Exploring the SharePoint product line

First things first. There is no product with the name SharePoint. You can't actually go and buy something called SharePoint. That's just a useful phrase that describes several different products and technologies. But obviously something somewhere has to be installed, so what actually gets installed? Well, there are several choices. First off is something called SharePoint Foundation 2010. This is free software that is installed on your Windows Server machines and SharePoint Foundation is the engine, the core, the heartbeat of all the SharePoint products.

While SharePoint foundation does provide a great deal of functionality, most larger organizations use another technology called SharePoint Server 2010. SharePoint Server 2010 wraps around SharePoint Foundation. If it's in the foundation product, it's in SharePoint Server. SharePoint Server is built on top of and includes everything is SharePoint Foundation. Now SharePoint Server 2010 comes in two Editions. There's a Standard Edition, and there's an Enterprise Edition.

Just as the Standard Editions includes SharePoint Foundation, the Enterprise Edition includes everything in Standard Edition, which includes everything in the Foundation Edition. We're going to cover all editions in this course, beginning with the Foundation functionality and moving up, and I'll explain when I'm using each different version. You might be wondering which one you have. Well, the easiest way is going to be ask the people who installed it. But there will be ways you can tell by looking. You need to do a bit of a process of elimination. Just because you're looking at a SharePoint site that exists in SharePoint Foundation, it doesn't mean you don't have Enterprise.

You just need to go looking for some of that Enterprise functionality. So we're going to explore all three of these products, because even if you don't have SharePoint Server Enterprise, you'd probably want to be aware of what's in the Enterprise Edition. If all you're working on is SharePoint Foundation, you almost certainly want to be aware of what's in the SharePoint Server Standard Edition. You might be surprised by just how much functionality is baked into the free SharePoint Foundation. In fact, what most people talk about when they talk about SharePoint is part of SharePoint Foundation.

We'll explore exactly what that is in the next few movies.