What you need to know about SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001,SharePoint has historically been associated with intranet content management and document management, but recent versions have significantly broader capabilities.

SharePoint comprises a multipurpose set of web technologies which are useful for many organizations, backed by a common technical infrastructure. By default, SharePoint has a Microsoft Office-like interface, and it is closely integrated with the Office suite. The web tools are designed to be usable by non-technical users. SharePoint can be used to provide intranet portals, document & file management,collaboration, social networks, extranets, websites, enterprise search, and business intelligence. It also has capabilities around system integration, process integration, and workflow automation.

Enterprise application software (e.g. ERP or CRM packages) often provide some SharePoint integration capability, and SharePoint also incorporates a complete development stack based on web technologies and standards-based APIs. As an application platform, SharePoint provides central management, governance, and security controls for implementation of these requirements. The SharePoint platform integrates directly into IIS - enabling bulk management, scaling, and provisioning of servers, as is often required by large organizations or cloud hosting providers.

In 2008, the Gartner Group put SharePoint in the "leaders" quadrant in three of its Magic Quadrants (for search, portals, and enterprise content management).SharePoint is used by 78% of Fortune 500 companies. Between 2006 to 2011, Microsoft sold over 36.5 million user licenses.

Microsoft has two versions of SharePoint available at no cost, but it sells premium editions with additional functionality, and provides a cloud service edition as part of their Office 365 platform (previously BPOS).

Microsoft's SharePoint marketing refers to the "SharePoint Wheel" to help describe what SharePoint's tools can facilitate inside organizations. The wheel refers to six outcomes:

Sites: A site is a contextual work environment. Once SharePoint is configured, these sites can be created without any requirement for specialized knowledge. A context for a site may be organization-wide, or it may be specific to an individual team or group.

Communities: A community is a place where communication and understanding happens. Communities can occur around any context, and will typically develop around either shared knowledge, or shared activities (such as collaboration).

Content: SharePoint provides management of documents and work items that need to be stored, found, collaborated on, updated, managed, documented, archived, traced or restored - in accordance with relevant compliance or governance policies.

Search: Look for relevant communities, content, people, or sites: search is based on keywords, refinement, and content analysis.

Insights: Information from any part of the organization can be surfaced inside useful contexts, providing information that can improve effectiveness.

Composites: SharePoint enables no-code integration of data, documents and processes to provide composite applications ("mash-ups" based on internal data).

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