When it comes to collaborating, there’s a reason users frequently send documents as email attachments rather than using SharePoint – because it’s easy. Throughout the workday, most of us live in Outlook and our other Office applications, so they’re often the first place we go when we need to share content with colleagues or those outside of our organization.
From an information management perspective, this method isn’t always best. It frequently results in multiple versions of the same document floating around, causing confusion, making it harder for users to find what they need, and taking up valuable storage across your environment. When users send documents outside of the company – either via email or through consumer file sharing solutions like Dropbox and Google Drive – the impact can be much more severe as content is left unmanaged and unsecure.
To help solve these challenges and enable organizations to easily merge content from Outlook, Office, and Windows File Explorer into SharePoint, we released AvePoint Office Connect earlier this year. AvePoint Office Connect makes it simple for end users to get content where it belongs so that it can be collaborated on through a secure, central repository in SharePoint. Today, we’re pleased to announce the latest version of the product – AvePoint Office Connect Service Pack (SP) 2 – offering new Office 365 support and more ways to share content securely with other users.
How Office Connect Works
With AvePoint Office Connect, users can select an email within Outlook and copy or move any attachments (or even the entire email) to SharePoint by drag-and-dropping, right-clicking, or via the native Outlook menu.
Secure external sharing is also simple with AvePoint Office Connect. They can right-click a document on a desktop and instantly share it with an external user (via a secure container) for collaboration while controlling how the recipient is allowed to interact with the content (optionally restricting printing, downloading, and editing). The user can also control how long recipients can access the content.
I’ve worked with SharePoint for a long time now, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard users ask for a solution to view their SharePoint content in the familiar experience of Windows File Explorer folders. AvePoint Office Connect integrates within the Windows File Explorer interface so that users can drag files into SharePoint, as well as explore and interact with their SharePoint content right from the desktop.
AvePoint Office Connect also integrates with Office applications – including Word, PowerPoint, and Excel – to enable users to add content to SharePoint with just one click.
Driving SharePoint Adoption with Office Connect
An amazing thing happens when you make it easy to store, tag, and share content within SharePoint – adoption goes through the roof. We’re hearing about phenomenal adoption rates from our AvePoint Office Connect customers. One such customer shared the following statistics with us:
In the span of 6 weeks, 1,300 employees uploaded 121,943 documents into SharePoint and reduced 1,539 email attachments by using AvePoint Office Connect.
These numbers speak for themselves. Once users had a tool to make it easy to migrate their content to SharePoint (without IT’s help or ever leaving Office and their desktops), adoption increased immediately.
Drive Adoption in the Cloud with New Office 365 Support
In order to help organizations leveraging the Microsoft Cloud for their collaboration environment, AvePoint Office Connect now supports Office 365. AvePoint Office Connect offers users the same ease of use and integration between the applications they use to get work done every day and their SharePoint Online sites.
Want an easy way for end-users to move their own content from their desktops to OneDrive for Business? AvePoint Office Connect delivers the ability to move content from Outlook, Office, and Windows File Explorer directly to the user’s own OneDrive for Business with a simple click of the mouse.
Share Content Easier than Ever Before
Through its Quick Share feature, AvePoint Office Connect enables users to collaborate on documents with colleagues and individuals outside of the organization by automatically converting a file into a secure SharePoint link that can be emailed to a recipient. Recipients can then view and edit the document through familiar Office Web Apps and make changes that are synced to the source destination without needing federated access to the SharePoint environment.
In AvePoint Office Connect SP 2, you can now securely and conveniently share content from the desktop, Outlook, Office applications, and the Office Connect Explorer interface.
Try AvePoint Office Connect Today
For more information on how you can utilize AvePoint Office Connect to boost SharePoint adoption and to download a free 30-day trial, please visit our product page.
Have a question about the product? Leave a comment on this post!
In the meantime, I’m going to use Office Connect to share this article with our Communications team for publishing. There – it’s done. See how easy?!
