Sending documents securely from SharePoint

Sending documents securely from SharePoint (All versions)

Historically making the content and in particular documents stored on the SharePoint platform you’ve invested heavily in for your intranet, available externally isn’t cheap or easy to do and can take quite some effort to plan out.

It can typically lead to a whole new set of SharePoint and associated infrastructure, licensing and development costs and finding budget for this can be challenging. Not to mention a plethora of additional networking infrastructure hardware & software, plus governance and security policies that will be in front of you also.

Is there really a solid business case to support this additional investment? Possibly. Do you really need all of the functions SharePoint provides for collaboration. Possibly. Or do you look at cloud services like Yammer (which Microsoft recently bought) to provide more social focused communications between you and third parties? Increasingly, yes…(see interesting infographic).

All these have their place, but in some cases you may be happy with just making it easier to send documents directly from inside SharePoint securely to external parties, and not necessarily need the collaborative tools wrapped around and within SharePoint. Yes you can do this in email now, but its not necessarily the most efficient process, or secure and its quite cumbersome series of steps to actually do this.

We met with Pro2col recently to understand where there could be some synergy between some of their products and services and how they could potentially fill this potential gap in capability. Pro2col have worked with companies of all shapes and sizes to tackle their data transfer challenges and provide comprehensive solutions that help them to increase productivity and enhance data security throughout the business.

One such capability targeted at on premise deployments of SharePoint offers secure and simple to use file transfer capabilities through the Biscom and GlobalSCAPE products, which provides integration into the SharePoint platforms. This is certainly something worth considering for your basic file transfer needs with your on-premise deployments of SharePoint.

Whilst it doesn’t necessarily remove the need to carefully plan and invest in additional networking equipment to facilitate this, it does make it a whole lot easier for your end users to send your files externally, securely and without opening up the whole of your SharePoint platform to external users.

So if you have need to simply send documents securely from SharePoint intranet site internally, to a third party externally then give James a ring at Pro2col. For more complex needs where you will need to put in place SharePoint as an extranet, for example to take advantage of it’s collaborative features, then do get in touch with the team here to discuss how we can help you.

By Andrew Walmsley