Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint makes it easier for people to work together. It enables organisations to connect and empower people through an integrated set of rich features.

SharePoint facilitates business collaboration in its broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners, and customers to work together in new and effective ways.

As a platform SharePoint is broadly divided into 6 areas:

Sites
SharePoint Sites delivers a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites.
Communities
SharePoint Communities allow people to collaborate in groups, share knowledge and idea, connect with colleagues and find information easily.
Content
SharePoint Content enables all users to participate in a governed, compliant content management lifecycle.
Search
SharePoint Search give users the ability to find the content, information and people they need by combining an integrated, easy-to-manage platform with best-of-breed enterprise search technology.
Insights
SharePoint Insights enables users to access and interact with information across unstructured and structured data sources.
Composites
SharePoint Composites empowers users to rapidly respond to business needs by creating no-code solutions on-premises or in the cloud, through a rich set of building blocks, tools, and self-service capabilities.

How can Core help?
We are one of the UK's leading providers of SharePoint services, including consultancy, development and support.

If you would like to find out more about SharePoint 2010, join us at one of our free SharePoint seminars or contact the Core Team.

What is SharePoint?

Click here to read the full video transcription

In this slideshow I'm going to introduce the concept of SharePoint and explain what it is and how it works using an analogy. So what is SharePoint? Well the Microsoft definition of SharePoint is an integrated suite of server capabilities that improves organizational effectiveness, so not a very good definition by all account so rather that consider that lets consider something else. Lets consider LEGO, so what is LEGO? Well LEGO is a construction set for making models and it comes in 3 forms so we have Duplo for small children, LEGO for slightly older children and Technic normally for their parents.

So if we consider some examples of some LEGO models this is an example of a Duplo model so I believe here we have a fire station and you can see it’s fairly simple and easy to get to grips with, and when your consider your helicopter example here on the top right and once we put the chap in the helicopter we have a finished helicopter so that’s really a 2 step process and then we have our model ready made. We consider an example of a regular LEGO model, here we have a ranch and you can see that now we’ve got a lot more steps to complete, before we have our model assembled. So we have to assemble our house here, with the garage and we have to assemble our vehicle before we can put our vehicle into the garage and we also have to assemble some of the landscape like these trees here.

Now moving on to a Technic model which is more engineering based model we start to see it becomes a lot more complex, so in this model we’ll things like working steering you can see the tires are slightly turned to the right there because we’ll have a working steering mechanism, we may have also suspension and a gearbox so as this model is a lot more complicated than the others.

So what does any of this got to do with SharePoint, well what it has to do with SharePoint is in terms of compatibility, so with LEGO we’ve got 3 different forms of the same product, and because of the way its designed it will all fit together, so for example in this photograph here we have an example of a regular LEGO brick that’s been attached to a Duplo block, similarly we could also put a Technic block on there if we wanted to because its designed to work in that integrated way. And this is much the same as SharePoint, SharePoint being a system of integrated components that cam be as simple or as complex as its required by the organization and fits together much the same way as LEGO does.

So taking the analogy one step further we have before us a street made of LEGO, so we have a shop, two houses and on the end here we have a tea hut, now because this is made out of LEGO, things don’t have to stay where they are, so we can move them around, so for example if I wanted to move the lady of the bench here, I can just move that to the front, perhaps move my house cross to the right, so and then place my bench back next to the shop, there we go. And also perhaps I'm not keen on having a tea hut in my neighborhood so I can just remove that select on it, delete so there we are there's my street now.

We try and do the same in SharePoint works in much the same way and this is an example site for the company Contoso which is a fictitious Microsoft company which make electronic components and this it the homepage here for one of the sections of the sites, so if I now click on side actions edit page, the page opens in edit mode and now I can move things around much the same as I did with my LEGO, so I can move this image here perhaps to the bottom of the page, just by dragging it dropping it, that’s now at the bottom there, the document library I have here which contains stuff, recently uploaded documents I can say perhaps I’d like that to be at the top of the page, so once again I drag and I drop that and it moves accordingly, and exactly like I did with the LEGO and now I can also make changes so where it says welcome to your site I could change that to perhaps welcome to this site, simple as that. And I'm not a web designer and I don’t need a particular web design skills, I'm just editing like I would in an office applications and now I click save and close and now those updates and changes are made.

Similarly as to how I deleted the tea hut, I could delete this image if I wished just by clicking on it. Clicking delete and then that becomes the live site, so that is an example of what SharePoint is how it works and how it’s similar in design to a working with LEGO.