SharePoint Overview

I'd like you to imagine that you and I are at work and one of our managers comes over to us and says hey what is SharePoint wouldn't it be like awesome to have a really good answer for that well my friend as a result of our time together in this nugget we're gonna have a good overview of what SharePoint provides as well as a better ability for us to answer that question what is SharePoint let's begin it's fun to learn and I remember as a young boy learning lots of things through stories and one of the stories that sticks out for me is the story about the elephant and the blind men and it went something like this once upon a time there were three blind men in a village and one day the villagers told them hey there's an elephant in the village today and they had no idea what an elephant was so they decided even though they wouldn't be able to really see it with their eyes they could go and feel it anyways so each one of them went to where the elephant was and touched the elephant and the three men had different experiences based on what part of the elephant they were introduced to for example one man said hey the elephant is like a pillar because he had touched the elephant's leg another man said oh no it's like a rope and that was said by the man who had touched the tail of the elephant and yet another man said oh no this is like a pipe and that was said by the man who touched the Tusk of the elephant and then they begin to argue who was right now how does this story about perception of an elephant relate to sharepoint and the answer is interesting if we ask the dozen people hey what is sharepoint people who use it we might get multiple answers from those people based on what portion or what aspect of sharepoint they are using so that leads us to these three questions first of all what the heck is sharepoint and if we boil it all down sharepoint is a web-based platform it's a product from Microsoft it's also a platform that's customizable and custom applications can be added to it with the intent of being able to provide business solutions and one of the cool things about sharepoint is that it's used or accessed let's talk about that first it's accessed via a browser a web browser and the reason that's so cool is because almost everybody has a browser our mobile devices have browsers our Windows computers have browsers or Macintosh machines have browsers and Linux machines have browsers so the most common for individuals to interact and use the services that are presented by SharePoint and the apps that are there are via a browser and as you might imagine that it simplifies quite a bit because we don't have to write a custom software application client portion for each of the different platforms that might be accessing and using the services that are delivered via SharePoint and now let's tie in the story of the three blind men and the elephant with these services and the applications that can be used by customers and enterprises that are taking advantage of a sharepoint system the first feature that I find really cool is collaboration for example let's imagine that you and I and several our people are on a team at work and we have a project that we're working on well who does what when do they do it coordinating the workflows between the individuals being able to see from a group perspective what's being done and who's responsible all of that can be coordinated with collaboration using SharePoint services another really cool feature is content management for example one of the challenges when working with the team and having documents involved is how do we track the revisions of documents how do we make sure two people aren't working on the same document at the same time how do we make sure that people know where to go to retrieve documents or see other documents so if a company needed a solution for enterprise content management that can be provided by a SharePoint and part of that management isn't just the ability to have a centralized location and an organization of documents it's also a kick-butt search feature so you can find stuff once it's out there in your SharePoint environment another aspect that's available through the applications and services as part of SharePoint is social networking so in a case where we have a company with thousands or tens of thousands of employees it would be great if we had some kind of a way to look up employees or if we needed a skill set we could search inside of SharePoint looking for certain skill sets and then being able to see a company directory with those individuals that have those skill sets that's assuming we're using the social networking aspect of SharePoint so going back to our story with the elephant and three blind men if we had a person that was just using SharePoint for collaboration they would think that's what SharePoint is it's a collaboration tool we're working on a proposal we're all going to collaborate on this proposal using the services and applications in SharePoint while a second person who works at the company that's all using it for content management and revision control is likely to give the opinion that SharePoint is a document management system where a third person who is choosing the social networking aspect that their company might have the opinion that SharePoint is like a social media application where SharePoint can be used as a social network for the enterprise experience to help you track down co-workers or locate people with various expertise within the organization and this is only a partial list of the functionality we also have what many people might think when they think of SharePoint is like a website Factory for your internal company because we all know how easy it is to access a website so maybe we have a company called Acme Incorporated so we create a website just for acne Incorporated and that can be very useful if every employee knows the URL to get to the website for Acme Incorporated that's being provided by SharePoint then they can post and have information on that website documents lists applications etc that internal employees for that organization can go ahead and use and one of the cool things about a SharePoint is that if we have an internal group let's say we have Human Resources and engineering and sales we could have separate pages on our website for each of those departments or with SharePoint we can also create what are referred to as sub sites for each one of those so we can have a separate sub site for Human Resources a separate sub site for engineering a separate sub site for sales and then this parent or what they call a root site for Acme incorporated as a whole and in SharePoint they refer to this as a site hmm what's a great name for this collection of sites they refer to it as a site collection and a site collection is an example of one of the many apps or functionalities that's provided by SharePoint and it's really easy to spin up and modify and manage your sites right through SharePoint so once again if we ask somebody who had worked only with the web aspect of SharePoint and we ask them hey what's SharePoint they might tell us hey share points awesome you can create useful self-service internal portals and intranets and websites for departments or for the company it's a fast and easy way to create internal websites for each department if you want that and then going beyond that there's also the ability to have custom applications that are written inside the framework of SharePoint and we can put that under the category of business applications as well as business intelligence with the concept there being if we have tons of data that's in SharePoint we can aggregate and analyze and look at that data that's being stored as part of the SharePoint infrastructure and then use that to make better business decisions regarding our company and the business apps aren't just restricted to apps that you customize and develop on your own there's also app stores just like for iOS and for Android you go to the App Store and you download an app there are literally thousands of apps that are pre-built that you can simply plug in to the SharePoint platform so going back to the question of how it's used it's used for any or all of these features that a company might want to use to benefit their business and it's accessed via a browser which reduces the need to have individual separate client components for all the platforms that customers may be using to access that information and for the last question regarding where is SharePoint hopefully it's accessible wherever the client needs it but regarding the actual server the sharepoint server or servers there's basically two options and those two options are number one you can have it local and here's what local refers to the IT department the IT group gets a machine it could be a physical machine or a virtual machine or a set of machines and they install all the software that makes SharePoint go which includes the Windows operating system in our case that'd be 2016 server they would also have installed iis which is the web services portion from Microsoft they would also have installed sequel server from Microsoft that's working on the back end in a SharePoint environment and then another product called the SharePoint itself the SharePoint Server software so all of those components working together are being used to deliver SharePoint services or for those individuals who either don't have the expertise to do it or don't want to take the time and effort to do it we can also purchase the services of SharePoint in the cloud and let's refer to as SharePoint online so if we look at the two terms we have SharePoint Server which implies that we have a local installation of our own server our own iis our own sequel server and our own sharepoint server software installed on our own systems or sharepoint online where we're simply using a browser and accessing the SharePoint services over the internet from a cloud provider which could be microsoft itself or one of Microsoft's partners that's offering this as a cloud-based service and for companies that are using office 365 the cloud-based services for the office products Word Excel PowerPoint etc the office 365 is already tightly integrated with SharePoint Online so what's interesting is that many corporate clients that are using office 365 those clients are already using many of the SharePoint services they may not even know that it's called quote unquote SharePoint they just see it as part of their office 365 experience in this nugget we covered three basic things regarding SharePoint number one what is it number two how is it used and three where is it is it local on-premise or is it sharepoint online and as a result of enjoying our time together in this nugget now if we get the question hey what is a sharepoint we now have some options regarding some of the features and functions that sharepoint can provide and then it's up to the individual companies of which of those features they choose to use hey I'm glad that you joined me for this nugget I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing

Channel: Keith Barker

Views: 23,974

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Id: O0Mdagx3kME

Length: 10min 15sec (615 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 08 2017