What is Microsoft SharePoint? [closed]

Answer 1

SharePoint is the reason I'm considering taking advantage of a suicide booth.

In all seriousness, the rest of the answers are spot on. The differences between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 commonly trip people up ("why pay for MOSS when WSS is free?" for example). SharePoint is a very complex and rich product that is integrated into other Microsoft applications, like Project Server 2007 and Team Foundation Server.

Why should you care about it? It depends. There are quite a few opportunities out there for experienced SharePoint developers and administrators. It can very quickly become the singular focus of your career if you decide to put a lot of effort into learning it.

Answer 2

Sharepoint, MS OFFICE proxy circa 2003...

remember when you emailed a copy of that word doc out to the whole company, that's what sharepoint is for, but apparently you missed the introductory gotomeeting training course.

Answer 3

I think in this case Wikipedia have it right

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is the basic part of Microsoft SharePoint, offering collaboration and document management functionality by means of web portals, by providing a centralized repository for shared documents, as well as browser-based management and administration of them. It allows creation of Document libraries, which are collections of files that can be shared for collaborative editing. SharePoint provides access control and revision control for documents in a library.

In a nutshell Sharepoint is all about corporative management and collaboration features. Your company have a Windows 2003 server? Here you go. WSS 3.0 is here up and running.

Answer 4

Very good points so far but I'll try my best to add something. :)

SharePoint is not just 2 technologies. It is a set of products and technologies brought together by Microsoft into one immense product that comes in 2 flavors. The 2 flavors are Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). MOSS does come in standard and enterprise.

[Some of the technologies used in SharePoint: Windows Workflow Foundation, ASP.NET, Web Parts, XML (included XPath, XSLT, etc), SQL, Web Services - to name a few I can think of off the top of my head]

No matter the version you choose, SharePoint allows for web-based capabilities to allow users to create, organize, distribute, and maintain information. Because of this, the most common uses for SharePoint sites are intranets and project/team sites.

SharePoint also has incredible possibilities as an application platform. Looking at the web part and workflow pieces alone you can begin to realize the potential. For example, automation of authorization processes within an organization can quickly be developed without any code using SharePoint Designer. (FYI: more complex workflows would require Visual Studio but many simple workflows can be designed using the point and click functionality of SharePoint Designer)

While MOSS only extends upon the WSS, it does add a large amount of functionality that can be very important and useful to a business. Some of the more important features available in MOSS and not in WSS are: records management, document retention and auditing policies, browser based forms (InfoPath forms without installing InfoPath on client machine), and some of the business intelligence capabilities. Amazingly we're seeing interest in the social networking features of MOSS too. (easy to read list of features not in WSS that MOSS has)

Why is SharePoint used? I was doing some research not to long ago on this exact subject and I found a research study that cited 5 key benefits:

1. Ease of information access
2. Streamlined internal communication
3. Increased end-user productivity
4. Optimized document management practices
5. IT time savings

Sorry if that turned into a bit of a ramble.

Answer 5

Previous answers describe what sharepoint is, but don't do a good job describing why it's popular. Yes, it gives you all that neat doc-management stuff out of the box. Yes, it integrates tightly with Office.

The OOB features are 1/10th of the whole story. Sharepoint exposes a comprehensive .Net object model that lets you customize the thing to your hearts content. People are coding amazing things with MOSS 2007. With the object model, you can build and customize sites via code, in response to external events. You can write custom "web-parts" (controls hosted on special pages) that consume both internal (sharepoint) and external data.

Check out Sharepoint Blogs to see what people are doing with it.

Answer 6

It's a collaboration website. All of the members on a team can update a single calendar and upload shared documents to a single repository.