Microsoft SharePoint is a document management and collaboration platform that helps a company manage archives, documents, reports and other content that is vital to its business processes. SharePoint’s enterprise content management capabilities are helpful to organizations in all industries and in any department within an organization.
SharePoint is configured using a web browser. It provides most of its capabilities via a web user interface (UI) and web applications. SharePoint is used to manipulate content and site structure, create and delete sites, enable and disable product features, configure basic workflows and manage analytics.
SharePoint 2019 is the latest version of the application. SharePoint is part of the Office 365 suite, where it is known as SharePoint Online. Microsoft also offers an on-premises version for organizations that prefer to keep their data in-house for compliance or security reasons.
Notable features in SharePoint include:
SharePoint 2016 was focused on traditional document management. With SharePoint 2019, Microsoft eliminated some collaboration, social media and enterprise search functions that are now included in Office 365. Those functions include the following:
Microsoft is focusing much of its development roadmap on SharePoint Online. However, it will continue to release on-premises versions because customers may have compliance requirements that require maintaining certain data on premises or because they cannot migrate all their data to the cloud.
Other features that were removed from the SharePoint 2016 server include the following:
The following features were deprecated or removed in SharePoint Server 2019:
SharePoint 2019 includes architectural deployment models that were introduced with SharePoint 2016 as part of Microsoft’s move to make SharePoint a cloud-first offering. Microsoft said with SharePoint 2019, it aimed to improve many of the cloud-first technologies introduced in 2016.
For example, SharePoint 2013 and previous editions relied on service deployments to patch problem servers. SharePoint 2016 had MinRole, a streamlined topology that has a server in a SharePoint farm that runs an explicit set of services based on its role and has no other services turned on. This enables more flexibility, easy fixes and quick updates to each server resulting in faster and more reliable service. SharePoint uses the MinRole farm topology in SharePoint Server 2019 and Online.
At their core, SharePoint’s architectural deployment models are largely the same as when they were introduced in 2016. There are four architectural models for SharePoint 2019.
SharePoint Online. SharePoint is delivered using a software-as-a-service subscription model. Microsoft provides updates automatically, but customers are responsible for SharePoint management.
SharePoint on premises. Customers maintain control over all the planning, deployments, maintenance and customizations of their SharePoint environments within their own data centers.
SharePoint has existed in one form or another since 2001. It has grown to more than 200 million users within 250,000 organizations. There have been nine SharePoint versions released since 2001, with SharePoint 2010 Enterprise being the first enterprise-based offering.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 was launched in 2010 with close integration with Microsoft Office and Active Directory. The benefits of SharePoint 2010 included the ability to quickly develop and build websites without programming knowledge. Such websites could be used to manage collaboration tools such as document libraries, discussion boards, shared task lists, shared calendars, blogs, wikis and surveys.
SharePoint 2013 was released as a collaboration platform for customized webpages in November 2012.
The initial release of SharePoint 2013 offered a simplified user experience, as well as new enterprise social media capabilities. Those features expanded upon previously offered capabilities for website management, including shared calendars, blogs, wikis, surveys, document libraries and shared task lists.
SharePoint 2013 also launched with a community forum for users to communicate with each other and categorize discussions. It included a microblogging capability and enhanced search capabilities, as well as e-discovery functionality, claims-based authentication and mobile support. The BI tools in SharePoint 2013 enabled users to organize goals and processes and create customizable data models, reports and dashboards.
SharePoint Server 2016 has the same code as SharePoint Online. As a result, on-premises customers have the same support and performance capabilities for their SharePoint server farms thanks to a few architecture changes.
SharePoint 2019 is the latest version. It brings more cloud-based features to the SharePoint Server and hybrid architecture types of the application.
While Microsoft SharePoint is a market leader in document collaboration and management, many other cloud-based competitors have entered the market, including Box, DropBox and Google Drive. Beyond document management, the collaboration software industry has grown, with new players gaining traction, including Salesforce Slack and Chatter and Aurea Jive.
In response, in 2017, Microsoft released its own collaboration tool, Teams, to complement SharePoint 2016. Teams is still used in conjunction with SharePoint today. Vendors such as Sitecore, Atlassian Confluence and WordPress all compete with SharePoint in the web content management market.
SharePoint integrates with a number of different collaboration tools. However, some businesses may find alternatives more useful, especially for easier migration to the cloud. Learn 7 alternatives to Microsoft SharePoint.
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