Though we have done lot of Microsoft SharePoint projects, I find it difficult to give
a single answer to everyone for the question on “What is SharePoint?”. Depending on
who (their job role) is asking the question and for what they are asking it, the answer
for the question “What is SharePoint” varies. It is different things for different
people. One thing is sure – it has been a very successful product franchise for Microsoft
and has been the fastest growing Billion Dollar business for Microsoft.
From a technology perspective it provides Content Management, Document Management,
Blogs, Wiki, Rights Management, Workflow, Forms and data capture, Search, a limited
RAD (Rapid Application Development) framework and more.
The Microsoft’s
site for SharePoint doesn’t make answering this question any easier, it says “Microsoft
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can
help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management
and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing
across boundaries for better business insight”. After few words my head has started
to spin - this definition is nothing but a boring soup of all possible technology
terms that Microsoft has managed to find. This didn’t help, so let us throw it outside
the window.
Till now the elevator pitch for SharePoint I have managed to come up with for answering
this has been to say “Connecting People and Information”. This was inspired
by the Microsoft
.NET initial days messaging that vaguely said Microsoft .NET is software for
connecting people, information, systems, and devices. Today I came across this
short video that introduces SharePoint in Plain English, finally
a good job by Microsoft marketing on this.
SharePoint
in Plain English
On a related note, you may be interested to watch this sneak peek video on the upcoming
release of SharePoint, SharePoint
2010 here.
Read the complete post at http://venkatarangan.com/blog/2009/08/19/What+Is+Microsofts+SharePoint.aspx