What is SharePoint?

As per Wikipedia “SharePoint is a web-based, collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies substantially between organizations.

When is first read this on internet, the first question that pop out in my mind was what does ‘collaborative platform’ means?

So, Collaborative platform is category of business software that adds broad social network capabilities to work processes

Microsoft states that SharePoint has 190 million users across 200,000 customer organizations. So, you can imagine about the capability and scope of this huge  platform called SharePoint. Organizations use SharePoint to create websites. You can use it as a secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from any device. All you need is a web browser, such as Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox.

“SharePoint” can refer to one or more SharePoint products or technologies, including:

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 2016 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 Designer 2013:- A free program last released in 2013. Used to build powerful, workflow-enabled solutions. And used to edit external content types for an external data solution based on Business Connectivity Services.

OneDrive for Business sync: – A desktop program that you can use to sync documents from a team site or OneDrive for Business to your computer for offline use.

SharePoint usage varies from organization to organization. The product encompasses a wide variety of capabilities, most of which require configuration and governance. The most common uses of the SharePoint include:

Enterprise Content and Document Management: SharePoint allows for storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting on of electronic documents and records. Many of the functions in this product are designed around various legal, information management, and process requirements in organizations.

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.

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.

Custom Web Applications: SharePoint’s custom development capabilities provide an additional layer of services that allow rapid prototyping of integrated (typically line-of-business) web applications. SharePoint provides developers with integration into corporate directories and data sources through standards such as REST/OData/OAuth. Enterprise application developers use SharePoint’s security and information management capabilities across a variety of development platforms and scenarios.

SharePoint has vast functionality that can be described in few papers. I’ll try to elaborate SharePoint in very easy way and try to post as many things I can.

 

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My begining to SharePoint

I started my career around three years back just after my bachelors. I was part of this big MNC in Gurgaon and my primary domain was Service management. In these 3 years of my BCA I studied coding and digital electronics and Data mining and Artificial Intelligence and what not, but destiny has chosen operations for me and not development. So, the management gave my Service management profile that don’t have any connection with what I have been studying from past 3 years. Working in Service management was a whole new experience and it helped me a lot like what is the lifecycle of an incident, how does an incident or alert got created. Service Management taught me the importance of SLA’s, how to talk to client, and a lot. I worked in Service management for 14 month and then I got a chance to choose the domain or technology I need to learn and persue my career in. I had 3 option for me that is Active Directory, Exchange or SharePoint. I chose SharePoint as suggested by my friends and managers out there in industry for quite a long time and i also searched internet and found SharePoint is quite a hot skill. I took an online training, saw some YouTube videos and gave an assessment for SharePoint and finally moved to my new domain.

Now I am working as a SharePoint admin for past 22 months doing all day to day task of SharePoint admin, creating PowerShell scripts, installing patches. I am working currently working in a SharePoint migration (from on-premises to cloud) in which i am learning new things each day.

I will keep posting my blog and provide you the knowledge of technology that i have, and try to give you deep insight of this vast and interesting technology.