Are SharePoint and Office 365 the same? It can be confusing to know which is the best option for your organization. In this article, we will explain the functions of both SharePoint and Office 365 and discuss the differences between them.
SharePoint is a collaborative platform that integrates well with Microsoft applications, whereas Office 365 is a suite of collaborative tools, including SharePoint. Many users often get confused between SharePoint and Office 365 because of the similarities they share. However, they do have some differences in the features they offer, which I will explain in this post. Let’s take SharePoint first.
SharePoint
SharePoint became available in 2001, and it made the business operations within the organization easier with its features. The ‘SharePoint’ in Office 365 and ‘SharePoint online server’ both come under SharePoint technologies. ‘SharePoint Online’ is a cloud version of the SharePoint server that supports multi-tenancy. You have to purchase the Office 365 subscription plan to use SharePoint Online. On the other hand, you can install the SharePoint server on the physical servers in your organization or from the data center.
SharePoint is now a part of the Office 365 suite, where you can get to use its advanced features with an Office 365 enterprise subscription. It supports small, medium, and enterprise-level business operations. In the beginning, SharePoint was used for document management. Later, it became a one-stop solution to organize and share several types of content, for example, events, tasks and invitations. It made internal collaboration easy with its functionalities.
Your employees can share information, create sites, share events and tasks with team members and clients with the help of SharePoint. It offers you the latest site pages, advanced search, Power apps, Power BI, MS Flow, modern web authoring, modern lists and libraries and a new SharePoint home page.
SharePoint is the best fit:
- If you have a large organization and require more security for documents.
- If your organization is involved with multiple projects with multiple work teams simultaneously.
- When you need the ability to co-author documents. SharePoint will provide the best results.
- When there is a need for a content management site to maintain a customized workflow and configurable data types.
Office 365
Did you know that every small, medium, and large business owner tends to use Office 365 suite to increase productivity? It has more than 120 million business users worldwide.
As a part of upgrading its features over the past few years, Office 365 took the applications to the cloud and made the process easy. That indicates that the Office 365 applications will be accessible off the MS servers and through the website. You only need an internet connection to access the applications. So, due to its modification, Microsoft added new applications to the Office 365 suite such as MS Teams, Planner, Power Apps, MS Stream, SharePoint, and more. In this, SharePoint is unique because it integrates well with most of the applications in the Office 365 suite and delivers the best results.
The best features of Office 365:
Each application in Office 365 suite can help the users with complex issues.
- For file-based storage, you can use OneDrive. With OneDrive, you can access your files across all devices.
- OneDrive is best for personal file management too.
- For seamless collaborations with your team or clients, you can use Microsoft Teams. In MS Teams, you can have a call with 300 members at once.
- Outlook is the best option to increase collaboration in the organization with its extensive calendar features.
- Whether it is lower or higher-level calculations, Microsoft Excel is always useful. Excel helps you with various file verification, data analytics, accounting, budgeting, and multiple operations.
Collectively, they lead to better results.
Would you like to improve productivity by upgrading yourself to the advanced features of Office 365 combined with SharePoint? Using these two together can give you the best results as both have multi-functionalities, which address every minor issue. We recommend Microsoft applications to help you to maintain workflow consistency in your organization.