What is SharePoint?
Most people find it hard to wrap their head around SharePoint and you might be one of them. Perhaps you’ve been playing with SharePoint for a while and you don’t really get it yet. You’re waiting for that one simple description, that one simple sentence that will suddenly make it all make sense. Well, you won’t get that one sentence from me because Sharepoint design.
That’s because SharePoint is not one thing. It is not a program, it’s a platform. SharePoint is a collection of many different products and technologies all wrapped up and given a name. From one perspective learning SharePoint is like learning Microsoft Office. You don’t really learn office, you learn word, then you learn excel then outlook and so on. In the same way you don’t just learn SharePoint, it’s a massive set of solutions of different things you can do with this platform and with every version of SharePoint, Microsoft has added more and more to it. When you learn the different things it does, you’ll pick and choose your own combinations, the things that are meaningful to you.
Sharepoint is a little different as it is a server product. You do not install SharePoint on your desktop or laptop. It’s installed on your back-end systems and shared across your network. The most common ways you’ll talk to SharePoint are either using a Microsoft Office program; Office love SharePoint and the feeling is mutual. However, if you are new to this it still doesn’t tell you much. It’s big, it’s installed on a server, but what does it do?
What Doest SharePoint Do?
Microsoft SharePoint is an online platform spread among small and large companies. It creates a common online internet page collecting news, documents, resources and lists to edit and share between people and groups, within your organization or external. It allows you to have deep control on sensitive information and communication; advanced file versioning and knowledge sharing through blogs and notebooks.
Microsoft talked about SharePoint as having six different areas:
- Sites
- Communities
- Content
- Search
- Insights
- Composites
- I’d like to give you my version of this.
Sites; SharePoint makes websites.
It’s a massive website engine. You tell SharePoint, I need a website. Bang! You have one. Make another. Bang! You have another. You don’t need special programs. You don’t need to be a web designer. You don’t need to be a programmer.
What are those websites? One might be a website for you. Another could be a website for your team. Another could be a website for your company. You might be involved in creating these websites or you might just use SharePoint websites made by other people. But SharePoint makes websites. Most websites that SharePoint makes are designed for you to be a contributor; to change them, to edit them, to join it, and that takes us to the second principle; Communities.
Communities; SharePoint helps you work with other people.
The idea of collaboration is built into this thing. That maybe just you and one other person working on a word document at the same time. Sharepoint can let you do that. Perhaps you need a companywide knowledge base or Wikipedia easily editable bye a hundred people, SharePoint can do that too. It can give you shared calendars, shared task list, discussion boards. It keeps track of immense amount of content and can let you know when things change.
Content; SharePoint gives you a place to put your stuff.
You are able to take all the content that makes up your organization’s day to day operations; documents, presentations, spreadsheets, agendas, images, audio, video, take all of it and upload it on SharePoint. Instead of emailing back and forth to people, you put it all into SharePoint.
Search; SharePoint lets you find your stuff.
It has a massive, super smart search engine built into it. It’s an excellent, complex search engine, that not only allows you to search your content in multiple ways, it will help you search people and it will do this securely so that no one gets access to anything that they shouldn’t.
Insights; SharePoint helps you bring all your information together, to understand it better.
It helps you organise and make sense of immense amounts of content. Taking different kinds of things and presenting it in a way that makes sense.
Composites; SharePoint helps you build on top of itself.
No program, no platform, no operation system can know exactly what you need. So, SharePoint has amazing capabilities to be extended and customized. Using SharePoint designer and Visio, you can build custom workflows without code.
Sharepoint is accessible online with your web browser from both Windows and Mac platform and available in three main versions:
1) SharePoint Online:
It is the most common solution for smaller businesses, hosting internet sites on Microsoft servers
2) SharePoint Server:
it is the most complete version with internet addresses completely customizable and pages hosted on local private servers.
3) SharePoint App:
It is a free version which allows to access all SharePoint sites directly from smartphones.
Hi, I am James Aaron, a professional Data recovery Engineer, working with Quickbooks Data Services as a consultant from the past five years in the USA. I am a specialized and trained Cloud consultant who helps small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. QuickBooks Closes Unexpectedly | QuickBooks Error H202 | QuickBooks Unrecoverable Error | QuickBooks Error 1712 | This Company File Needs to be updated | QuickBooks Restore Failed | QuickBooks Email not working | QuickBooks 2020 end of support
