SharePoint Tale

SharePoint now is a factor in the life, every day millions of hits happens to a SharePoint farm (term used to define and environment running SharePoint technology).

In this blog I will talk about SharePoint explaining what is it, how it can help your business, will discuss about life of SharePoint gurus, the available communities/events and some interesting links that can help you ignite your company with the power of SharePoint.

 

SharePoint Facts 

  1. SharePoint has a 100+ million users base.
  2. 66% enterprise penetration, fastest growth application.
  3. 2 out of 3 enterprise workers deals with SharePoint.
  4. 80 % of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint.

 

SharePoint History

SharePoint is Microsoft product Launched in 2001, SharePoint was born from projects codenamed "Office Server". 

It went through different versions: 

  1. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001.
  2. Microsoft SharePoint Team Services (2002).
  3. Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
  4. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
  5. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
  6. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.
  7. Next SharePoint release is announced for 2016 by Jeff Teper (the Corporate Vice President of Office Service and Servers group at Microsoft).

 I am involved in the early adopter program once I am allowed to speak about the product as I am under NDA I will start writing some blogs about it !!

 

SharePoint Capabilities 

Microsoft SharePoint standard license provides key product areas which are:

  1. Sites: building team sites and several other templates to collaborate and share documents.
  2. Communities: MySites (personal profiles including skills management, and search tools), enterprise wikis, organization hierarchy browser, tags and notes, recently Yammer is replacing part of the communities features.
  3. Content: provides compliance for document & record management, managed metadata, word automation services, content type management.
  4. Search: search results, search customization abilities, mobile search, Faceted Search and metadata.
  5. Composites: Workflows and BCS for line of business.

 Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise is extending SharePoint Standard with extra features includes:

  • Search thumbnails and previews and better search results.
  • BI Integration and Dashboards.
  • Microsoft Office Access, Visio, Excel and InfoPath Forms services.

 

How it can help the business?

Share: Connect with employees across the enterprise - use SharePoint to engage with people, share ideas and reinvent the way you work together.

Organize: Whether working as a team or an individual, SharePoint helps you organize information, people and projects

Discover: SharePoint makes it easy to find answers, discover insights and connect with experts.

Build: Developers and web designers can create new experiences on SharePoint using familiar tools and internet standards.

Manage: SharePoint provides powerful controls that allow IT departments to manage cost, risk and their time.

 Customer success stories

  

SharePoint Life

 This is an interesting piece that all SharePoint gurus in the world have the same passion about this product, some call themselves SharePointers, they are bounded together with a unique bound which is SharePoint through different ways one major gathering is called the SharePoint Saturdays Events www.spsevents.org which is a city event, each city can create a group where there are some SharePointers responsible of organizing free 1 day event that happens in Saturdays and it is a must to be Saturday, so imagine in one Saturday several events can happen all over the world.

There are a lot of communities/forums and free events:

SharePoint 2013 TechNet forum

SharePoint 2013 General TechNet forum

SharePoint 2013 development TechNet forum

SharePoint 2013 search TechNet forum

Collab365 event

Unity Connect event

SharePoint Community

ITUnity

 

 Important conferences:

SharePoint Evolution

European SharePoint

  

SharePoint Jump Start

 

There are a lot of resources available free for you over the Internet either through Microsoft itself or through SharePointers blogs , I will list here references where you can learn about SharePoint whether you are user, power user, business owner, administrator or developer.

SharePoint Product

SharePoint blog

SharePoint for IT Pros

SharePoint for developers

SharePoint Twitter

SharePoint over Channel 9

SharePoint over Microsoft Virtual Academy

SharePoint over TechNet Wiki for developers

SharePoint over TechNet Wiki for IT Pro

SharePoint User Groups

 

Written by: John Naguib

Solution Architect, Wiki Ninja Blogger, SharePoint Expert and Speaker

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