Simply put, SharePoint 2013 (also
referred to as SharePoint after this point) is a platform to support
collaboration — a central Web-based portal for you to manage your own
and your colleague’s documents, social activities, data, and
information. This definition is pretty broad, but try framing it within a
scenario: you manage projects on a daily basis and must also manage
teams of people across those projects. Within the project, people are
having meetings, creating documents, exchanging ideas, managing
schedules, and so on. Without a central place to manage these activities
and documents, you’re using file shares on servers; you’re exchanging
documents via mail; and you’re using one or more different types of
management software to help keep a common view of activities. Within
this one scenario, you should be able to see the problem. A file share
can go down anytime, so what’s the backup? Documents aren’t versioned.
Context is lost around a project as elements are spread out across
different technologies. And security around those documents is difficult
to manage and control in an effective in an effective and efficient
way.
Project management is but one scenario that paints
a picture of collaboration. Many others exist, and this is why
SharePoint has seen such broad adoption. Often companies see great
advantages with SharePoint through simple document management; that is,
being able to store, version, create, and manage documents in one
central place. However, what these companies soon discover is that many
more features are built into SharePoint such that its use goes beyond
simple document management. Users soon begin to see Business
Intelligence (BI) features, discoverability benefits (that is, search
functions), social features, and governance abilities, among the many
other areas of which they can take advantage.
Defining SharePoint by Function
To provide you with an idea of the types of things that you can do with SharePoint, Figure 1 breaks SharePoint out into three separate areas:
- Collaboration — You’ll see the notion of collaboration
as a very strong theme for SharePoint. This is because SharePoint is
about bringing people together through different types of collaboration,
such as enterprise content management (ECM), Web content management
(WCM), social-computing through the use of newsfeeds, discoverability of
people and their skills, creating dashboards to fulfill your BI needs,
and so on. Given the new app model in SharePoint 2013, collaboration is
managed through apps. Developers can extend, customize, or build their
own Apps for SharePoint as well manage collaboration on SharePoint.
- Interoperability — SharePoint is also about bringing this collaboration together through interoperability.
This means Office and Web-based document integration, and the
capability to build and deploy secure and custom solutions that
integrate line-of-business (LOB) data with SharePoint and Office,
integrating with wider Web technologies, or deploying applications to
the cloud.
- Platform — As you’ll see, SharePoint is a platform
that supports not only interoperability and collaboration but also
extensibility, through a rich object model, a solid set of developer
tools, and a growing developer community. One of the key paradigm shifts
here, though, is the notion of the cloud in SharePoint. The cloud
introduces new app models: new ways of developing, deploying, and
hosting SharePoint applications; new forms of authentication through
OAuth; and new ways of data interoperability using OData (and REST).
So, at its essence, SharePoint is a Web-based platform that provides the following:
- A set of native, out-of-the-box capabilities to support productivity and collaboration
- An open and extensible set of APIs and services that you can use to
build light apps or cloud-based apps using your own hosting technology
- Infrastructure to manage security and permissions against the various artifacts (for example, documents and list items)
- A management and configuration engine that provides deep
administrative abilities, both for the cloud-hosted version of
SharePoint and the on-premises SharePoint server.
Defining SharePoint by User
Depending on the role of the person who is using SharePoint, the stated definition might take on a slightly different hue.
For example, for the end user, SharePoint enhances
productivity by providing a core set of connected applications that
essentially act as the Web-based application platform. The applications
enable people to connect using wiki sites, workspaces, lists, document
libraries, and integration with Microsoft Office applications such as
Outlook, Excel, and Word 2010.
From an organizational point of view, the unified
infrastructure enables the organization to rally around a central point
of collaboration — be it through an organizational portal, a team site,
or a personal My Site. It also enables organizations to integrate LOB
systems, such as SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Microsoft Dynamics, into
the information worker experience through SharePoint. Furthermore, it
enables you to tap into your growing cloud services and data that you
might be developing and deploying.
From a developer’s perspective, you can take
advantage of a wide platform (arguably the widest historically for the
platform) to build and deploy many different types of applications.
These range from simple HTML and JavaScript applications to managed code
and .NET cloud apps that are deployed to Windows Azure.
The response to business needs arrives through the
capability to use SharePoint as a toolset in the everyday work lives of
an organization’s employees — for example, routing documents through
managed processes, providing social newsfeeds and updates, or managing
and tracking project documents. In essence, SharePoint represents a
platform that offers the organization a lot of functionality to do many
different things, with collaboration lying at the heart of them.
Introducing the User Interface
Taking a look at the SharePoint user
interface at this point might be helpful for you. Although you can
create sites from many different templates, Figure 2 shows a Team Site and calls out some of the areas of the page:
- Area 1 is where you can access other areas of Office 365 such as Outlook or the Site Settings.
- Area 2 provides a search box for you to enter queries and search the site collection.
- Area 3 contains some quick launch tiles that can help you get
started with your site (note you can click the Remove This link to hide
them).
- Area 4 provides a place for you to upload and view documents.
- Area 5 shows quick links to other areas of your Team Site.
You’ll find a common set of options in many sites
(such as the link bar at the top of the site). Depending on the type of
site that you create, you’ll find a different set of default options
available. For example, some have more BI functions or governance
workflow or social features built into them. This all depends on the
type of site.
For example, in Figure 2
you could programmatically add data from external LOB systems into your
site, you could integrate a Web app from Windows Azure, or you could
create a light HTML and JavaScript and deploy to your Team site. You
could also customize the branding of the site. For example, Figure 3
shows a sample SharePoint site that has more branding. This example
uses some of the native SharePoint capabilities to configure the look
and feel, but you could create a much more elaborate, branded, and
custom look-and-feel for any of your SharePoint sites.
Thus, the Web-based experience that SharePoint
provides out-of-the-box integrates core (as well as external)
applications and functionality that end users can employ during their
daily work lives.
In Figure 4,
note that the default view has changed. This is because the site is now
in Edit mode, which enables you to customize the SharePoint site. In
this view, you can add Web parts, HTML or JavaScript apps, integrate
external applications, and so on. The fact that you can quickly put a
site into Edit mode, make some changes, and then save those changes back
to the server is one of the great advantages of SharePoint.
Introducing the Structure
The structural taxonomy of SharePoint
comprises multiple levels. On the first level you have a site that is
made of a template. As mentioned earlier, you have a variety of
templates that you can use for a given site — either out of the box or
custom. Within a site, you can create more subsites — using the same set
of site templates. So it’s essentially a parent site, or site
collection, with subsites. Within a specific site, you then add (or
create and deploy to the sites) apps. Now for those of you who have been around SharePoint for a while, this will feel a little weird: Everything is now an app.
That is, lists, document libraries, form libraries, and so on are all
apps — just different types of apps. For those who are new to
SharePoint, this idea won’t seem so jarring; thinking about a site
comprising apps is a pretty natural way to think about Web platforms
today. Also, as you start building apps for a marketplace, then the
concept of an app (as opposed to differentiating across lists, document
libraries, and so on) begins to make even more sense. Figure 5 shows you a small set of apps that are available to you by default within your SharePoint site.
For organizations, SharePoint provides a one-stop
shop for leveraging the SharePoint infrastructure not only for internal
sites to manage your day-to-day project needs and as a business process
workflow, but also activities and infrastructure to manage your publicly
facing sites. The key point is that SharePoint provides the
infrastructure for many types of sites and for site and app development.
