What is the point of Sharepoint?

Question

My company have started to use Sharepoint. Now as a software developer I simply can not understand the advantages of such a system. To me it just looks like a browser based application through which you access/edit files; has windows not allowed this for 20 + years? I can understand it is an intranet for messages etc. so why not just a normal website? Why would someone choose it? On top of all that, it only seems to work in IE (ActiveX I'm guessing) so its restrictive as well.

Please enlighten me.

Answer 1

SharePoint provides organizations with a web-based platform for content management, information-sharing, communication, collaboration, and much more.

Why use SharePoint?

1. As an organisation grows so does the quantity of its files. It soon becomes difficult to keep track of the multiplying documents and their locations. SharePoint overcomes this by allowing you to store and locate your files in a central site. Files can also be located through searches of the SharePoint enterprise portal.
2. Today’s work occurs over multiple locations, whether it is in different countries, office locations, separate departments or at your home office. SharePoint enables teams and individuals to connect and collaborate together regardless of where they are located.
3. SharePoint allows anyone to create sites for use within their department, as they are needed, whether they are departmental sites, document libraries, meetings sites, survey sites, or discussion boards

A software developer should be consumed daily in the best way of helping the company meet it's objectives not setting up a team site because Sales wants to but rather building Silverlight or ASP .NET or WinPhones application to helps sales sell the widgets.

Answer 2

It is Microsoft's attempt at a Content Management System, where you can route, approve and share documents. It also serves as portal to other "nice" Microsoft products like "MS-Project" You get what you pay for though...

Answer 3

As told in the wiki and tutorials, SharePoint is based totally in .net platform, that means you have the freedom to develop what's in there and to make it on your own in a very smart way. Tutorials with asp.net and sharepoint integration are very useful.

And another tip, just think that you have a database in the background that catches all your users moves and you don't have to care about this, sharepoint is made to deal with this easily.

I have developed in SharePoint and it was a very useful experience.

Answer 4

To add to Otavio's comment, in the corporate intranet world, it is really useful as a replacement for an old fashioned fileserver:

• Storage of artifacts, especially MS Office files, also scanned images, photos etc
• Tagging of artifacts with metadata
• Permission controlled access to content
• Versioning
• Searching through content
• Workflow
• WebDav support (so sites and lists can appear as a file directory to a WebDav client)
• For developers, Sharepoint provides APIs (OM, Web Services, CAML etc) and SmartParts. The internal storage of Sharepoint is on SQL
• It also provides all the common CMS - Wikis, Forums etc.

Answer 5

It was only for IE but that has changed in Sharepoint 2010. No activex as far as Im aware. Its a collaborative environment, like a file server ++. The best description I can think of is Intranet in a box. A non-technical user can set up an Extranet fairly quickly (and potentially very badly)

Advantages over a file server are:

• Can share documents, images, information outside of corporate network
• Full Content management
• Publish lists of data etc (sort of like a web version of MS Access)
• Customisable home page with widgets etc to create an information 'Dashboard'
• Full search indexing across all documents and content

For .NET developers its pretty easy to create mashups to bring in corporate data into the mix, write widgets etc.

On the negative side, most people do not use Sharepoint to it's fulll potential and without a lot of work you are pigeon-holed into the Sharepoint look and feel which can get dreary pretty quickly.

Answer 6

SharePoint is an excellent platform, but if used in the right context. I myself have learnt this the hard way. The core elements of SharePoint like content and asset management, user management, as well as version control are some of the excellent "out of the box" elements of the platform.

However, be warned, customisation on any level is costly and time consuming. You will need to work hard to understand how much longer things may take you when programming against the platform and to be honest this can only really be achieved with exposure and experience with the product yourself.

Another thing to consider -- and again I learnt this the hard way -- is customer expectation. Make sure, if you are selling a 'quick' Sharepoint solution (i.e. everything out of the box, quickly reskinned and deployed for a company) that you educate the consumer as to exactly what to expect - i.e. the fundamental behaviours and patterns of the system, else you (and they!) may be sorely disappointed and unhappy. There is nothing worse than a customer turning around and saying 'that's not how I imagined it would work' because then comes the obvious 'I want to change that to this' and that's where the cost will fly up immediately with the time and resource needed to amend the solution, meaning their 'cheap' solution suddenly gets very costly indeed!

Good luck.

Answer 7

SharePoint is a collaboration platform and a content management system. It is also has a very powerful search crawling indexer. Combine those with what everyone else has said and you open a lot of possibilities for enterprise use cases.

It has a ton of plumbing code everyone takes for granted. Even down to something as simple CRUD operations for data.

If somene approached you and said I want to have a data and document repository that I can have full control over and connect with my office suite(word,excel,powerpoint,etc.) and I want to be able to build my own reports and share with my colleages. Oh and I want to manage permissions myself, and it needs to have a robust search function.

That'd be a TON of custom development, with sharepoint that can be setup and transitioned to the end user with zero custom code written in an extremely short amount of time.

A great site to get ideas for use cases is www.endusersharepoint.com