Microsoft Sharepoint is the fastest growing software product (in terms of revenue) in Microsoft’s history. Sharepoint licenses are selling like hotcakes to companies of all sizes. And Steve Ballmer calls Sharepoint the cornerstone of Microsoft’s business strategy.
Sharepoint’s main purpose is to quickly create internal sites. For example, a site for a department, project or event. The main tasks that such a site solves are:
- publishing news, announcements, calendar;
- file sharing (with version control);
- Discussion of various issues and materials published on the web pages.
Sharepoint allows you to flexibly customize access rights to sites and files to ensure security.
In addition to the usual web pages with comments and files, Sharepoint allows you to create forums and blogs, calendars and tasks (with Gantt Chart) – but it clumsily replaces/complements the calendar and tasks in Outlook.
In general, Sharepoint is a development platform, which means it can be added, customized, integrated. I.e. all of the above concerns the default functionality of Sharepoint.
Each Sharepoint user has a profile – a personal page with a photo and personal data. On this page you can find the person’s relations with other employees – for example, who works with him in the department. Sharepoint search allows you to find not only content, but also such pages of people. This is useful when you don’t know who in the company to ask for an answer to your question.
In addition, Sharepoint is integrated with MS Office Communications Server and wherever a person’s name is displayed, you can see their online status and, if necessary, call them via messenger.
In Sharepoint you can customize entire business processes that are initiated when filling out a form. For example, if someone has entered a credit application into the form, a document-application is automatically generated with the data from the form, it is sent to the responsible employee for verification, after verification – to the manager for approval, after approval – a notification is automatically sent to the person who filled out the form.
Records are, for example, messenger messages, or forum posts, or e-notes – in general, unstructured information that usually does not appear in management systems, but can be very useful for the company. So, Sharepoint knows how to search for such records and carefully archive them so that they can be used normally.
Sharepoint can take data from excel files, databases, online sources and create various analytical reports.