This article is the first part of the "Learning SharePoint" series. The purpose of this series is to help the reader understand SharePoint and boost their knowledge from a beginner to that of a SharePoint developer.

Here are the basic points which I am going to cover in this article.

What is SharePoint?

Wikipedia defines SharePoint as "A web-based, collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies substantially between organizations".

Microsoft describes SharePoint like this: "Organizations use SharePoint to create websites. You can use it as a secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from any device. All you need is a web browser, such as Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox." (Definition source).

The definition of SharePoint may differ from person to person. If you ask me to define SharePoint, then I would define SharePoint as, "A web-based platform which allows a user to build a CMS-based website and manage their contents without having knowledge of HTML, JavaScript and CSS". Now managing the content includes creating content, searching the content, and many more operations.

History and Evaluation of SharePoint

The history of SharePoint is quite simple and straightforward. Microsoft has evolved SharePoint from time to time. The first product of SharePoint was launched in 2001. And then later in 2003, Microsoft came up with a new version. Let's have a look at the history of SharePoint and its feature enhancements.

For more references on the history, you can read here.

Basic comparison of SharePoint and other web development platforms

There are many web-based platforms available that provide the functionality to develop a website just using web browsers. A few of them are WordPress, Joomla, and many other CMS websites. Some are premium and some are free. SharePoint is also one of them. SharePoint can be considered as a great CMS that allows the user to build and control the website and its content without having knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In other words, SharePoint allows the user to manage content on the website without having any technical knowledge.

As compared to other CMS websites, SharePoint provides much better control over the contents and security of the contents. Some of the functionalities that SharePoint provides is versioning to the contents, content approval, fast search, permission management, user management, and many more features.

How to decide whether to go with SharePoint?

When it comes to choosing between SharePoint and another web-based platform, it becomes a tough call to decide to choose SharePoint. Let me simplify the choice(*).

(*) Every organization has its own reason to choose SharePoint. Here I am describing if I have to make a choice then why I will choose SharePoint.

Due to following reasons, I will choose SharePoint:

And it has many more such facilities. You can refer to the following links to learn more:

The basic architecture of SharePoint

SharePoint is built on the top of Microsoft .NET framework. Every web page in SharePoint will end up with the extension *.aspx. So the architecture of SharePoint is based on the .NET framework. Below is the architecture of SharePoint.

Sharepoint
Image Source: http://www.enjoysharepoint.com/pic/SharePoint-2013-architecture.png

Architecture explained

As per the architecture, please follow the below-given instructions to set up SharePoint.

Types of SharePoint

There are basically 3 types of SharePoint.

  1. SharePoint Foundation: SharePoint Foundation is a free downloadable installation and represents the foundational parts of SharePoint. You will just need to have Windows Server OS. For features refer https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sharepoint/sharepoint_types.htm
  2. SharePoint Server: SharePoint Server offers a wealth of features that expand upon those offered in SharePoint Foundation. It provides a richer, more advanced collection of features that you can utilize in your organization’s solutions. For more details, you can refer here: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sharepoint/sharepoint_types.htm
  3. SharePoint Online: It is SharePoint’s Cloud version. It provides cloud-based solutions. You just need to pay per the number of users. You do not have to worry about upgrading SharePoint, Microsoft handles that on its own. For more details refer here: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/sharepoint/sharepoint_types.htm

Components of SharePoint

Components of SharePoint include

  1. SharePoint Farm
  2. Web Application
  3. Site Collections
  4. Sites and Subsites
  5. WebParts
  6. List and Libraries
  7. Search
  8. Site Pages
  9. Users and Groups
  10. Permissions
  11. Workflows
  12. Branding
  13. And many more

So in this article, I tried to cover the basics of SharePoint. I hope this will be helpful to someone who is pretty new to SharePoint and wants to start learning SharePoint. If you are a SharePoint person, and you think that I have missed or provided some improper information then please let me know in the comments section.

The links to my next articles are

  1. Part-II: Learn about SharePoint Web Application
  2. Part-III: Learn about SharePoint Site Collections

You can refer to it.