Create Office Community With a SharePoint Social Site

What is SharePoint? Well, it’s a lot of things: it’s a program that makes web page building a snap for folks familiar with Microsoft products, it’s a great way to share documents and information, it’s a social networking site, it’s an amazing way to communicate, and the list goes on and on.

This fantastic interactive tool replaced our office intranet years ago, and we couldn’t be happier. I’m no SharePoint expert, so I’ll leave the how-to explanations to the pros (a quick Internet search of “SharePoint” yields tons of great results!), but in this post, I’ll give you a snapshot of one of the many ways we use SharePoint. And trust me, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Creating Community is one of the Ruby Receptionist Core Values, and we use SharePoint to help us do just that. As you can probably guess, all our phone answering keeps us pretty busy. Because we don’t always have time to chat face-to-face, our Director of Culture Sarah Sackett created a social website on SharePoint. It’s sub-site of our main SharePoint page, and it’s dedicated strictly to fun stuff. Here are three cool things our social site allows us to do:

1. Share photos. We love to host events and snap photos of the Ruby revelry. The SharePoint picture library feature makes sharing photos a breeze! The best part? All it takes is a minute of photo viewing to put smiles on our faces. Ah, memories!

2. Share recommendations. Looking for a good restaurant, a new doctor, or something fun to do this weekend? Never fear, the social site is here! We’ve got discussion boards for all sorts of intriguing topics. When we want feedback, we know where to turn!

3. Know what’s up. Our Event Planning Committee creates all sorts of opportunities for our teambuilding — kickball, bowling, and volunteering, to name a few. So when does all this fun stuff go down? Just check the event calendar on the social site to find out!

If your team uses SharePoint, consider creating a space for socialization. We think you’ll like the results! And if you already use SharePoint for a social site, please share your tips below.