SharePoint is a web application framework and platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001, SharePoint integrates intranet, content management, and document management, but recent versions have broader capabilities. SharePoint comprises a multipurpose set of Web technologies backed by a common technical infrastructure. By default, SharePoint has a Microsoft Office-like interface, and it is closely integrated with the
Office suite. The web tools are intended for non-technical users. SharePoint can provide intranet portals, document and file management, collaboration, social networks, extranets, websites, enterprise search, and business intelligence. It also has system integration, process integration, and workflow automation capabilities.
Enterprise application software (for example, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) packages) often provide some SharePoint integration. SharePoint incorporates a complete development stack based on web technologies and standards-based application programming interfaces (APIs). As an application platform, SharePoint provides central management, governance, and security controls for implementation of these requirements.The SharePoint platform integrates directly into Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), which enables bulk management, scaling, and provisioning of servers, as large organizations and cloud computing providers often need.
Microsoft has two versions of SharePoint available at no cost, sells premium editions with additional functionality, and provides a cloud service edition as part of their Office 365 platform
. The product is also sold through a cloud model by many third-party vendors.
Applications
The most common uses of SharePoint include:Intranet portals
Main article: Intranet portal
A SharePoint intranet or intranet portal is a way to centralize access to enterprise information and applications on a corporate network. It is a tool that helps a company manage its data, 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/blogs)..Enterprise content and document management
Main article: Enterprise content management
SharePoint is often used to store and track electronic documents or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions created by different users. In addition to being a platform for digital record management systems that meet government and industry compliance standards, SharePoint also provides the benefit of a central location for storing and collaborating on documents, which can significantly reduce emails and duplicated work in an organization.Extranet portal
Main article: Extranet
SharePoint can be used to provide password-protected, web-facing access to people outside an organization. Organizations often use functionality like this to integrate third parties into supply chain or business processes, or to provide a shared collaboration environment.SharePoint provides an Alternate Access Mapping, or AAM, which allows the same 'site' to be surfaced via a number of different URLs, each URL can have its own authentication technology allowing the same site to be both an intranet on one network while an extranet to outside users.
Internet sites
Main article: Web content management system
Using the 'Publishing' features, SharePoint can be used to manage larger public websites.Software framework
Main article: Software framework
SharePoint is built upon the ASP.Net framework and provides an additional layer of services and codebase to greatly reduce the amount of custom development required to provide a working application It may also be referred to as a web application framework.Configuration and customization
Web-based configuration
SharePoint offers a ribbon user-interface similar to that in Microsoft Office 2007 and later. This interface provides a general user interface for manipulating data, editing pages, and adding functionality to sites. Users can:- manipulate content in lists and libraries, pages and sites.
- copy, create, delete, or rename lists and libraries, pages, sites and web-parts
- manage user permissions, and view document/page version histories
- manage definitions and properties of lists and libraries, pages, sites and web-parts and many others
Main article: SharePoint Designer
- The SharePoint "Client Object Model" (available for JavaScript, Silverlight, and .NET), and REST/SOAP APIs can be referenced from within a custom page, feature, or in SharePoint 2013 from a SharePoint-hosted or Provider-hosted app.
- "Sand-boxed" plugins can be uploaded by any end-user who has been granted permission. These are security-restricted, and can be governed at multiple levels (including resource consumption management). In multi-tenant cloud environments, these are the only customizations that are typically allowed.
- Farm features are typically fully trusted code that need to be installed at a farm-level.
- Service applications: It is possible to integrate directly into the SharePoint SOA bus, at a farm level.
- Application-to-application integration with SharePoint
- Extensions to SharePoint functionality (e.g. custom workflow actions)
- 'Web Parts' (also known as "portlets", "widgets", or "gadgets") that provide new functionality when added to a page
- Pages/sites or page/site templates
Core functionality
Sites
A SharePoint Site is a collection of pages, site templates, lists, and libraries configured for the purpose of achieving an express goal. A site may contain sub-sites, and those sites may contain further sub-sites. Typically, sites need to be created from scratch, but sites can also be created according to packaged functionality. Examples of Site templates in SharePoint include: blogs, collaboration (team) sites, documents, and meetings .Lists and libraries
Lists and libraries have the same properties. This could be considered similar to a database table. For instance, you can have a list of links called "my links", where each item has a URL, a name, and a description.[citation needed]Lists have many features such as workflows, item-level or list-level permission, version history tracking, multiple content-types, external data sources and many more features. Some of these features depend on the version of SharePoint that is installed.[citation needed]
SharePoint supports the creation of multiple views of a list or library, including Gantt chart and calendar views. Views can define columns to show rankings, aggregation and establish criteria for inclusion in the list. Views can be personal or distributed to a group of users.[citation needed]
From 2007 on, lists also support item (document or record) level security permissions, where each list item can have a unique permission level. This feature can cause problems in viewing large lists and Microsoft recommends that for 2007 a list have no more than 1,000 unique permissions defined, and in 2010 that limit is 5,000.[citation needed]
A Library is a list where each item in the list refers to a file that is stored in SharePoint. Libraries have all the same behaviors as lists, but because libraries contain files, they have extra features. One of these is the ability to be opened and modified through a compatible WebDAV client (e.g. Windows Explorer).
Microsoft SharePoint comes with some pre-defined list and library definitions. These include: Announcement Lists, Blogs, Contacts, Discussion Boards, Document Libraries, External Content (BCS) lists, Pages, Surveys, and Tasks.[citation needed]
Some of these pre-defined lists have additional integration. For example, lists based on the contact content-type, and lists created using the calendar list template can be synced directly with Microsoft Outlook.[citation needed]
Web-parts
Web-parts are sections that can be inserted into Pages in SharePoint sites. These sections are UI Widgets whose typical uses are- Displaying content defined in the web-part's settings (e.g. custom content or an iframe)
- Displaying items from Lists/Libraries (this can be customizable in SharePoint Designer, using XSLT & CAML)
- Providing access to features in the SharePoint platform (e.g. Search)
- Providing a user interface into other products (e.g. Microsoft Reporting Services, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server or a variety of third party systems).
Web-parts also support connections to other web-parts on the page, providing the ability to construct relatively complex pages without the need to build additional code.
SharePoint web-parts were formerly implemented separately from ASP.NET web-parts, but as of SharePoint 2007, SharePoint's web-parts are now based on ASP.NET's.
Pages
SharePoint provides three primary page content-types:- Wiki page
- Web-part page
- Publishing pages
Search
SharePoint Foundation contains a limited search engine. Microsoft produces a free product called Microsoft Search Server Express to complement SharePoint Foundation. Different SharePoint search versions offer different features, including the ability to search within documents and—except in cloud environments—across external data sources (such as file systems). You can read a SharePoint Enterprise Search features deep comparison.Compliance, standards and integration
- SharePoint integrates with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010. "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" (MOSS 2007), the previous version of SharePoint, was considered part of the Microsoft Office Suite.
- SharePoint uses Microsoft's OpenXML document standard for integration with Microsoft Office. Document metadata is also stored using this format.
- SharePoint 2010 provides various application programming interfaces (APIs: client-side, server-side, JavaScript) and REST, SOAP and OData based interfaces.
- SharePoint 2010 can be used to achieve compliance with many document retention, record management, document ID and discovery laws.
- SharePoint 2007 and 2010 are compatible with CMIS - the Content Management Interoperability Standard, using Microsoft's CMIS Connector.
- SharePoint 2010 by default produces valid XHTML 1.0 that is compliant with WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards.
- SharePoint 2010's server control output is primarily driven by XSLT and can be modified using the proprietary SharePoint Designer tool, or with any text editor.
- SharePoint 2010 can use claims-based authentication, relying on SAML tokens for security assertions. SharePoint provides an open authentication plugin model.
- SharePoint 2013 adds support for XLIFF to support the localization of content in SharePoint. Also added support for AppFabric.
Architecture
The SharePoint platform is a flexible, n-tier service-oriented architecture (SOA). It can be scaled down to operate entirely from one machine, or scaled up to be managed across hundreds of machines.Farms
A SharePoint farm is a logical grouping of SharePoint servers that share common resources. A farm typically operates stand-alone, but can also subscribe to functions from another farm, or provide functions to another farm. Each farm has its own central configuration database, which is managed through either a PowerShell interface, or a Central Administration website (which relies partly on PowerShell's infrastructure). Each server in the farm is able to directly interface with the central configuration database. Servers use this to configure services (e.g. IIS, windows features, database connections) to match the requirements of the farm, and to report server health issues, resource allocation issues, etc.Web applications
Web Applications (WAs) are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm, and are typically the interface through which a user interacts with SharePoint. A web application is associated with a set of access mappings or URLs defined in the SharePoint central management console, then automatically replicated into the IIS configuration of every server configured in the farm. WAs are typically independent of each other, have their own application pools, and can be restarted independently in Internet Information Services.Site collections
A site collection is used to provide a grouping of 'SharePoint Sites'. Each web application typically has at least one site collection. Site collections may be associated with their own content databases, or they may share a content database with other site collections in the same web application. A site collection may contain one or more sites. A site collection is a group of sites that are functionally, navigationally, and administratively related to one another.Service applications
Service Applications (SAs) provide granular pieces of SharePoint functionality to other web and service applications in the farm. Examples of service applications include the User Profile Sync service, and the Search Indexing service. An SA can be turned off, exist on one server, or be load-balanced across many servers in a farm. SAs are designed to be as independent as possible, so that—depending on the SA—restarting an SA, experiencing an SA failure, or misconfiguring an SA may not necessarily prevent the farm from operating. Each SA enabled on the farm typically has its own process that requires a certain amount of RAM to operate, and typically also has its own configuration database and Active Directory (AD) service account. SharePoint Server and SharePoint Enterprise include all the SharePoint Foundation SAs, as well as additional SAs.Administration and security
The modular nature of SharePoint's architecture enables a secure 'least-privileges' execution permission best practice.SharePoint Central Administration (the CA) is a web application that typically exists on a single server in the farm, however it is also able to be deployed for redundancy to multiple servers. This application provides a complete centralized management interface for web & service applications in the SharePoint farm, including AD account management for web & service applications. In the event of the failure of the CA, Windows PowerShell is typically used on the CA server to reconfigure the farm.
The structure of the SharePoint platform enables multiple WAs to exist on a single farm. In a shared (cloud) hosting environment, owners of these WAs may require their own management console. The SharePoint 'Tenant Administration' (TA) is an optional web application used by web application owners to manage how their web application interacts with the shared resources in the farm.
A summary of the SharePoint versions can be found here.
The underlying technology for all SharePoint sites. SharePoint Foundation is available for free on-premises deployment and was called Windows SharePoint Services in previous versions. You can use SharePoint Foundation to quickly create many types of sites where you can collaborate on Web pages, documents, lists, calendars, and data. It is dependent on various hardware/software requirements, including a proper license for Microsoft Windows Server. It contains much of the core functionality and architecture drawn on by the commercial version of the package. Downloading SharePoint Foundation 2010 requires a mandatory registration, but this has been omitted for the 2013 version.
Microsoft Search Server Express
Microsoft's Search Server Express was a free, modified distribution of SharePoint 2010 Foundation. The installer for this package installs SharePoint 2010 Foundation, plus a limited subset of enterprise search features and enterprise document management features typically only found in paid versions of SharePoint. This version has been replaced with SharePoint 2013 Foundation, which has a completely new Search Service Application.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, 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.
It is possible to upgrade a SharePoint farm from Foundation to Standard. The product is equivalent to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007.
Built upon SharePoint Standard, Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise features can be unlocked simply by providing an additional license key. The product is the equivalent to MOSS 2007 Enterprise.
Extra features in SharePoint Enterprise includes:
- Search thumbnails and previews, rich web indexing, better search results
- BI Integration, Dashboards, and Business Data surfacing
- PowerPivot
- PerformancePoint
- Microsoft Office Access, Visio, Excel, and InfoPath Forms services
- SharePoint Enterprise Search extensions
A cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint Server on premises, any business can now simply subscribe to a service offering such as Office 365 and their employees can use SharePoint Online for creating sites to share documents and information with colleagues, partners, and customers. Microsoft Office 365- SharePoint has inserted many new features in its latest Version.
Microsoft currently offers two SharePoint Online plans with different features.
Related products
 | This section needs additional citations for verification. (February 2014) |
| Product name | Description | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search Server | An enterprise search platform based on the search capabilities of SharePoint. A freeware Express edition was once available. | Discontinued | |
| FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint | Search product that can be implemented on SharePoint Foundation | Discontinued | |
| SharePoint Designer | A free, client-side customization and configuration tool for SharePoint | Active | |
| Office Web Apps | Web-based, online, cross-browser compatible versions of Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote. These integrate directly into SharePoint's document management functionality. | Active | |
| Project Server | An extension to SharePoint providing integration with Microsoft Project | Active | |
| InfoPath Forms Services | Allows InfoPath forms to be hosted in a SharePoint web site and served via web browser | Discontinued | |
| Excel Services | A server technology included in SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007 that enables users to load, calculate, and display Excel 2010 workbooks on SharePoint Server 2010 | Active | |
| SharePoint Workspace | A client-side document management synchronization component included in Microsoft Office 2010 (Professional Plus edition and higher). | Discontinued | |
| SharePoint Foundation | A free download of core SharePoint functionality, without all of the Server functionality[further explanation needed] | Active |
History
Origins
SharePoint evolved from projects codenamed "Office Server" and "Tahoe" during the Office XP development cycle."Office Server" evolved out of the FrontPage and Office Server Extensions and "Team Pages". It targeted simple, bottom-up collaboration.
"Tahoe", built on shared technology with Exchange and the “Digital Dashboard”, targeted top-down portals, search and document management. The searching and indexing capabilities of SharePoint came from the "Tahoe" feature set. The search and indexing features were a combination of the index and crawling features from the Microsoft Site Server family of products and from the query language of Microsoft Index Server.
Versions
Successive versions (in chronological order):- Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001
- Microsoft SharePoint Team Services (2002)
- Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (free license) - Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (commercial release)
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (free license) - plus Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (commercial extension)
- Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 (free) - plus Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (commercial extension for Foundation), and SharePoint Enterprise 2010 (commercial extension for Server)
- Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 (free) - plus Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 (extension on top of Foundation) SharePoint 2013 has been available to Microsoft volume licensees and TechNet and MSDN subscribers since late 2012
Changes in end-user functionality added in the 2010 version of SharePoint include:
- "v4" User Interface, featuring a Fluent Ribbon
- Business Connectivity Services - providing interfaces for interacting with business data
- new governance and workflow functionality
- use of wiki-pages rather than web-part pages in default templates
- social profiles and social networking features
- support for SharePoint Workspaces 2010
- a re-developed client editor (SharePoint Designer)
- multi-browser support: Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 3.6 (Limited), and (WebKit-based) Apple Safari 4.04 (Limited). Support for Internet Explorer 6 has not been tested, according to Microsoft.
- new central administration UI1
- replacement of "Shared Service Providers" with "Service Applications"
- jQuery & Silverlight support, plus more theming flexibility
- new client-side object-model APIs for JavaScript, Silverlight, and .NET applications
- claims-based authentication
- support for Windows PowerShell
- sandboxing
- database caching, called Cache Service
- content-aware switching, called Management
System requirements
The following are the various requirements for deploying Microsoft SharePoint 2010.Server hardware
| Processor | 64-bit, four cores |
| RAM |
|
| Hard disk | 80 GB for system drive, varies for production environment depending on application size |
Server software
| Operating system | |
| Database server |
|
Web browser support
Supported web browsers:- Internet Explorer 8 or later: supported
- Google Chrome (latest version): supported
- Mozilla Firefox 19 or later: supported
- Safari (latest version): supported
Open source equivalents
Some potential SharePoint users arrive from the open source world and initially struggle to understand SharePoint in terms of related open source software they used previously. "SharePoint" refers to a large stack of Microsoft software, not a single program, and does not translate to a single system in open source world. However many parts of the stack have equivalents. The low-level frameworks map to web libraries such as Django and Rails while the higher level platforms (e.g. CMS, wikis, forums) map to systems using those libraries such as django-cms, django-wiki, django-blogs and similar Rails-using libraries. Other open source tools produce only high level aspects of the stack such as standalone wiki (e.g. MediaWiki), CMS (e.g. Drupal, Alfresco), or social network (e.g. Diaspora) software.DOWNLOAD FULL PDF FILE- >
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