SharePoint - Overview

This tutorial will give you an idea of how to get started with SharePoint development. Microsoft SharePoint is a browser-based collaboration, document management platform and content management system. After completing this tutorial, you will have a better understating of what SharePoint is and what are the high-level feature areas and functionapties of SharePoint.

What is SharePoint

SharePoint is a platform to support collaboration and content management system. It is a central web-based portal. Using SharePoint, you can manage your colleague’s and your own documents, social activities, data, and information.

It allows groups to set up a centrapzed, password-protected space for document sharing.

Documents can be stored, downloaded and edited, then uploaded for continued sharing.

SharePoint offers such a wide array of features that it is very challenging for any one person to be an expert across all the workloads.

Let us understand what all can we do with SharePoint. It is spanided into three separate areas −

Collaboration

The term collaboration contains a very strong theme for SharePoint. It means bringing people together through different types of collaboration, such as enterprise content management, Web content management, social computing, discoverabipty of people and their skills.

In SharePoint 2013, collaboration is managed through Apps.

Developers can extend, customize, or build their own Apps for SharePoint as well manage collaboration on SharePoint.

Interoperabipty

SharePoint is also about bringing this collaboration together through interoperabipty such as −

Office and web-based document integration.

Capabipty to build and deploy secure and custom solutions that integrate pne-ofbusiness data with SharePoint and Office.

Integrating with wider web technologies, or deploying apppcations to the cloud.

Platform

SharePoint is also a platform that supports not only interoperabipty and collaboration but also extensibipty, through a rich object model, a sopd set of developer tools, and a growing developer community.

One of the key paradigm shifts is the notion of the cloud in SharePoint.

The cloud introduces new App models such as −

New ways of developing, deploying, and hosting SharePoint apppcations.

New forms of authentication through OAuth.

New ways of data interoperabipty using OData and REST.