What is SharePoint?
Brent Vollrath, Micro Endeavors, Inc. (July 2010)
The recent release of SharePoint 2010 marks the fourth version of the SharePoint server product. While SharePoint technology has been around for almost a decade now, it seems that many companies are still trying to figure out what exactly SharePoint is all about. SharePoint really is too large a product to easily answer the “what is SharePoint?” question. A better question may actually be what are companies doing with SharePoint?
Nowhere was this question more apparent than at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009, this past October in Las Vegas. With more than 7,400 people in attendance, you couldn’t have a conversation without the recurring question of “what are you doing with SharePoint?” being asked. Even Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, confirmed the vagueness of SharePoint during the keynote presentation.
“I want to talk about something which is kind of unusual thing to do at a SharePoint Conference, but what is SharePoint?” Ballmer asked during the keynote. “This is still a question that I get asked often when out visiting customers. What is SharePoint? Is it a collaboration system? Yes. Is it a business insight system? Yes. Is it a social networking system? Sure. Workflow? You bet. Document management? Yes. ”
Ballmer goes on to say “But SharePoint, in my estimation, it’s kind of magical in a certain way. It’s really a special kind of product. And I don’t think, directly, there’s anything in the market that going to do in as holistic a fashion, as integrated a fashion and as comprehensive a fashion what we’re trying to do in SharePoint. And because of the extensibility and programmability of SharePoint it really becomes a platform for a whole big set of scenarios, that before were all served by special, or niche, or custom developed applications.”
To expand on Ballmer’s explanation of SharePoint, let’s take a quick look at Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 Product Information page. Here we see the following core capabilities of SharePoint 2010.
Sites
Think of SharePoint 2010 Sites as a “one-stop shop” for all your business Web sites. It provides a full set of tools that your people can use to create any kind of site, plus a single infrastructure that simplifies site management. From a team site for colleagues, to an extranet site for partners, to an Internet site for customers, people can share and publish information using one familiar system.
Communities
SharePoint 2010 Communities lets people work together in ways that are most effective for them. How? By providing great collaboration tools that anyone can use to share ideas, find people and expertise, and locate business information. Even better, SharePoint 2010 lets you manage these tools from a single, powerful platform. With SharePoint 2010 Communities, your people can be more creative and productive—and you can rest easy knowing that they’re working in a secure, well-managed environment.
Content
SharePoint 2010 Content makes Enterprise Content Management (ECM) easy for everyone. Combining traditional content management, social capabilities, and powerful search, it is as natural to manage as it is to use. With its simple, “behind-the-scenes” administration, you can quickly set up compliance policies, while its familiar interface lets your people work just as they would in Microsoft Office. The result is well-managed information that is easy to find, share, and use.
Search
SharePoint 2010 Search helps your people find the information they need to get their jobs done. It provides intranet search, people search, and a platform to build search-driven applications—all on a single, cost-effective infrastructure. But what’s so unique about SharePoint 2010 Search is its combination of relevance, refinement, and people. This new approach to search provides an experience that is highly personalized, efficient, and effective.
Insights
SharePoint 2010 Insights lets everyone access the business information they need to make good decisions. With powerful features like interactive dashboards and scorecards, people can use the information in databases, reports, and business applications to address specific needs.
Composites
SharePoint 2010 Composites provides building blocks that you can use to assemble, connect, and configure collaborative business solutions. From simple sites to complex applications, you can rapidly respond to specific business needs with custom solutions.
An important thing to note here is that SharePoint is a platform. It is not a product. The various building blocks provide functionality that you’d otherwise have to write yourself. All of this “plumbing”, whether it be security, workflow, data persistence, content publishing, etc., is one less thing you have to worry about. Much of this is available through the user interface without writing a line of code. Obviously to fully maximum SharePoint’s potential custom code will need to be written.
So clearly SharePoint has a lot to offer, but what are companies actually doing with SharePoint? A quick search of Microsoft's SharePoint Case Studies helps shed some light on this question. The answer is “quite a bit”. With over 200 case studies available, it’s apparent that SharePoint is being used, by companies large and small, in a broad number of ways. Among some of the more interesting SharePoint solutions mentioned are by companies such as Sony, Starbucks, Hawaiian Airlines, 3M, Pfizer, Dow Corning and my personal favorite, Ferrari.