What is SharePoint?

SharePoint has evolved from 2001 to 2010 and it strongly raised to top by including lot of features over those periods. This is mainly created for managing the Contents and documents effectively. If you want for evolution of SharePoint, I’ll add that in future articles. Now I’ll give you my thoughts on What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is commonly we can say it is a framework / platform. Using this we can share and manage lot of contents, documents, users, sites and also we can communicate with other persons with in Groups, Teams, even external Users.

I said SharePoint is a framework : Yes, this is a framework for building the web based collaboration applications, which is extended by including lot of services available from Microsoft. Microsoft has lot of products and they provided API’s for connecting with those Products. For ex, If we want to connect with External Data Source, SharePoint now has a Business Connectivity Services. This service which has inbuilt API’s to manage the connection between the SharePoint and External Source and helps to access the data’s from the External Source.

So, SharePoint is just a framework, which was built on top of Windows Server, IIS, .Net Framework, ASP.Net, SQL Server and extended by lot of services. The Framework has the xml type of definitions for Sites, Lists ( intermediate area for storing and managing the contents, documents in SQL Server Database ), Columns and pages for managing the SharePoint.

This is mainly concentrated on the Intranet based applications for organizations, but we can use this for building public facing websites. Microsoft currently release this a three type of Products.

Microsoft SharePoint foundation 2010
Has a Framework and limited service applications
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Standard
This is built on top of SharePoint Foundation and this is extended by including lot of services.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise
This is built on top of both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint 2010 Standard and extended by including some more services with additional features included to existing services.

I will add more points to services available in each addition in future posts.

Shantha Kumar
Shantha Kumar
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