Officially, Microsoft represents SharePoint as a “business collaboration platform for the enterprise and web.” SharePoint is a platform from Microsoft that allows businesses to meet their diverse needs in the following domains:
Collaboration: Use SharePoint’s collaboration sites for activities, such as managing projects or coordinating a request for proposal.
Social networking: If you work in a large company, you can use SharePoint as a social network for the Enterprise experience to help you track coworkers and locate people in expertise networks.
Information portals and internal websites: With SharePoint’s web content management features, you can create useful self-service internal portals and intranets.
Enterprise content management: SharePoint offers excellent document- and record-management capabilities, including extensive support for metadata and customized search experiences.
Business intelligence: SharePoint is an ideal platform for providing entrée into your organization’s business analysis assets. It integrates with Power BI and lets you create insightful dashboards from data all over your organization and the Internet (not just SharePoint).
Business applications: Use SharePoint to host sophisticated business applications, integrate business processes’ backend databases and your SharePoint content, or simply use SharePoint as the means to present access to your applications.
You can approach SharePoint with the following model in mind:
Product: SharePoint is a product with a lot of features. Explore how SharePoint works without any customization when you’re deciding how to approach a solution, and then decide if you want to customize it for your specific needs.
Platform: SharePoint provides everything you need to deliver a robust business solution. It provides the infrastructure (the “plumbing”) required to deliver web-based solutions and has many prepackaged solutions you can use right out of the box without any customizations at all.
Toolkit: Finally, SharePoint is a set of components and controls that you can mix and match to provide a solution. You can create sites, pages, and apps, all without leaving the comfort of your web browser. You can bring this same concept to mobile devices with the SharePoint Mobile App and PowerApps.
A Microsoft product
SharePoint is a software product that Microsoft develops and sells to customers. If you followed along and created a Microsoft 365 Business Standard account, you will eventually have to pay Microsoft $12.50 per month in order to continue using it. If you choose the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plan, you will get SharePoint, but not the Office clients, and will pay $5 per month. Regardless of how you purchase and use SharePoint, you can rest assured that your organization is paying Microsoft a licensing fee. In other words, SharePoint isn’t free.
In the past, SharePoint was a considerable cost for an organization wanting to adopt it. In addition to buying all of the licenses for your organization, you would also need an IT team to install and manage it. For this reason, SharePoint used to be considered enterprise-class software, as only large organizations could afford it. This has all changed. In the first few minutes of reading this book you have already gotten up and running with SharePoint. In the past, it would have taken months for a giant IT project to get SharePoint up and running. You just did it in minutes!
Many different SharePoint definitions
SharePoint has many different types of users, and depending on where your role fits in, you might have a very different experience from a fellow SharePoint user. For example, you might be assigned to create and administer a SharePoint website for your team. In this case, you might see first-hand the vast functionality of SharePoint websites. On the other hand, you might be a user of a SharePoint site. In this case, your SharePoint world might be only the site that someone has already created for you. To confuse matters even further, many organizations will roll out SharePoint and give it a spiffy internal name; for example, “Connect.” So even though the cool new web tool called Connect is actually SharePoint, most users don’t even realize it!
On the more technical side, if you’re an infrastructure administrator, you see SharePoint as a platform capable of offloading the difficult job of website administration. If you’re a software developer, you see SharePoint as a web platform for developing programs for users.
The vastness of SharePoint creates areas of specialization. The result is that a person’s view of SharePoint is greatly affected by how that person uses the product. It’s important to keep this in mind when talking with people about SharePoint. If you ask ten people to define SharePoint, you’re likely to get ten different answers, as illustrated in Figure 1-8.
FIGURE 1-8: There are many different ways to define SharePoint.
SharePoint is a platform, so the user roles an organization defines depend on the organization itself. Here are some examples of the possible roles of users in SharePoint:
Anonymous visitors: People who browse to a website that just happens to be using the SharePoint platform. Anonymous visitors just see SharePoint as a website and nothing else.
SharePoint visitors: People who browse to the site and authenticate so that SharePoint knows who they are. Visitors might still just see a SharePoint site as any other website, except they notice their name in the top-right corner of the screen and know they must log in to reach the site. Visitors might not use any of the features of SharePoint, however, and just browse the information posted to the website.
SharePoint casual users: People who know all the company documents are posted to SharePoint and know they can upload their own documents to their personal SharePoint site. Casual users might realize that they are using SharePoint, or they might just think of the platform as the name the organization has given to SharePoint. For example, we have seen organizations give their web platform tool names such as Source or Smart or Knowledge Center. SharePoint is the name of the web platform product from Microsoft, which is often unknown by users of a tool built on the SharePoint platform.
SharePoint users: People who are familiar with SharePoint and its main features. SharePoint users often perform various administrator functions even if they don’t realize it. For example, they might be responsible for an app that stores all the company policies and procedures. Thus, they are an app administrator.