Thing you Should Know about SharePoint in MicroSoft 365

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is web-based collaboration and document management platform. Though highly flexible, it is primarily used to store documents, and communicate information across organizations.

With SharePoint, users can create an intranet (or internal internet system) which works like any other website. Subsites can be created for specific departments or teams. Through this centralized, secure space users can access, share, and edit documents.

What does SharePoint offer?

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.

Some of the features SharePoint offers include:

• External sharing of files and content with people both inside and outside your organization
• Content management features to help organize and manage content using libraries, lists, metadata, records management, and retention policies
• Team sites that provide a place for predetermined groups of users to view and collaborate on content, data, and news
• Communication sites to share and communicate messaging across organizations with customizable, dynamic sub-sites
• Mobile apps to allow users to access intranets, team sites and content on Android, iOS, and Windows devices
• Automate business processes by creating alerts and workflows
• Search functions that help surface relevant people and important content

Who uses SharePoint?

Since SharePoint offers a number of different functionalities, it’s used by a wide range of businesses and organizations of all sizes.

According to Microsoft, more than 250,000 organizations use SharePoint, including over 85% of Fortune 500 companies who use SharePoint Online as part of Office 365.

According to Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, SharePoint is a leader in the market, with the report stating that “though there are a handful of platforms that nudge out Microsoft in terms of vision, none can rival SharePoint’s ability to execute and deliver a complete product.”

What’s the difference between SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server?

According to Gartner, “SharePoint Server is available on-premises, while SharePoint Online is a cloud-based multitenant offering typically bundled with Microsoft Office 365 subscriptions. Although the two products use common codebases, they differ programmatically and functionally.”

Essentially, SharePoint Server is a locally-hosted platform that the user organization owns and operates themselves. With SharePoint Server, users are responsible for running and maintaining everything internally, including server architecture, active directory, and file storage.

While SharePoint Online is a cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, which users simply access “as a service” rather than having all the architecture (and relating hardware) existing on their own premises. With SharePoint online, all the “back end” parts of SharePoint are looked after at Microsoft’s end.

With SharePoint Online, users don’t have to think about things like servers, architecture, or resources, as this is all taken care of by the vendor. That means that users get the benefit of the vendor’s security features too, which usually tend to be more robust than what users could implement themselves in-house.

Delivered as part of Office 365, SharePoint Online enables organizations to participate in a collaborative, contextual user experience, as part of a productivity services platform offering a broad range of user-centered content capabilities.

SharePoint Online can also be integrated with other Office products, including Exchange, Word, and Excel, more easily. The only thing users need to deal with to get access to SharePoint Online is licenses, which are charged per user, so businesses only pay for the number of users and levels of access necessary. Another benefit of using SharePoint Online is that it will always be up-to-date, while SharePoint Server users must manually download and install updates, which are often rolled out much later for on-premises instances.

The other side of the coin to automatic updates, though, is that SharePoint Online users have little control over when and how these automatic updates hit their systems, and may find that when a new update wreaks havoc with their customizations.

For some businesses, however, using a SaaS service like SharePoint Online means giving up some of the autonomy that an organization would have if they owned and operated the software internally, as their data will be housed in one of Microsoft’s data centers, rather than on the users’ own services.

What is the difference between SharePoint and OneDrive?

Both SharePoint and OneDrive can be used for file sharing and storage, and share similarities when it comes to underlying design and features, so it can be confusing to differentiate the two.

OneDrive is simply a single document library within SharePoint. OneDrive is a free service, linked to a user’s Outlook account. Generally, OneDrive is used by individuals and teams to store and access files. SharePoint is a collaboration tool. SharePoint uses OneDrive to store files with a SharePoint site, but you can use OneDrive without SharePoint.

Both OneDrive and SharePoint allow users to:

• Use Office Online
• Store and share files of up to 15 GB, both internally and externally
• Edit files simultaneously
• Track version history
• Access files on mobile devices
• Syncing files local to devices

OneDrive is meant for personal storage, and when an organization licenses Office 365, each user gets their own OneDrive with at least 1TB of cloud storage space.

The significant variance between SharePoint and OneDrive is that OneDrive doesn’t support metadata.