Learn SharePoint In Series - Part One - Introduction

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?
• History of SharePoint
• Evaluation of SharePoint
• Basic Comparison of SharePoint and Other Web Development Platforms
• How to decide whether to go with SharePoint
• The basic architecture of SharePoint
• Types of SharePoint
• Components of SharePoint

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.

• SharePoint 2001: Microsoft SharePoint 2001 was officially called SharePoint Portal Server 2001. It has the functionality of document management and enterprise search with SharePoint Team services to work in collaboration.
• SharePoint 2003: Microsoft SharePoint 2003 was officially called Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003. This time Microsoft released Windows SharePoint Server as part of Windows Server 2003. It had an improved user interface, better personalization, and a collaboration store.
• SharePoint 2007: Microsoft SharePoint 2007 was officially called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007(MOSS). Also, it came up with many fixes for Microsoft SharePoint portal 2003. A few more services were introduced such as Business Data Connectivity, Infopath Form Services site columns, content types, etc.
• SharePoint 2010: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 was officially called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. With this version, SharePoint Foundation was also released. New authentication functionality was also added.
• SharePoint 2013: Microsoft SharePoint 2013 was officially called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. This product came up with an entirely new design package. It had a new master page as compared to SharePoint's previous versions. The most significant changes that Microsoft has made to SharePoint 2013 have been done to adapt the SharePoint platform for hosted environments in the cloud, such as SharePoint Online in the Office 365 environment. This is a big change for developers because the SharePoint platform has been split in two. There is the older, familiar SharePoint platform in scenarios in which a company has deployed SharePoint on-premises.
• SharePoint 2016: Microsoft SharePoint 2016 was officially called Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016. Key improvements include hybrid mode, improved mobile navigation, large file support, and extended support for special characters in filenames, and SharePoint Server 2016 now provides the same data loss prevention capabilities as Office 365.

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

Basic comparison of SharePoint and other web development platforms