Microsoft SharePoint Overview:
Microsoft SharePoint is an enterprise-class collaboration and content management platform, or groupware solution, that enables users to connect to and share information with their colleagues and coworkers. SharePoint may be the dominant intranet platform of its kind, used by large and medium-size businesses in particular.
SharePoint Features:
SharePoint is feature-rich and robust, but also very complex. The base technology, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), runs on Microsoft Windows Server. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is based on WSS and extends the framework to include social networking features, improved integration with Microsoft Office, and other enhancements.
The SharePoint components and features you would access as a remote worker or professional user would depend on how the platform is set up by your company's IT department or administrators. There are many add-ins and third-party modules available for SharePoint including connectors for Jive, which adds business-class social networking, and a Silverlight Toolkit for adding multimedia components to SharePoint.
Major features of SharePoint include:
- Collaboration: such as team calendars, discussion boards, and document libraries that allow users to "check out" documents and track changes. Users can be notified by email of new items or changes.
- Portals: intranet sites or public web pages can be created in SharePoint using templates and component parts (e.g., a Help Desk ticket system) which can be added to the portal
- Content Management and Document Workflow: SharePoint helps users review, edit, and track documents. Administrators can control access to specific documents by team member or groups, and SharePoint is also useful for other policy, auditing, and compliance features like setting document expiration and retention.
Other notable SharePoint features and functions include: a search component, forms-driven process integration, and business intelligence capabilities (such as the ability to create dashboards to easily see key business information). These are all designed to make it easier for the business user to find and share information across the enterprise.
How to Use SharePoint
Because SharePoint is very complex, Microsoft offers a SharePoint training module that runs on your desktop. After downloading the file, you can get a tour of SharePoint features and also learn about using it via articles, videos, and interactive tutorials. There's also a training edition for administrators to install on the company's SharePoint site.
Your organization will likely offer SharePoint usage training or guidance for your particular job and team needs, including who is responsible for maintaining team workspaces or portals, what kinds of documents can and should be shared on the intranet, etc.
Microsoft's Groove collaboration software is being renamed as SharePoint Workspace and redesigned to offer tighter integration with SharePoint. Users of SharePoint Workspace will be able to access SharePoint documents offline and also use Groove's peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing and syncing feature. SharePoint Workspace will also be included in Office 2010 Professional Plus edition.
SharePoint 2010: Improved Online and Mobile Collaboration
SharePoint 2010 is being billed (by Microsoft) as "The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web". The tagline significantly reflects Microsoft's expanded focus on delivering Web-based solutions. New online tools for users include blogs and wikis, embedded Silverlight Web parts and controls, and personal SharePoint sites with tag clouds and relationship connectors. (For a closer look at SharePoint 2010's social enhancements, see CMS Wire's blog post on "5 Ways Social Networking Has Improved in SharePoint 2010".)
Another important enhancement for SharePoint is its role in mobile devices: Microsoft is making SharePoint key for users to link their phones to the office, with the new Office Hub feature in Windows Phone 7 that allows you to link to desktop Office files from the phone.
Other SharePoint 2010 updates for users include adding the now-familiar Office ribbon for better WYSIWYG Web-editing, improved search, updated image formatting capabilities, and an overall cleaner Web interface.
All in all, SharePoint has been getting positive press in the IT world for its increased social business networking features, less clunky interface, and greater other enhancements important to end users, developers, and IT pros. For some users, however, SharePoint may be too late into the social business arena, a space that is highly competitive with popular Enterprise 2.0 solutions like Socialtext and Jive. In the end, though, the competition is great for end users.
