SharePoint For Dummies. Rosemarie Withee

to be done in a special climate-controlled facility called a data center. The data center has to be secure and redundant. After all, what if a disaster happened and the data center computers in the data center — or worse, the data center itself — were destroyed? Finally, the whole setup must be scalable so that as more users begin using SharePoint for mission-critical business processes, the servers and sites can keep up with the added load. And that isn’t the end — after everything is up and running, someone still needs to manage all the updates and keep the servers humming smoothly. Whew! What a lot of work.

With a hosted solution, you or your organization pay someone else to do all this for you — you simply use the final product, SharePoint. With SharePoint Online, Microsoft sells its SharePoint platform as a service, so the actual servers and software are run in its data centers, managed and maintained by its employees. You, being a customer of Microsoft, connect to this managed version of SharePoint over a secure channel of the Internet and use it to develop business solutions on the SharePoint platform. (Maybe a better name would be “SharePoint Infrastructure Hosted and Managed by Microsoft,” though it’s too cumbersome for marketing.) Figure 2-1 illustrates this point.

      FIGURE 2-1: The SharePoint platform runs in the Microsoft data center and is accessed in a secure channel over the Internet.

      

Microsoft is not the only company that offers SharePoint over the Internet. Other companies also offer SharePoint hosting, though Microsoft seems to have cornered the market recently because they also offer so many other things for the same price as SharePoint. In our view, one of the biggest competitors to SharePoint has become WordPress. WordPress is another web platform that includes endless plugins to extend it. Another competitor to SharePoint Online is an internal SharePoint site hosted by your local IT department.

      

SharePoint Online is when Microsoft manages SharePoint in its data centers and you access it over the Internet. SharePoint On-Premises is when your local IT gurus manage SharePoint in your company data center.

Determining What Version of SharePoint You Are Using

      A key aspect of understanding SharePoint is first determining what version of SharePoint you are using. The main thing you need to determine is if you are using SharePoint Online, SharePoint On-Premises, or a hybrid of both. If you signed up for SharePoint with Microsoft 365 in Chapter 1, you are using SharePoint Online. If your organization has provided you access to SharePoint, then it is a little trickier to determine which version you have. Since SharePoint Online is part of Microsoft 365, you can usually just look for the app launcher in the upper-left corner of your browser. The app launcher is where you can switch to other apps like Outlook or Teams. If you see the app launcher (hint: it looks like a waffle and is sometimes called the waffle icon), then you are using SharePoint Online.

      If you don’t see the app launcher, you are probably using a version of SharePoint that is being managed by your organization. This is called SharePoint On-Premises. Updated versions of SharePoint On-Premises are released every few years. The latest version is called SharePoint Server 2019. Prior versions include SharePoint Server 2016, SharePoint Server 2013, and SharePoint Server 2010. Microsoft has put together a nice article on determining the version of SharePoint you are using. To find it, search for “Which version of SharePoint am I using?” on the https://support.office.com site.

      

Microsoft usually releases On-Premises versions of SharePoint every three years. If the trend holds, then the next On-Premises version will be SharePoint Server 2022.

Understanding Why SharePoint Online Has Become So Popular

      Putting a complex computer platform in place is difficult. Organizations discovered this when they implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in the 1990s and 2000s, and it still holds true today. Putting the SharePoint platform in place is not an easy endeavor. Larger organizations usually require a more complex implementation. As the complexity of the implementation increases, so do the costs, time, and risk. The current best practice is to use an experienced consulting firm with expertise in implementing a SharePoint platform. As in dealing with any services company, sometimes you pick a winner, and sometimes it’s a complete disaster.

SharePoint Online takes the implementation of the infrastructure out of the equation with a known variable in cost and resources. This is music to a bean counter’s ears! Predictability! The predictability of cost and time to implement are why SharePoint Online and other cloud solutions are becoming so popular. They reduce complexity and provide a fixed and certain cost on a SharePoint platform that is guaranteed to follow best practices. Having a known variable in place for the infrastructure frees up resources to focus on the actual business problems. Which, by the way, are your main reasons for implementing SharePoint in the first place, right?

      

Microsoft has introduced the SharePoint Online offering to cater to everyone from small businesses to large multinationals. In fact, you can even purchase just one license if you’re a solo entrepreneur. Because Microsoft has already built out the offering, it can offer it’s just as easy to offer the same reliability and security to small companies as it does to large companies. It is, after all, the same product — the only difference is the scale.

Differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises

      In the past, there have been some major differences between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises. For one, SharePoint Online used to trail the version of SharePoint that was available on-premises. For example, when SharePoint 2016 came out, it took SharePoint Online a painfully long time before it became comparable to SharePoint 2016.

      

The current on-premises version is SharePoint 2019. The previous version was SharePoint 2016, and the version before that was SharePoint 2013. SharePoint Online doesn’t have a version number.

      Times have changed, however. Microsoft has moved to focus on SharePoint Online instead of the on-premises versions. It rolls out new features in SharePoint Online, and then grabs a snapshot of the online version and makes it available for organizations that choose to deploy it themselves on-premises.

      

You can think of SharePoint Server 2019 as a snapshot of the features available in SharePoint Online around the year 2019. One thing is certain, though: If you want the latest and greatest features, SharePoint Online is your best bet.

In fact, one of the major development areas with SharePoint Server 2019 is its integration with SharePoint Online. This is to accommodate organizations that want to keep some of their data on their local premises and in their own control, but want to leverage some of the benefits of having Microsoft manage SharePoint for them. This concept of using some SharePoint Online and some SharePoint On-Premises is called a hybrid approach.

      With that said, there are still integration points with other local server products and advanced functionality that are only available with SharePoint On-Premises. This is an ever-changing landscape, so the best way to stay on top of the available features is on the frequently updated SharePoint