SharePoint For Dummies. Rosemarie Withee

the organization and display results specifically for you. So, for example, if you’re in sales and searching for a product, your search results will be sales materials. If you’re an engineer and searching for a product, your results will include specifications. SharePoint search can make this happen, but configuring it is best left to the IT department.

      Social

      In recent years, computers and the Internet have been connecting people like never before. This new way of interacting through computers is called social computing. The biggest public social network of all is Facebook. Not every organization wants to be in such a public space though.

      SharePoint is designed for organizations, and the social aspects of SharePoint share a common goal with Facebook — connecting people. The difference is that SharePoint connections are limited to people within a particular organization. The social aspects of SharePoint are covered in Chapter 10.

      Web content management

      Content is a fairly simple concept. When you create a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, you generate content. If you develop a web page for your colleagues to admire, you generate content. Even if you just pull out a pencil and paper and start writing, that’s content. If you scanned that paper, you could then let SharePoint work its content management wonders on the scanned image file.

SharePoint is especially powerful in handling content, as described in Part 5. One particularly tricky piece of content, however, is the content you develop for websites. You know, all of those web pages that contain policies and procedures and documentation and all of that? If the content is created for a web page, then it’s web content and it holds a special place in the heart of SharePoint. The web content management features of SharePoint are legendary, and many organizations first started using SharePoint for just this reason.

      

Content management often goes by the name Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Don’t be fooled by the terminology though. The Enterprise portion of ECM just means the system manages content at a large scale, as found in a large company or enterprise.

      SharePoint and web content have a special relationship that all comes down to delegation and control. SharePoint provides the ability for many people to generate content and for a few people to approve content. This maintains order because a select group of people control what goes out to the world. SharePoint streamlines this process by allowing approved content to be published automatically.

      You might be wondering what makes the relationship between SharePoint and web content so special. Well, it all comes down to delegation and control. SharePoint provides the ability for many people to generate content and for a few to approve content. After it’s approved, content can be published automatically to be consumed by the world or those in your organization.

      Workflow

      Workflow is one of those things in business that happens whether anyone wants it or not. If more than one person is required to achieve a goal, then a workflow is involved. SharePoint has been good in the past at handling workflow within SharePoint, but it lacked integration with other products. To address this deficiency, Microsoft created a new product called Microsoft Flow. Microsoft Flow is not part of SharePoint, but it integrates with SharePoint as well as with many, many other products (both Microsoft and others).

      Using Microsoft Flow you can finally build a workflow that mimics the way you work. If you use products such as Survey Monkey, GitHub, Twitter, or many others, you can use Microsoft Flow to build workflows that integrate with SharePoint. We cover using Microsoft Flow with SharePoint in Chapter 15.

Chapter 2

      Introducing SharePoint in Microsoft 365

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      

Exploring SharePoint Online

      

Determining why SharePoint Online has become so popular

      

Finding out what version of SharePoint you are using

      

Understanding the benefits to a service-based offering

      Just a handful of years ago, it wasn’t easy to adopt SharePoint. SharePoint fell squarely into the realm of enterprise-class software. Enterprise-class software is powerful, expensive, and resource-intensive. In order to adopt SharePoint, you needed to be a large organization with big bucks and a large IT support team.

      The rapid rise of super-fast and ubiquitous Internet connectivity caused a paradigm shift in the software world. Microsoft and other companies quickly came out with new applications that offered enterprise-class software, including SharePoint, over the Internet. Microsoft branded its SharePoint offering as SharePoint Online and packaged it with products such as Exchange (email), Teams (instant communication), and Office (productivity).

      

Microsoft called the various combinations of services (SharePoint, Exchange, Teams, and Office) as Office 365. Recently, Microsoft has added Windows licensing and management to the existing Office 365 bundles and changed the name to Microsoft 365. We still use the terms Office 365 and Microsoft 365 interchangeably. Though we expect Microsoft will continue to ditch the Office 365 branding in the future.

In this chapter, you see how SharePoint Online has changed the game and what it means to use a cloud-based solution. You will read about the differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises and find out which you should use and when. Finally, you explore some of the benefits of using SharePoint Online.

Accessing and Using SharePoint

      At its heart, SharePoint is a website. To use it, you open up your web browser and navigate to the location of your SharePoint site. With that said, Microsoft has recognized that the world has moved to a mobile-first environment. Many people do all of their computing with a mobile phone or tablet. To accommodate this, Microsoft created the SharePoint Mobile App. The SharePoint Mobile App can be installed on your iOS or Android device and used to interact with SharePoint.

      

Many people who are brand new to SharePoint might only access and work with SharePoint through a mobile app on their smartphones or tablet devices. Even if you only use a mobile device, you should be aware that you can always open a web browser on a good old-fashioned desktop or laptop computer and access SharePoint.

      We cover signing up for SharePoint with Microsoft 365 and opening it with a web browser in Chapter 1, and we cover installing the SharePoint Mobile App in Chapter 4.

Getting Familiar with SharePoint Online

      Microsoft offers SharePoint over the Internet in a product called SharePoint Online. With SharePoint Online, Microsoft takes care of all the heavy lifting. To get SharePoint going, someone has to procure and set up the servers, and install the operating system, databases, web server,