There are a lot of applications, services, and platforms that help users work together in a team by collaborating data and projects fluently. Within the standalone application called “Word” itself, there are many features that can help you share your document with others, edit it in real time together, and other such capabilities. Office 365 is also rich with sharing and collaborating features. But if you want a really robust collaboration tool and platform to effectively work in a large team, there is nothing better than SharePoint from Microsoft.
SharePoint Online
The first thing to understand that it is a web-based platform that includes a lot of things, including SharePoint server and it is different than Office 365. In simple terms, it is a way to manage the hierarchies of site collections, libraries, and other web-based technologies. It is often divided into three systems: Newsfeed, OneDrive, and sits.
SharePoint is also available as a standalone or as a part of Office 365 suite.
Similarities between SharePoint and Office 365:
- They are both designed to work seamlessly with Office applications, like Outlook, Word, and Excel.
- They can be installed on on-premises (local machines) or in the cloud
- SharePoint is included in Office 365 or can also be purchased as standalone
- Several features in Office 365 also allows storing documents and searching, but SharePoint also does the same in better and more complex ways.
What is SharePoint Server?
SharePoint sever is the main part of the SharePoint services. It is offered by Microsoft as part of the SharePoint to store your data in an organize way. It was originally offered in three different editions: Standard, Enterprise, and Foundation. The foundation edition, which was free, was discontinued by Microsoft in 2016, leaving it only with two edition types: Standard and Enterprise.
The Enterprise edition of SharePoint server includes all the features of ‘Standard,’ but has additional services mainly suited for large scale IT departments.
The SharePoint server is installed on the premises, that is, the IT infrastructure of the company.
What All You Can Do with SharePoint?
Here are some of the features and services offered under the SharePoint license:
For Collaboration:
It allows teams to work together and collaborate on various documents, tasks, lists, sites, and blogs in a fluid and harmonious way. You can implement workflows and share information with your team quickly.
Portals:
One of the very important service of SharePoint is the ‘Portal,’ which is the way to centralize the access to all the information and content within the organization. It allows creating a customized MySite Portal based on the users’ profile.
Search:
Once you have a very large infrastructure, searching for content can become complicated. The Enterprise Search feature makes searching for anything quick and easy.
Workflows:
You can create workflows and share them with your team in a matter of minutes. It can include forms to automate the work inside the company and streamline the process.
SharePoint is a very large and complicated service that includes plenty of options to users to make the collaboration and sharing efficient within the organization. It has several unique capabilities that you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere. In later articles, we will get in depth of some of these features to help you understand how to make the best out of it.