SharePoint Web portal (hereinafter referred to as SharePoint) is Microsoft's product with the highest sales growth in recent years.
Microsoft SharePoint is a Web application which started to develop as a integration place for all Office applications a business is using. Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Visio, Outlook and other Office applications are brought online with a single click, either hosted within the company network or the Internet. This enables authorized users to access it from Office or using a web browser on your desktop computer, mobile phone or a tablet, which also includes all other SharePoint applications and functionalities.
SharePoint enables saving all changes of all types of documents along with the history of changes and sends automatic notifications to users who have interest in the changes made. SharePoint keeps all the functionalities of Office applications fork working in a multi-user environment and on the web - the organization of meetings, contacts, knowledge bases, monitoring of tasks execution, blogs, PowerPivot reporting from Excel, Web visualization of business processes through Visio, quick creation of Web forms for Finance, Human Resources , legal and other functions using Infopath, download of Access applications and work with them and all of this is done easily and without any programming knowledge. Other (Non-Microsoft) data types are also supported - PDFs, videos, audios, etc. It can also be said that SharePoint has become a system for document management.
During more than ten years of development a lot of important functions has been added to the package.
SharePoint has turned into a so powerful web design tool that Ferrari designed its own web site in it. This tool is very simple to use that an average employee is able create and design their own web pages.
A tool for creating business processes (workflows) has been added to SharePoint and it is now possible to create business applications, organization documentation and information workflows and all that can be done by the employees themselves without any programming knowledge.
A functionality for the social networking (like Facebook) has also been added to SharePoint, so that each employee can manage one or more of their sites for different purposes independently of the administrator, to create surveys by themselves, discussions, notifications, blogs, to like, tag, rank and comment on the content or search for information about their colleagues and their specific knowledge and experience.
SharePoint has functionality for quick and easy connecting with other applications in the company or on the Internet - ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), BI (Business Intelligence), banking or any other applications, and after setting up the connection it can read, edit and visualize this data inside SharePoint.
A functionality for Search has been added to SharePoint similar to Google Search - Search by content from within SharePoint, outside of SharePoint, but within the company, and outside the company network wherever it is allowed to search (Internet, portals of government institutions, libraries...).
Perhaps the most important feature of SharePoint is its price - the server cost is around $ 1,800 for the intranet, $4,500 for the Internet, and client license is $40-$70.
In the last five years only Microsoft has invested huge amount of money in SharePoint.
Microsoft has bought FAST – a Norwegian company specialized in developing search applications for 1 billion dollars. FAST search capabilities are better than Google and in the stages they are integrated into each new version of SharePoint.
This year Microsoft bought Yammer for a 1.5 billion dollars. Yammer is a leading company specialized in social networking applications for businesses. It is expected that Yammer functionalities will start to get integrated from the next version of SharePoint - SharePoint 2013.
In 2012, SharePoint MarketPlace come to life - a website where software companies upload SharePoint and Office applications similar to the Android Market. The number of applications available on MarketPlace is measured in the thousands and it is growing rapidly. Many applications are free. The world's largest IT companies like Dell and HP have developed applications for SharePoint and uploaded them on MarketPlace. Users can from connect to MarketPlace from SharePoint select, download and install applications and improve early efficiency, collaboration, beautify SharePoint site or have fun using them.
SharePoint has become the middleware on which the information system of a medium or a large enterprise is implemented, which combines data from different applications in one place and that accessible from any location or device.