What Is SharePoint?
So now that we have covered some of the primary functionality available within SharePoint, let’s dive into the different versions of the product. There are several versions of the product, and it is important to understand what version you are working with so that you can fully understand the features that are available for you to use in your solutions.
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So what is SharePoint? There are two ways you can look at SharePoint—what it is and what you do with it. Think of the process of building a house. There are many different tools and materials that are combined for the final product. Each of the materials alone might or might not be anything by itself, but once they are combined with the proper use of tools, you have a strong, reliable structure that fulfills a purpose. In the same way, SharePoint is like the various tools and materials, and the final business solutions you build are like the house. There are many features and tools in SharePoint, and within this book you will see different ways to combine and structure them into business solutions.
If you head over to the official Microsoft SharePoint website (SharePoint.com), you will see a discussion of six capabilities that SharePoint provides. In the following sections, we summarize each of them.
Sites
Within SharePoint you can use sites to store and manage data in many different forms. You can create a site that publishes content internally for users: this is typically referred to as your corporate intranet. You can also push information to the web for public, anonymous access, which is referred to as your Internet site. You can also use sites to store and manage data that is used and referenced by a group of named users who have access to the sites. These are typically referred to as collaboration sites. Some common types of collaboration sites include project sites, team sites, and department sites. In some cases these collaboration sites are extended outside the corporation, and vendor and third-party users are invited to join in the collaboration. These types of sites are typically referred to as extranet sites.
Communities
Communities are the various social features that allow us to collaborate more efficiently. These features can help you locate other users within your organization on the basis of information about them or their areas of expertise. Once you are connected, you can easily communicate and collaborate with them through their My Sites. Communities also provide some tagging and rating features. These features allow you to quickly classify content, and these classifications are shared across the organization and used by others as they try to locate content.
Composites
Composites define the way that you can interact with various line of business systems within your organization. Using the composite features, you can easily incorporate business data into SharePoint. The two primary features within the composites structure are Access Services and Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Access Services allow you to use Microsoft Access to build and configure applications that can be published to SharePoint. Users will have visibility to the data within SharePoint, through the browser alone, without needing to have the Access client installed. BCS is used to configure connections to external data. Once the connection is configured, the external data is available within SharePoint through the standard features of lists, metadata, and external content types.
Content
Within the content features of SharePoint, some of the most common features are records management, document management, web content management, and search. The records and document management features allow you to manage how data is added to the environment and let you create policies to manage data compliance.
Insights
Insights are considered the business intelligence features within SharePoint and include the following technologies: Excel Services, Visio Services, Chart web part, key performance indicators (KPIs), and PerformancePoint Services. These services provide the capabilities for you to use common tools such as Visio and Excel to manage and report on data, while allowing users to access the content without needing a client application.
The chart and KPI features can connect to the data that is published through the services, giving you another way to present the data to your users through SharePoint. PerformancePoint is a downloadable application that allows you to create rich charts, graphs, and reports on data that is stored within SharePoint, Excel Services, or SQL Server. As with the other tools mentioned earlier, the reports are generated within the PerformancePoint dashboard builder and published to the SharePoint sites, allowing users to have clientless access to the data.
Search
The search features within SharePoint allow you to easily find and locate relevant content. Since search is configured for both content and people, users within the organization can rely on search to help them quickly find what they need. The search experience is completely configurable, allowing for each organization to provide a search experience that best works for its users.
So now that we have covered some of the primary functionality available within SharePoint, let’s dive into the different versions of the product. There are several versions of the product, and it is important to understand what version you are working with so that you can fully understand the features that are available for you to use in your solutions.
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