Nowadays, one of the main challenges for teamwork is picking the right tools to enhance team collaboration. If a company is working within a Microsoft environment, team members are probably struggling between SharePoint and Outlook. Synchronization between SharePoint and Exchange can be the solution to this struggle.
But what is this struggle about? Organizations and managers want to make SharePoint the central collaboration platform, and they want to remove barriers for people to use it. All information that concerns other people in the company should be in SharePoint so that it is accessible for relevant colleagues.
Synchronizing SharePoint & Exchange - theory and practice
In theory, that makes total sense. However, in reality, this rarely works. People love Outlook, their email client, and they feel they don't have all the information they need for communication and collaboration available in SharePoint.
Besides, sometimes it's simply not possible to use SharePoint. Maybe the users are bound to specific devices or have limited connectivity.
In the following video, we will have a look at a practical use case scenario. We will consider Eric, a project manager that is looking forward to starting a new project with three of his colleagues, using SharePoint as a team collaboration tool. We will see what challenges he faced and how using SharePoint Exchange Sync helped.
CB SharePoint Exchange Sync
CB SharePoint Exchange Sync is a solution that synchronizes calendars, tasks, contacts, and emails between SharePoint and Exchange server.
In the beginning, the company had two different worlds:
- SharePoint, the tool of choice for the manager, as it made sense to him for handling the different aspects of his projects and
- Exchange + Outlook for personal productivity of the other team members
On SharePoint, they could place the project-related calendar, tasks, email, and contacts. But this was not pratical for the team members, as each team member had their individual calendar, tasks, email, and contacts in Outlook.
By using CB SharePoint Exchange Sync the project calendar got synchronized so that everyone in the project can now see free time info and every team member's status. The manager can assign a task to people, and that task is immediately visible in Outlook. Contacts are synchronized from Exchange to SharePoint, and everyone in the team can now access them. Synchronization even includes emails, that go into the document library of SharePoint. This way, each team member can share relevant emails to all team members at once.
As CB SharePoint Exchange Sync is handling the synchronization on the server-side, team members can see appointments and tasks instantly on mobile phone standard apps as well.
Takeaway
This synchronization enables SharePoint to be the number one tool that the people open in the morning and on which they base their team collaboration, while not having to give up on Outlook.
If you want to see how this could work for your organization, go ahead and ask our experts for a free demo. Do provide them with some info on your use case and they will be more than happy to adjust the demo to your needs.