What Is SharePoint?

SharePoint is an online collaboration platform developed by Microsoft. From a business point of view, SharePoint allows participants to share documents and files to access calendars and check availability, or to take part in team discussions. Much like the traditional email or the more recent solutions from Google (Google Docs or Google Wave), SharePoint has a Microsoft Office user-friendly interface and is closely integrated within the Office suite.  According to an online poll SharePoint scored an 8.8% as opposed to 29.98% for the more conventional and familiar email, in terms of user preferences.

SharePoint consists of 6 key areas:

·         Sites – one collective infrastructure that allows collaboration across Intranet, Extranet and Internet.

·         Communities – enables people to work together and share information in a very straight-forward and  efficient manner.

·         Content – offers a compliant content management experience that doesn't affect the ease of usability.

·         Search – it provides users with the ability to find content, information and people across multiple sites; much like a Google-type of browsing.

·         Insights – the reporting and analyzing feature of SharePoint that compiles data into intuitive dashboards and scorecards for business intelligence.

·         Composites – enables an extra layer of customization with no-code solutions for a more personalized experience.

It is commonly accepted that SharePoint’s greatest strength is the collaborative capacity, which along with the social media capabilities contributes to a great online environment for communication and sharing. The drawback for using it is that it may require extensive setup and customization in order to bring the features to a fully functional state.