.

This is the fifth and final (for now) part of our QuickTip series on Cloud Computing. We hope you’ve found it enjoyable and informative.