From the course: SharePoint 2016 Essential Training

SharePoint: The basics

From the course: SharePoint 2016 Essential Training

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SharePoint: The basics

- [Voiceover] Different people work with different aspects of SharePoint. So for some of us SharePoint is a collaboration site. For others of us SharePoint is simply a place to store documents. For some of us SharePoint is a workflow engine that's used to automate tasks that we do on an everyday basis. But SharePoint is more than any of those individual things. See, SharePoint's not an individual application like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. It's not even a suite of applications like Outlook or Microsoft Office. Microsoft SharePoint is more than simply an application or program. SharePoint is what's called a platform and you and I can use SharePoint to do the thing it does best which is to create powerful websites that have features that allow you and I to work together in ways that we hadn't previously imagined. SharePoint is a product that's installed on a server. So unlike Word for example, or Outlook, or Adobe Reader, we don't install SharePoint on our local desktops. Now, there are applications that we use with SharePoint that we do install locally. For example you and I might wanna use SharePoint designer to create work flows, or to change how SharePoint appears. Or we might wanna use InfoPath to create forms that work with SharePoint. But SharePoint itself lives on a server and you and I then connect to that server using a browser from our desktop or laptop, from a tablet, from a mobile device. But for many of us our first introduction to SharePoint and the primary way that we use SharePoint isn't using a browser. It's by using the Office products that we use already. For example, we can create and save products in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel on our SharePoint site. We can edit the documents that we create either on our desktop, in a browser using Office 365, or we can view them on a mobile device. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, these core Office products, are made to work with Microsoft SharePoint. And so it's very easy to collaborate on documents by placing them in a SharePoint environment. The other thing we get then of course is because that document is hosted on a server I don't necessarily need to have access to my own laptop or desktop to be able to go retrieve a document. It's very easy to access my documents from this common store where I save them using Microsoft SharePoint. But I can also use other applications to work with SharePoint. For example, when I'm working in Microsoft Outlook I can have a calendar in SharePoint that I connect back to Outlook. Perhaps my team's calendar or a calendar of events that we're responsible for. Or we might create a common calendar in SharePoint that allows me to see when different people in the office are out of the office, or are on vacation, or attending conferences. So we can create group or team calendars in SharePoint that every single member of the team can view using Outlook. The same thing is true for contacts and for tasks. InfoPath has a special relationship to SharePoint because InfoPath is used to create form templates that other users can then fill out using InfoPath form filler and SharePoint. So I'll create a form hosted in SharePoint and make it broadly available to an entire team. I can publish Visio diagrams as web pages and host them in SharePoint. Microsoft Project actually uses a particular version of SharePoint for people who wanna collaborate, using Project at the enterprise level. So we have these core Office applications that are well supported by every version of SharePoint. And then we have these other members of the Office family, that have some integration with all versions of SharePoint. But what is SharePoint? I've told you a little bit about what it does, but what is it? Microsoft has been asked this question ever since the very first version of SharePoint came out, which was called Teamsites. So, Microsoft Teamsites, which was around for a couple of versions, was difficult for people to imagine; hard for them to wrap their heads around. And that basic foundation of Teamsites has done nothing but expand to provide more and more features that you and I can use. So, how does Microsoft explain what SharePoint is? Well, they start by saying that we use Microsoft SharePoint to create websites. We create sites that are places where people can work together, can save documents, can go find information. So very specific full featured websites. You can then invite members of your team to work on a site with you. Because you have a site in common you have a common platform for collaboration. So when my group of folks in my workplace saves things together, in a particular site, we can then access those documents. We can share them. We have a single source of truth about where they are. When I ask, "Where's the latest version of the calendar," the answer would be, "It's on our team site." Where's the up-to-date contacts list? I don't have to ask who has that. It's the one on our team site. And we create this community together, then, of people who have access to a common set of information that's always kept current. I can invite particular people to one site, a different set of folks to another. This can be based on things like geography or having common tasks that we share. But it can also be that we wanna create a quick community of folks who want to help plan a shower for one of the employees in the workplace. Or want to be able to get together to bounce some ideas around a particular project. So the communities can be long-lived. They can be institutionalized communities. Or they can be short-lived ad hoc communities of folks who need to work together. Because we have really good content controls, we don't have to worry about having versions of documents available that people shouldn't see. So we'll be generating lots and lots of content for project teams, institutional content being provided by groups like the HR department, new documents for employee in-boarding. We can have all of our policy manuals here, all of our forms that are necessary to get our work done. And all of that content can live in SharePoint. That creates a huge problem. How do we find it? Well, SharePoint has excellent search capabilities. So when I create my documents, I can search for them in a particular library or a larger zone, a site, or I can even search on all of the sites that I have access to to find particular content, whether it's an Excel spreadsheet that I know that I need or a PowerPoint presentation that I saw yesterday. So, SharePoint provides great search capability that allow us to go and search all the content that we've created. But because we've aggregated all of this content in one place, we also have the ability to gain insights from it, that we wouldn't if it was sitting on different people's desktops in different people's inboxes in different network shares. So we can aggregate information about the content we have, whether we're gaining information out of a database or getting information from some list that we're keeping. We can do some regular kinds of reporting about the information that we're keeping in SharePoint. Our ability to gain insights from the data that we have stored in SharePoint is based on which version of SharePoint we're working with. We have some limited ability to be able to mine data from SharePoint Foundation, but we're working with SharePoint Enterprise Server, and we have all the tools necessary to create key performance indicator pages, and to work with business intelligence robustly in SharePoint. And then finally, there's the sixth aspect of SharePoint. This is the SharePoint product design, but finally we have something called composites. And what composites means is the extensibility of SharePoint, the ability to create new things with SharePoint that are very specific to your business. For example, there's the ability to add a work flow to a document library or a list or even a site. There's the ability to create customized content, customs lists, custom libraries, all kinds of custom apps that you would create that would allow SharePoint to best meet your situation. There's lots of out-of-the-box capability to create sites, to invite people to specific communities, to be able to manage our content, to search through it, and to garner some kind of business insight around it. But composites truly make SharePoint extensible and useful in every business setting. So, what is SharePoint? It's not an application like Word or Excel. It's not a set of applications like Outlook. SharePoint is more than a program. SharePoint is a platform that organizations use to build web based solutions to solve a wide variety of business problems. And with SharePoint it's easy for us as users because we use the same applications we've always used but now we use them with SharePoint. Outlook with SharePoint, Word with SharePoint, Visio with SharePoint. And SharePoint simply enhances the user experience and allows us to collaborate and do more together than we could possibly have done alone.

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