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SharePoint Products and Downloads
SharePoint Online
A cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint Server on-premises, any business can subscribe to an Office 365 plan or to the standalone SharePoint Online service. Your employees can create sites to share documents and information with colleagues, partners, and customers.
SharePoint Server
Organizations can deploy and manage SharePoint Server on-premises. It includes all the features of SharePoint Foundation. And it offers additional features and capabilities, such as Enterprise Content Management, business intelligence, enterprise search, personal sites, and Newsfeed.
SharePoint Foundation
No longer available separately for the SharePoint Online release, SharePoint Foundation was the underlying technology for all SharePoint sites. SharePoint Foundation (formerly Windows SharePoint Services) is free for on-premises deployment. You can use SharePoint Foundation to create many types of sites where you can collaborate on webpages, documents, lists, calendars, and data.
SharePoint Capabilities
Enterprise content and document management
- SharePoint allows for storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting on of electronic documents and records.
- SharePoint also provides search and 'graph' functionality.[17] SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office allow for collaborative real-time editing, and encrypted/information rights managed synchronization.
- This capability is often used to replace an existing corporate file server, and is typically coupled with an enterprise content management policy.
Intranet and social network
A SharePoint intranet or intranet portal is a way to centralize access to enterprise information and applications. It is a tool that helps an organization manage its internal communications, applications and information more easily. Microsoft claims that this has organizational benefits such as increased employee engagement, centralizing process management, reducing new staff on-boarding costs, and providing the means to capture and share tacit knowledge (e.g. via tools such as wikis).
Collaborative software
SharePoint contains team collaboration groupware capabilities, including: Project scheduling (integrated with Outlook and Project), social collaboration, shared mailboxes, and project related document storage and collaboration. Groupware in SharePoint is based around the concept of a "Team Site".
File hosting service (Personal Cloud)
SharePoint Server hosts OneDrive for Business, which allows storage and synchronization of an individual's personal documents, as well as public/private file sharing of those documents. This is typically combined with other Microsoft Office Servers/Services such as Microsoft Exchange, to produce a "personal cloud",
This capability is often compared to services like Box or Dropbox.
SharePoint Content Structure
Sites
A SharePoint Site is a collection of pages, lists, libraries, apps, configurations, features, content types, and sub-sites. Examples of Site templates in SharePoint include: collaboration (team) sites, wiki sites, blank sites, and publishing sites.
Lists, libraries, content, and "Apps"
- A SharePoint library stores and displays files and folders.
- A SharePoint list stores and displays data items.
- Each item in a library or list is a content item. Examples of content items include "Document" - which may have a "Name", "Contact" - with contact information fields, or "Sales Invoice" - with fields such as "Total" and "Customer ID".
- Content Types are definitions (or types) of items. These definitions describe things like what metadata fields a Document, Contact, or Invoice may have. SharePoint allows you to create your own definitions based on the built-in ones. Some built in content types include: Contacts, Appointments, Documents, and Folders.
- Some built-in content types such as 'contact' or 'appointment' allow the list to expose advanced features such as Microsoft Outlook or Project synchronization.
- In SharePoint 2013, in some locations, Lists and Libraries were renamed 'Apps' (despite being unrelated to the "SharePoint App Store"). In SharePoint Online, some of these were renamed back to Lists and Libraries.
Pages
SharePoint provides free-form pages which may be edited in-browser. These may be used to provide content to users, or to provide structure to the SharePoint environment.
Web Parts & App Parts
Web parts and App parts are components (also known as portlets) that can be inserted into Pages. They are used to display information from both SharePoint and third party applications.
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