A Guide to Using Sharepoint

Sharepoint is a powerful server-based platform that allows businesses to share documents between different applications. If someone wanted to be cynical, then they could say that SharePoint is essentially a website that is hosted under Microsoft branding, but that is no longer a truly honest explanation. There is more to SharePoint than that.

SharePoint offers the appearance of a single destination for information that can then be accessed by other partners and customers, but there’s more to it than that. It’s a single source for information, yes, but it provides more ways to access it, and it provides good user access control, to ensure that only the right people get access to the documents on the platform. The challenge is not so much that using SharePoint is difficult, but that the platform has yet to carve out a clear niche, so while people understand how to use it, they often wonder why their office is not just using a Dropbox installation or Office 365 to achieve much the same goals.

Using SharePoint to Share Files and Information

Files in SharePoint are shared using the Document Library, the reason that SharePoint is often thought of as a CMS is because of the Document Library. This library is a network-accessible location which acts as a portal for accessing documents. Microsoft wants to move people towards using OneDrive for simple document sharing, and OneDrive for business is slowly adding the main features that people turn to SharePoint for.

Portals

The main reason to use SharePoint is for Portals. These are a set of tools that allow developers and designers to make portals, which can host, share and index multimedia content. The ease with which portals can be deployed by power users is a valuable part of SharePoint.

SharePoint and the Enterprise Search Centre

The Enterprise Search Center feature was added to SharePoint in 2007, and while it is still going strong it may well be retired in favour of Delve, which is the new name for what was originally codenamed Oslo. Delve offers a number of useful features to improve search. The Office Graph functionality, for example, offers a rich set of associations. The ESC offers some powerful features as well – searches can be conducted to cover both the web and on-premise, and a newly developed hybrid index will offer both sets of results, saving time and offering improved details in search.

Content Management

As the Office 365 brand is taking over a lot of what makes SharePoint popular, there are some features that are remaining squarely in SharePoint territory, one such feature is that of the content management system and the Business Intelligence tools. Office 365 is attempting to secure itself as the service for content and for core customer-facing functions, while SharePoint’s Business Intelligence will be the main reason to use it. SharePoint is focusing on an on-premises Server Edition, and with rapid releases and constant itterations, it will be interesting to see what the future holds for the system.