This is my first blog post, just thought of writing something interesting and light content.
Beauty of SharePoint , this is the Title of my blog so why not elaborate it first.
SharePoint is looked upon as a platform for collaboration.but before Microsft launched this beautiful application , were there not any other collaboration tools available?
yes there were like HyperOffice.
The most common answer I get is , it is Microsoft friendly product, its ease of use etc etc.
Here is a list of all the benefits a SharePoint platform offers to its user.
- Access Services and Visio Services:SharePoint offers a very good Service structure where user can upload his Visio or Access application files onto the SharePoint server and later it can be accessed in a browser. which means few years back the power of applications such as Excel, Microsoft Access , was limited to desktop , but SharePoint brought to web
- Document Management: It provide you greater capabilities for managing document libraries like version control, Information Policy management for document library , Document Archiving ,workflows Content Types etc.
- Role Management and Access Control: SharePoint comes with inbuilt Roles and Access control model it offers you various authentication like Form Base Authentication ,Windows Authentication, SAML Token based Authentication,Claim based Authentication etc.
- in-place Record Management: you can archive your documents just like any other SQL server record and can carry out all the operations on this record which you could have in SQL server Table row.
- Business Connectivity Service : Earlier there used to be BDC with MOSS 2007 , which enabled the users to connect to External Database , BDC only allowed the users to read the data from other databases , but with new feature of BCS , not only user can connect to external database but can manipulate the data onto the database server .
- Business Intelligence and Reporting: Microsoft used Excel's Business Intelligence capabilities , where it can import large amount of data and organize it in pivot table, pie charts.Share Point provides Dashboards ,KPI Lists and lots of other BI tools which enables the user to create an efficient business decision model.
- Enhanced Workflows: workflow is a very strong feature of SharePoint , it allows you to create declarative workflows(No code) in Designers which can be saved as template and can be reused.It also provide a capability to modify out of the box workflows such as Approval workflow , feedback workflow or three state workflow.
- Social Networking capabilities: SharePoint offers all the capabilities which a social networking tools offers nowadays such as twitter , Facebook. It allows inbuilt discussion boards , Blogs ,Information Sharing etc etc.
Now a days there is another collaborative technique emerging , that could be seen as replacement to SharePoint , that is Cloud Computing, though this seems to be possible , but if you just look at the SharePoint features , it is clear , it can not be replaced completely.
