Collaboration portals in Office 365

Why are cooperation portals needed?

In the past, communication has been largely through email, but the challenge is that the information shared between you, your partner, your customer or supplier is often of such a nature that it needs to be updated frequently. The same type of problem that arises internally within companies can therefore arise externally - there are many versions and updates of documents and files. This leads to confusion, and even outright errors, as it becomes difficult to keep track of which version is current.

Exchanging information with partners, customers and suppliers also requires both security and accessibility. The different parties in a collaboration must have constant access to the information, but it should rarely be available to everyone. A collaboration portal therefore needs to be a place that is both protected by access restrictions and accessible to those who need it, as well as being able to be updated in real time.

In the past, guest accounts were often created so that different parties could access common information in your environment. This, in turn, requires administration, and since each account has its own license, this also involves costs.

Collaboration portals in Office 365

A collaboration portal creates a common communication space for customers, partners and suppliers to share and retrieve information. This ensures that the documentation on the portal always contains the latest versions and is accessible to all who need it.

Many companies create a collaborative portal to build a support area for customers where they can log in and access FAQs, forms to start a support case, case statistics, chat functions and so on.

About 70% of all companies today use Office 365, which is the only prerequisite for seamless communication between the parties in the collaboration portals created in Sharepoint. In the portal, you simply log in from your own Office 365 account and access the content from your own environment. All that is required is that you as a user are invited to the portal.

Benefits of collaborative portals

The benefits of building collaborative portals include the following:

• You keep your data in your Office 365 environment. In other words, you don't have to store it externally and it never leaves your Office 365 environment.
• You control who has access from your own environment. You do not need to go through your web agency or IT department to request that a user be removed or added.
• There is no need to "ask for permission". Any administration of the portal will be much less cumbersome as the responsibility lies with those actually working with the partner/supplier/customer.

WeSafe helps you to build collaborative portals

At WeSafe, we place great emphasis on how you as a customer should think when building new functionality. We provide advice on how you can best optimize your processes based on your individual needs. When it comes to collaboration portals, for example, we analyze how you can best build it in Office 365. We act as a sounding board and support, while challenging your way of thinking to find new ways forward.

Want to know more about building collaborative portals in Office 365? Get in touch with us!