Microsoft has announced a number of changes to SharePoint, which is its content management and collaboration platform.

Launched in 2001, SharePoint now has about 190 million users in more than 200,000 companies. Many businesses such as Cole, Marks & Spencer, Booz Allen Hamilton and more have been using SharePoint for more than a decade for automating various business processes.

Microsoft says that SharePoint is a core part of Office 365 provides collaboration and content management capabilities, which are effortlessly integrated with other applications for document creation.

However, Microsoft wants more out of SharePoint, and revealed that it is planning to launch mobile apps for Windows, iOS and Android soon. The company also announced its plans of integrating SharePoint with OneDrive, its cloud file sharing service.

In the past, many corporate intranet sites were restricted to desktop devices only, said Jeff Teper, the corporate vice president of OneDrive and SharePoint teams. However, SharePoint will now allow these sites to be accessed on mobile devices, which will make it easy to access data during business trips or any activities out of the office.

OneDrive will also become more powerful as users will be able to access files on SharePoint Online.

Microsoft also announced SharePoint Framework, which is a page and part model that supports easy integration with Microsoft Graph, enables fully supported client-side development and also support for open source tooling.

"The SharePoint Framework is an evolutionary step in SharePoint extensibility that delivers a new client-side rendering framework leveraging open source JavaScript technologies. The client-side development framework will allow developers to use modern JavaScript and Web templating frameworks across cloud and on-premises SharePoint," says Teper.

Apart from new features, Teper says that Microsoft has also enhanced the security of SharePoint. The application has powerful administrative controls, reports and policies that manage compliance, privacy and security of its users.

Microsoft has also announced dynamic conditional access policies for SharePoint, which intelligently and automatically defines a user's access based on the device and location of the network.

Many companies prefer focused products, such as Slack, which is also easy to understand and get started. However, Slack does not have as many features when compared to SharePoint. The newly announced features of SharePoint may also give the Microsoft application an edge over competitions that offer similar services.

Photo: Mike Mozart | Flickr