How do I know if SharePoint Online or SharePoint Server is best for my business?

For modern businesses, Office 365 with SharePoint Online is the obvious choice. Not only does SharePoint Online deliver greater functionality and flexibility, it also comes at a lower cost.

From a functionality perspective, SharePoint Online is the ideal choice for organisations. Your business will be able to operate more effectively as Microsoft commits SharePoint Online to a 99.9% uptime SLA.

If your business has remote and mobile workers, SharePoint Online is an ideal solution. Not only does it support remote access, it allows a higher level of integration with external parties, such as consultants, who aren’t directly employed by your business. SharePoint Online includes a file sharing feature which works better in O365 than in SharePoint Server. SharePoint Online makes it easy for teams to work together effectively, regardless of physical location.

SharePoint Online is part of the Office 365 plan, so the service is billed monthly on a per user basis. With no need to purchase and maintain expensive hardware on which to install the system, you only pay for what you need, and you can quickly scale the service up or down as your needs evolve and business changes.

As a cloud-hosted platform, Microsoft takes care of SharePoint Online disaster recovery, upgrades and patches. This means you don’t need to train and manage a dedicated IT team to maintain the infrastructure, reducing your operating costs. You’ll have immediate access to new features and updates as they’re released.

When is SharePoint Online the better option?

·         If you want to get things up and running quickly: in most cases it will only take minutes to set up an Office 365 account. SharePoint will be at your fingertips in no time at all

·         If you are keen to reduce the costs of your dedicated infrastructure

·         If you want to collaborate with external employees, partners or customers

·         If you would like to use new technologies like Office Delve  and Sway 

·         If you want to provide your employees with state-of-the-art tools for mobile deployment as well

When is SharePoint On-Premises the better option?

·         If you already have a dedicated infrastructure for SharePoint

·         If you have integrated external employees and customers in your infrastructure already

·         If you require so-called farm solutions – so programs that penetrate deep into the system

·         If you are required to do so for data protection reasons

·         If your Internet connection does not have sufficient bandwidth