SHAREPOINT DEVELOPER

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 among organizations.

Microsoft states that SharePoint has 190 million users across 200,000 customer organizations

SharePoint Server

SharePoint Server is provided to organizations that seek greater control over SharePoint's behavior or design. This product is installed on customers' IT infrastructure. It receives fewer frequent updates but has access to a wider set of features and customization capabilities. There are three editions of SharePoint Server: Standard, Enterprise, and Foundation (free) which was discontinued in 2016. These servers may be provisioned as normal virtual/cloud servers or as hosted services.

SharePoint Standard

Microsoft SharePoint Standard builds on the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation in a few key product areas-

• Sites: Audience targeting, governance tools, Secure store service, web analytics functionality.
• Communities: 'MySites' (personal profiles including skills management, and search tools), enterprise wikis, organization hierarchy browser, tags and notes.
• Content: Improved tooling and compliance for document & record management, managed metadata, word automation services, content type management.
• Search: Better search results, search customization abilities, mobile search, 'Did you mean?', OS search integration, Faceted Search, and metadata/relevancy/date/location-based refinement options.
• Composites: Pre-built workflow templates, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) profile pages.

SharePoint Standard licensing includes a CAL (client access license) component and a server fee. SharePoint Standard may also be licensed through a cloud model.

SharePoint Enterprise

Built upon SharePoint Standard, Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise features can be unlocked by providing an additional license key.

Extra features in SharePoint Enterprise include:

• Search thumbnails and previews, rich web indexing, better search results.
• Business intelligence integration, dashboards, and business data surfacing.
• PowerPivot and PerformancePoint.
• Microsoft Office Access, Visio, Excel, and InfoPath Forms services.
• SharePoint Enterprise Search extensions.

SharePoint Enterprise licensing includes a CAL component and a server fee that must be purchased in addition to SharePoint Server licensing. SharePoint Enterprise may also be licensed through a cloud model.

SharePoint Online

Microsoft's hosted SharePoint is typically bundled in Microsoft 365 subscriptions, but can be purchased outright. SharePoint Online has the advantage of not needing to maintain one's own server, but as a result lacks the customization options of a self-hosted installation of SharePoint.

It is limited to a core set of collaboration, file hosting, and document and content management scenarios, and is updated on a frequent basis, but is typically comparable with SharePoint Enterprise. Currently, additional capabilities include:

• Support for SharePoint Framework extensions
• New "Modern" (Responsive) SharePoint UX (partially included in 2016 - Feature Pack 1)
• Yammer Integration & Office 365 Groups
• Integration with Outlook Web App
• Newer versions of Online Office Document Editor Tools
• Removal of various file size/number limitations
• Apps Concept

Missing capabilities include:

• Some search & UI customizations
• Many web publishing capabilities
• Service Application administration options
• Many customization/solution types will not run
• No ability to read error (ULS) logs
• No ability to share a Site Page (ASPX) to external anonymous visitors, only documents (Word, Excel, Picture, ...) may be such shared

Microsoft lists changes in SharePoint Online on its Office Roadmap.

Applications

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 electronic documents and records. Many of the functions in this product are designed around various legal, information management, and process requirements in organizations. SharePoint also provides search and 'graph' functionality. 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)

Main articles: Personal Cloud and File hosting service

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",

WebDAV can be used to access files without using the web interface. However, Microsoft's implementation of WebDAV doesn't conform to the official WebDAV protocol and therefore isn't compliant to the WebDAV standard. For example, WebDAV applications have to support the language tagging functionality of the XML specification which Microsoft's implementation doesn't. Only Windows XP to Windows 8 are supported.

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 also contains an enterprise "app store" that has different types of external applications which are encapsulated and managed to access to resources such as corporate user data and document data.

Content structure

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 and 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.

Content item, Content Type, Libraries, Lists, and "Apps"

• Content item is a resource in electronic form. Following are some examples:
• Document: always has a "Name"
• Contact: may have Email address and/or Phone number.
• Sales Invoice: may have Customer ID.
• Content Types are definitions (or types) of Content items. These definitions describe things like what metadata fields a Document, Contact, or Sales 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.
• SharePoint Library stores and displays Content items of type Documents and Folders.
• SharePoint List stores and displays data items such as Contacts. 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 2016, some of these were renamed back to Lists and Libraries.

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.

Configuration and customization

Web-based configuration

SharePoint is primarily configured through a web browser. The web-based user interface provides most of the configuration capability of the product.

Depending on your permission level, the web interface can be used to:

• Manipulate content structure, site structure, create/delete sites, modify navigation and security, or add/remove apps.
• Enable or disable product features, upload custom designs/themes, or turn on integrations with other Office products.
• Configure basic workflows, view usage analytics, manage metadata, configure search options, upload customizations, and set up integration.