What is sharepoint server. First look at SharePoint

Flexible management tool

Microsoft's browser-based content management system allows you to centralize a secure space for document sharing and team collaboration. Serving more than 200 thousand organizations around the world. These companies use SharePoint to create intranets, store, organize, and share information with the entire company in one central location.

SharePoint is a flexible tool and can be used in many different ways:

• storage location for documents;
• collaboration tool for handling daily workflows and reading company communications.

What is a SharePoint site?

When we talk about websites, we mean places where people can work together and find and save information. They also make collaboration easier. You can invite your team members to work on the site with you.

They offer a common platform for joint activities. In other words, when many people save content on a site, that content can be accessed and shared by members of the site, and everyone knows where specific documents (and their latest versions) are stored. Updated task lists, the latest version of your calendar - they are all stored on your team resource. Therefore, you do not need to constantly request these documents. You (or the site administrator) can decide who has access to each section. Rights can be based on things like geography, departments, general tasks.

Search value

Think about the amount of content that is created throughout your organization, from documents and reports to image files. Depending on the size of your company, finding the right document can be difficult, whether it's a PowerPoint presentation, Excel sheet, .doc, or other piece of content. This is why search is such an important aspect of Microsoft SharePoint.

List and libraries

Sites are made up of SharePoint lists and libraries. What is this? Lists are the basic building blocks of SharePoint Designer. Almost everything we create in SharePoint is stored there. This element consists mainly of headers and rows of data, just like an Excel spreadsheet. An example would be a list of clients. A SharePoint list is much more dynamic compared to storing data in Excel.

Such elements can be accessed and updated by all team site members—without having to create a new version. What does it mean?View of the project list, including task due dates, can be accessed, added and edited by anyone with access from anywhere at any time.

Advantages of the resource

SharePoint 2013 file sharing became popular because it was an easy way to share documents online. After all, it has so many advantages. Many organizations that have adopted SharePoint have taken advantage of the ability to upload documents and share that data with others.

One great example of sharing on a website is a company extranet where users are not in the same location or authentication domain. Using forms-based authentication, accounts can be created for people across physical and corporate boundaries. By providing one place for shared documents around a task rather than a corporate entity, SharePoint goes beyond file sharing.

Microsoft SharePoint Issues

A functional resource with great data management capabilities has its own vulnerabilities. SharePoint - what is it? The challenge lies in supporting certain industry standards. SharePoint's records management capabilities allow you to preserve documents for legal or historical reasons. This can be a problem in some industries (medical and financial) where there are complex regulatory requirements for record keeping. In such cases, you should consult a professional regarding your specific industry solution.

Microsoft offers a lot of solutions for users and business clients. These include SharePoint. What kind of program is this, what products it includes, what their functions are, read within the framework of this article.

About the program

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies is a set of software products and components aimed at enterprises for working with corporate information through websites. Their presence will allow you to: share, organize, store, and access data from any device.

You can use any Internet browser to work. SharePoint include:

1. A set of web applications for organizing collaboration.
2. A set of functions for creating blogs and web portals.
3. Search module for filtering and searching data.
4. Module for creating forms for entering information.
5. Functions for managing workflows and business intelligence.

Technologies

The SharePoint name may refer to several products called:

1. SharePoint Online. Microsoft cloud service designed for business. Once Office 365 is released, you can simply subscribe to it or SharePoint Online to allow your employees to create sites, store and share information.
2. SharePoint Server. Using this system, your enterprise can manage the information base locally (deployment within its network). This complex includes:
   1. SharePoint Foundation- technology that acts as a base for all sites.
   2. Capabilities for corporate content management.
   3. Business analytics, personal website and channel management, searching for information on these sites.
3. SharePoint Designer 2013. HTML editor, which is necessary for creating pages and working with content on the created corporate website.

How to create a website?

1. In the upper left corner, click on the tile. From the menu that opens, select SharePoint.
2. In the window that opens, click on the “Create site” button.
3. Name the site and click “Create”. The new website will appear in the directory previously specified by the administrator.
   
4. The website is empty, so you need to make a template, fill it with content, and provide access to colleagues.
5. Microsoft took care of the templates and prepared its own options. Choose the appropriate template that will suit the type of your site:
   1. Groups. Can be used as a unified environment for creating and working with information for a group. Often used as a company's front website.
      
   2. Blog.Blog allows you to quickly distribute useful information published on the site among organizational members. You can create, edit, and delete entries on it. Post them in several categories. Disable and enable the ability to comment on posts.
   3. Project. Specially designed for working with a project. It includes collaboration features and displays the Project Summary feature connected to the Task List. A task added by a colleague to the “Task List” will be automatically displayed on the project website.
      
   4. Community . A kind of forum in which colleagues conduct discussions.
      
   5. Document Center. Allows you to work with a large number of documents. Can be used as an archive or library.
   6. Records Center. Suitable for working and storing financial, legal and similar documents.
   7. Business Intelligence Center. Designed for storing, analyzing and conducting business reports.

The task of the intra-organizational space is high-quality and prompt exchange of information. In order for employees of an organization to interact more productively, computer corporations are trying to create a better platform that could be responsible for performing this task. Microsoft took this issue most seriously among all corporations. Its development is the SharePoint product. What is this program? Let's try to figure it out...

SharePoint: what kind of program?

As you probably already understood, today we will talk about the SharePoint program. What is its purpose? What advantages does this program provide when used? SharePoint is a fairly convenient program that is responsible for organizing productive interaction between company employees. Thanks to this platform, a portal is created within the corporation, which is a connecting center for all employees of the organization, as well as a place where official information is stored.

What purpose can SharePoint be used for? In general, we have already figured out what SharePoint is. Now all that remains is to figure out what to do with it. When an organization's internal communication portal has already been created, this program allows you to organize a common system that can be used for joint processing of projects and documents. Today it is possible to create an online platform for communication, automation of work processes and solving similar problems.

SharePoint Designer

One of the components of a SharePoint project is the SharePoint Designer program. Next, we will try to figure out what this program is and what it is needed for. We have already understood the main purpose of SharePoint. Now we know what this program is. However, as practice shows, not all system tools work fully. Therefore, these restrictions have to be expanded. To fully work with web sites, you must use web editors. The Share Point Designer component allows you to carry out step-by-step quick setup, use templates, fill the system with modular components, and create high-quality design and design of the project.

This program contains everything you need, which allows you to quickly start working with the website. In this case, everything is done quite simply. The user does not need to know complex system codes. It is enough just to have a basic understanding of visual design tools. Although SharePoint Designer is part of the Microsoft family of products, you won't find it in the standard Office suite. Therefore, if the user needs to use this program, he will have to purchase it separately. By the way, this program can be obtained for free only during the trial period.

Goals and objectives

As you already understand, SharePoint Designer is a standard web editor. For this reason, the tasks and functions of this program should be familiar to you. This includes generating HTML pages, working with web applications, creating ASPX pages, and managing a website. Web sites require a connection to the server running SharePoint services to ensure proper management. If you just need to create an HTML or ASPX page, you don't necessarily need to use a server connection. The only important point is that after completion of the work you will need to download all the files.

Principle of operation

Working with SharePoint Designer is quite simple. The user is first greeted with a simple interface. If you have ever worked with a web editor, you will be able to intuitively guess what to do next in the program. The next operation you will have to do is enter text. The program already provides some code combinations that can be used to design HTML. The designer is basically no different from other programs of this type. The program allows you to add various design elements, such as tags and server elements. Despite the fact that there are still certain differences in these components, the way they enter text is exactly the same. By the way, you can insert elements with different configurations. You can select various options from the context menu. After the project is completed, you can preview it and then save it.

SharePoint WorkSpace

Another SharePoint component is SharePoint Workspace. What is this program and what is its purpose? SharePoint Workspace appeared in 2010. This component replaces Microsoft Office Groove 2007. This program is a special application that allows you to quickly access document libraries and other SharePoint services. The new version of the program is more flexible and interactive. The application can now be used independently or in conjunction with SharePoint Server. If you look at this issue in more detail, the main task of this component becomes clear. It consists of synchronizing content on a personal computer with lists and documents in real time. Unlike the previous component, which was responsible for design, this component is a communication platform used on previously created sites and areas.

SharePoint WorkSpace Features

The subject under consideration is SharePoint WorkSpace. We already know what it is. It remains to understand the capabilities that this software provides. Firstly, it can be used to design workspaces, which in turn are divided into the following types: SharePoint, Groove and public folder area. The first type is responsible for synchronizing two directions directly without any processing. The second type is designed for full-function interaction between employees. This area is considered the safest.

The third type is designed to operate and maintain employee access to operating system folders. These features allow for simple installation and startup without outside help. When starting to work together, you should first take into account that this program can work both offline and connected. Thanks to the automatic synchronization feature, you will be able to return to the latest versions of the created document.

SharePoint Services supports the following processes: optimization, integration, messaging, safe mode, content search, and more. This, of course, is not all the functions that are available to users.

Errors during the setup process

Now let's talk about errors that may occur when setting up SharePoint. This section may seem useless to you now, but suddenly in the future you will still encounter one of these errors. In this case, knowing how to resolve such errors will be very useful. Due to the fact that this program is very feature-rich and complex, users have to deal with many errors. First of all, users can be advised not to skimp on workspace.

It is important that the application has sufficient memory. Otherwise, some functions simply will not work. Also ensure proper use of Microsoft SQL server. It is advisable to find a separate place for it in the physical system and not share its resources with other services. Many SharePoint errors are related to using the Configuration Wizard. This tool has many shortcomings, which often leads to various failures. Also, you need to be very careful when creating a content web application. Errors may appear due to an incorrect URL. To avoid errors of this kind, the user is recommended to document all application settings step by step.

The more discussions I read about SharePoint, the more I become convinced that the very concept of “SharePoint” carries with it a bunch of myths and misconceptions. Some of them live in the heads of those who are thinking about using this platform, some (and this is the most dangerous) - in those who have only recently started creating sites on SharePoint. Since the second part is more difficult to describe (and today is also Friday), I, being terribly lazy, would rather talk about the first.

So, myths. Or delusions? Doesn't matter. I describe in the order that came to mind, and not because some myth is “more terrible” than another.

Myth 1: SharePoint was actually developed on another planet and given to Microsoft by humanoids from a UFO to break people's brains.

Myth 2: SharePoint is expensive.

It is absolutely logical that as the project grows (and its monetization, as they say), the need for use and adequate configuration arises. Here, software costs of course increase, like all other expenses: servers, channel rental and, finally, staff. It is the last item of expenditure that is the most tangible, but it is often considered separately. This is forgivable for small start-up teams, but when serious experienced companies do not include in the project budget the costs of salaries of people called upon to develop the solution and then support it, this is surprising.

I am convinced that the benefits provided by the platform and the development tools that support it, including the now free SharePoint Designer (for the purpose of quickly fixing something), justify the price of such software. The same goes for SharePoint Server (MOSS). The latter is far from free and in the version for Internet sites it costs significantly, but I will repeat once again: stop maximalism in choosing a configuration and evaluate the entire project from the point of view of real needs and income. It’s funny to hear about the high cost of a MOSS Internet license from a person who earns several thousand dollars a day on the site. Again, if you plan to create a community site with income that barely covers costs and hosting, you first need to think about what SharePoint can provide in its minimal configuration.

As a summary of the “myth,” I’ll voice a seemingly obvious idea. For projects of any size, start by thinking about what the most basic SharePoint capabilities will do for you. The opportunity to save on developing a storage system, authorization, managing website infrastructure and layout templates, integration with Office applications and built-in content deployment tools is already a lot.

Myth 3. SharePoint is slow and requires hardware.

Load balancing

Output Cache

Object cache

For those interested, links: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc298466.aspx and “Accelerating Sharepoint to the speed of a Highload Internet site.” ASP.NET “bisons”, pay attention to the last section in the MissUFO post (IHttpModule and hard optimization). With a careful approach and a responsible attitude, using this technique you can turn pages into truly racing cars.

To finish this topic, I’ll tell you about my first impressions after buying a car. As soon as I got behind the wheel, I realized that the car terribly limits my freedom of movement. Now I have to plan and learn where turns are allowed, where traffic jams are most common, how to get around and how to avoid getting on a one-way street while driving in the opposite direction. And also gasoline, worries about washer, tire pressure. Motorists, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Several months have passed. Dissatisfaction diminished, I began to understand my advantages. Several years later, I can say that a car gives freedom of movement and pleasure from it. On foot - excellent, environmentally friendly and inexpensive. But slowly. Possible on a motorcycle. But imho - it’s not safe, and it’s not suitable for temperament :-)

Myth 4. SharePoint is only for large companies and corporate websites.

There really isn't much ready-made scripts and templates that can be used when developing classic Internet portals or social networking sites that are so fashionable today. But are there many portal platforms that offer this now? Meanwhile, according to rumors, Microsoft has realized the gaps in this area and is actively working to include relevant features in future versions.

This myth stems from the belief of many customers like: “SharePoint should definitely have templates for all occasions. Make me a website in a couple of days! I've heard that with SharePoint it's a piece of cake." Funny? Rather sad.

Finally, my experience (and probably yours too) shows that the concept of a “ready-made template from Microsoft” is poorly applicable for serious Internet sites. If you start developing your own solutions in this direction, make your own templates. And here we smoothly move on to the next myth.

Myth 5: Web developers and designers are not needed to create a site on SharePoint.

I will say one thing for sure. SharePoint needs to be embraced by all team members. It allows a lot, but requires respecting some of its expectations from your design. And these expectations are most often dictated by issues of security (oddly enough) and support for all the rich functionality of the platform.

But in general, SharePoint, as I already said, is an ASP.NET application with its features and tricks.

Myth 5.5. SharePoint limits creative freedom, and imposed features often only complicate life.

Often developers (especially Russian ones) criticize SharePoint for what they consider to be strange features of the operation of some subsystems. Let's take two as examples - storing list items and Business Data Catalog.

What is puzzling about the lists is the fact that they do not behave like database tables. Queries that are more or less complex are not supported; there is no referential integrity. The answer is simple: lists are not databases. If you want to use SharePoint as a frontend to the database, then use it that way. There are simple rules for lists and document libraries:

1. Document libraries store files that with which users work, as with documents. Seems simple, right? But italics are often forgotten and people plan to store, for example, software distributions. Avoiding file sharing is a good idea, but everyone needs common sense. A separate storage class is aspx page files. There are usually no questions with them.

2. The lists store information related to the structures of collective work of users, direct publication of information (articles, news, etc.) and file metadata (from the first rule). Nothing else needs to be stored in lists. The rule can be broken if there is little data, but with large volumes you will quickly experience performance gaps and difficulties with data queries.

The second example is Business Data Catalog. It seems like a good idea - to abstract data sources and link them to existing structures stored in SharePoint. But the developers complain: the description format is very complex. The answer is simple and is based on the idea behind BDC. The complex XML-like description format is designed to solve two problems simultaneously:

1. Be flexible enough to describe all the necessary entities and operations, allowing SharePoint applications not to directly operate with data in the database.

2. Have a readable format that allows reading and editing without special software.

This may not be very convincing for some, but I’ll try to clarify. Initially, it is assumed that such a data source profile is created once by the developer of the source information system in order to provide access to it from SharePoint Server. This was done quite quickly for systems such as SAP, Siebel or Amazon services. Also, the description format allows, among other things, to specify objects in such a way that it is possible to search for entities from the data source used without developing specialized components.

When I think about this myth, the car analogy comes to mind again.

Tell us about your “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn it.” The impressions of experienced people are even more welcome. Good ideas, as we know, do not come to the head, but “between the heads.”

Many people find it quite difficult to understand what SharePoint is. Perhaps you are just like that. Maybe you've already tried working with this thing called SharePoint for some time, but you still haven't fully figured it out. You want a simple one-sentence definition so everything is immediately clear. And you won't get this simple explanation from me, because SharePoint is not a simple thing. SharePoint is not a “thing” at all, i.e. it is not one thing. SharePoint is not a program, but a platform. It is a collection of very different products and technologies brought together under the name SharePoint. This is a tough decision that will allow you to do a lot of different things. And with each new version of SharePoint, Microsoft adds more and more inventions to this platform. If you understand all these diverse benefits that SharePoint has, you can choose the right combination of those things that make sense for you.

More precisely, not quite like that. After all, SharePoint is a server product. You don't install SharePoint on your computer. It is already installed somewhere on the servers, and you just connect to it. Of course, there are some related programs that you can install on your computer, such as SharePoint Designer or Visio. But you won't necessarily need them, since you typically use SharePoint either through Microsoft Office (Office for SharePoint is a native program) or through a web browser.

So, we understand that SharePoint is a big product, that it is installed on the server, but what does it do anyway?

Microsoft talks about SharePoint in 6 different aspects: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, Composites. But this doesn’t make it any clearer. These are special terms. Of course, we can translate each word and understand its meaning, but we still won’t understand what lies behind it until we delve deeper into the product. I’d rather give you my version of these terms.

First, you can make websites using SharePoint. SharePoint creates websites. This is a powerful engine for creating websites. You say you need a website - and, lo and behold, you have a website. You need one more - oops, you have one more. You don't need any special programs, you don't need to be a programmer or web designer.

What kind of sites does SharePoint create? This could be your personal website, or it could be your team website, or a company website. Or it could be a public site for everyone. You can participate in the creation of the site, or you can simply use sites that are created by other people. But unlike most of the sites we visit on the Internet and which we only read, SharePoint is primarily designed for creating sites in which we are members, i.e. we can connect to sites and change and supplement them. And here we come to the second principle.

SharePoint helps you work with other people. Even if it's just you working on one Word document at a time, SharePoint allows you to do this. You might want to make your company's knowledge base, like your own Wikipedia, that hundreds of people can edit - SharePoint can do that too. It can give you a shared calendar, a shared task list, a discussion board. SharePoint gives you it all. It helps you keep track of a huge, gigantic amount of information, letting you know if anything has changed. The idea, (ideology) of working together is (initially) built into this thing. It turns out that you can take all this heap of information that is generated in your company in the course of daily work: documents, tables, presentations, plans, pictures, audio, video and even databases... take all this and upload it to SharePoint, and all this because

SharePoint gives you a place where you store your content, your information, your everything. Instead of storing it on your computer or in a shared folder on a server, or sending it back and forth via email, you just put everything on SharePoint. There must be places where information is under super control, monitoring, audit, accessible only to a narrow circle of people, where you work with data of a certain type. The other part can be made available to everyone absolutely freely if you so choose. You can put everything in there. And this does not become an obstacle to your work. You continue to work exactly the same as you did before. You just save it all in SharePoint instead of your local drive, or you create a document on your desktop, or update a meeting schedule from your laptop, and then want to look at it all from your smartphone - and you don't have to worry about how it ends up in one place in another, you can even edit documents directly from the browser, all within SharePoint. Apparently, after some time of such work, you will accumulate a bunch of all sorts of files, information and data... and many people will work with this information, and anxiety (danger) will arise about how not to lose it all (search).

And in the next part we deal with search. in SharePoint allows you to search your farm for the information you need. SharePoint has a built-in powerful search engine. This is not something that people might think is like it was added later (It was originally intended to be there). This brilliant and sophisticated search engine allows you to search not only for information in a bunch of different ways, but also for people, and do it with information security in mind, i.e. no one will see in the search results what they should not see.

OK. All we've talked about so far are things that are useful, but not mind-blowing (if all you want is to work with your files the old-fashioned way). But the next part is Understanding. Here SharePoint helps to collect all the information together, and not just collect it together, but collect it together to better understand it, organize it so that new meaning appears in a huge amount of different data. Take data in various formats - tables, blogs, data from other systems and present them in such a way that it becomes clear. And if you go further, you can make a control (monitoring) panel in which information can be displayed in real time.

If you are watching this now (have watched it up to this point), then, despite what you work now, although most likely it is mental work, and you are paid for your brains, and not for manual labor. This means that part of your job is to make decisions, and for this you need information, and not the kind that needs to be collected from different places every time, but the kind that you need in the form that is convenient for you, relevant and direct in front of your eyes. So, SharePoint helps to collect (provide you) such information. But that's not all.

SharePoint can still be built upon (added on top of itself)... After all, not a single program, not a single platform, not a single operating system knows what exactly you need. And SharePoint has fantastic expandability. It was designed from the start to be extensible and customizable. You don't need to be a programmer. Using programs like SharePoint Designer or Microsoft Office Visio, you can create your workflows without coding. But if you know how to code, you can do even more (SharePoint's extensibility options are almost endless). SharePoint can also talk to your old databases and applications. It can retrieve data from them and give you access to view and use it. And all this right from SharePoint, securely, under control.

Now, if all this seemed like too much, then you are absolutely right. ... (? he attitude to take more than anything) SharePoint is not a program, it is not a solution to one problem, it is a platform that you can use to find hundreds of solutions to hundreds of problems. And that’s why it’s difficult to grasp it all, because for you it’s one thing, but for another it’s completely different.

But SharePoint makes websites, it helps you work together with other people, it gives you a place to store your data, it gives you the ability to search through it all, it helps you consolidate information for better understanding, and it can also be expanded and customized. Each of these features is quite deep on its own, and you could spend months working with SharePoint and not fully grasp it. You can be satisfied with the website creation capabilities by making a public website. You can live in the Construction section, creating business processes and applications for SharePoint, you can live in the Understanding section, making dashboards and monitoring for better understanding of information, or you can simply save some documents there and use them as needed. And that's all good.

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