SharePoint FAQs

"SharePoint" references one or more Microsoft SharePoint products or technologies, the most popular of which are:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010. The underlying technology for all SharePoint sites. It is available for free and was called Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) in previous versions. You can use SharePoint Foundation to create quickly many types of sites that will allow you to collaborate on Web pages, documents, lists, calendars and data. Document management and workflow are also key features.
• SharePoint Server 2010. The more versatile and robust version of Foundation. Called MOSS in previous versions, it is a server product that relies on SharePoint Foundation technology to provide a consistent, familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration and site customization. SharePoint Server includes all the features of SharePoint Foundation, plus additional features and capabilities such as enterprise content management, business intelligence, enterprise search, and personal profiles through a feature called "My Sites." Any features that are available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 are also available in SharePoint Server 2010; the latter simply features enhanced technical aspects that are critical to enterprise-level scale and support for robust Web application efforts.

For more information, download a Microsoft overview datasheet on SharePoint.

Contact us now for a free hosted SharePoint quote!

Microsoft SharePoint enables organizations of virtually any size—from a family of four sharing photos to a corporation of 10,000 sharing data -- to complete mission-critical tasks in a cutting-edge, collaborative workplace environment that is both flexible and secure.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 is the answer for collaboration within your business, your home, or a community group. It’s user-friendly and great for sharing anything: file storage, contacts, calendars, a wiki, an intranet site, photo albums, schedules, sales leads—anything.

Clearly, while some SharePoint customers represent smaller organizations, deployments are also popular among mid-sized organizations, large departments and even large enterprises, which typically use SharePoint Server 2010. According to a 2009 survey by the consultancy InfoTrends, almost half of mid- to large-sized enterprises use SharePoint—rates that beat all of the other document and content platforms such as EMC, IBM, Open Text, Oracle, Hyland and others. Of these SharePoint customers, the largest companies create more than 100 SharePoint sites every month and already have more than 200 sites to manage on average (about a quarter of which are inactive or not in regular use). Although SharePoint use varies considerably across and within company size segments, nearly all organizations that have deployed it rely on it primarily for basic collaboration and document management. Other key uses include "team" site creation, network file storage and basic workflows (i.e., review and approvals).

If SharePoint can meet the toughest, mission-critical standards of these companies, imagine what it can do for your organization.

Contact us now for a free hosted SharePoint quote!

SharePoint Server 2010, which is ideal for dedicated server hosting and/or enterprise-level hosting, extends SharePoint Foundation 2010 by providing many additional capabilities, opportunities for customization and enhanced scalability.

For example, both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server include site templates for collaborating with colleagues on team sites, blogs and meeting workspaces. However, SharePoint Server upgrades these capabilities with enhanced social computing features such as news feeds and tagging, all of which help people to discover, organize, navigate and share information with colleagues.

In another example, SharePoint Server enhances the SharePoint Foundation’s business intelligence capabilities. SharePoint Server’s search technology includes features that are useful for employees in large organizations—such as the ability to search for business data in SAP, Siebel and other business applications.

It’s worth noting that both SharePoint products are designed to work effectively with other programs, servers and technologies, including those in the Microsoft Office system. For instance, you can initiate or participate in a workflow to approve an expense report from within Microsoft Word. Or, you can take a site, list or library offline in SharePoint Workspace, work with the site content while you are disconnected from your network and then automatically synchronize your changes when you reconnect.

To learn more, download the Microsoft whitepaper, "Introducing Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010."

Contact us now for a free hosted SharePoint quote!

With SharePoint Server 2010, Microsoft overhauled its popular MOSS 2007 to bring customers numerous enhanced capabilities such as:

Collaboration and social computing. Extends the collaboration features of SharePoint Foundation to bring users into a whole new sense of community.

• Use "My Sites" personal profiles to network with colleagues
• Post status updates, note board comments, blogs, sites documents, photos and more
• Use tag profiles to see what’s being used and followed
• Monitor your colleagues through activity feeds

Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Helps organizations manage the entire life cycle of content—from creation, to editing and collaboration, to expiration—on a single, searchable, unified platform.

• Consolidate, manage and search for diverse content through new document management features
• Improve information search/ discovery through metadata management
• Use workflow tools to move documents in a structured way
• Store and protect data to satisfy compliance/ legal requirements
• Establish audit trails and legal holds
• Publish Web content with a user-friendly authoring tool and built-in approval process
• Support rich media in a new Asset Library
• Use Web templates to apply consistent branding to Web pages
• Monitor sites through built-in Web analytics features
• Use a single deployment and management infrastructure for intranet, extranet, and Internet sites—as well as for multilingual sites

Enterprise search. Delivers a powerful search infrastructure that complements other business productivity capabilities such as ECM and collaboration to help people get better answers faster and amplify the impact of knowledge and expertise.

• Refine your search through interactive navigation
• Extend your search across more content sources, content types and enterprise apps

Business intelligence. Extend business intelligence capabilities to make the right data available to everyone who needs it.

• Increase visibility into key organizational objectives and metrics
• Extract and present data from a variety of sources to facilitate analysis/decisions
• Implement interactive dashboards with scorecards, reports and trend-finding filters
• Publish, share and manage Excel workbooks and rich charts on a SharePoint site

Portals. Build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of the business such as enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites and divisional portal sites.

• Connect individual sites, company-wide
• Access existing business apps, expertise and information across an organization
• Use portals to enhance My Sites capabilities
• Personalize the portal for individual users with content targeting

Business process and forms. Integrate and streamline your business processes through workflows to cut the cost of coordinating common business processes.

• Expedite project approval or document review through task tracking
• Use predefined or customized workflows to support unique processes
• Create browser-based forms

To learn more, download the Microsoft whitepaper, "Introducing Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010."

Contact us now for a free hosted SharePoint quote!

SharePoint 2010 adoption concerns fall into two categories: technical and non-technical.

Technical adoption hurdles include concerns about logical architecture, physical architecture, network bandwidth and content database size, among other issues.

Non-technical adoption hurdles include concerns about getting your SharePoint 2010 solution accepted and used by those within your organization and whether or not your users have the knowledge they need to use SharePoint effectively in order to get the most out of it.

Leading SharePoint experts Scott Jamison and Susan Hanley cover these issues thoroughly in two best practices whitepapers published by Microsoft.

The "SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper" guides you in creating an adoption strategy and training plan to encourage SharePoint usage within your organization. The white paper tackles questions such as:

• How do I get my employees excited about using this new collaboration technology (champions, incentives)?
• How do I ensure that all employees within my organization understand and feel comfortable using SharePoint 2010?
• How do I ensure that SharePoint 2010 fits into existing business processes and makes people's jobs easier?
• How do I manage the behavioral change required to integrate SharePoint 2010 into the way people work?

The "SharePoint 2010 Usage Best Practices White Paper" offers solid best practices for using SharePoint every day. Questions tackled in this white paper include:

• What collaboration methods and site templates are most appropriate for which types of situations?
• What should I ask myself before setting up a SharePoint site?
• How should I manage content?
• What should I think about when tagging?
• What is the proper etiquette for social interactions?

For extra guidance, Jamison and Hanley, along with Mauro Cardarelli, have also published a book entitled, Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance, and Planning (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series, 2^nd Revised Edition). It approaches Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 from a strict business value perspective, covering the essentials of how to plan and implement SharePoint solutions to achieve superior business results.

For more information, download a Microsoft overview datasheet on SharePoint.

Contact us now for a free hosted SharePoint quote!

Governance is an important part of any SharePoint deployment. It covers key topics like roles and responsibilities, processes and policies. To be useful and effective, your SharePoint 2010 implementation should have clear goals, incorporate user input and include clear policies.

Microsoft's "SharePoint 2010 Governance White Paper" , authored by leading SharePoint experts Scott Jamison and Susan Hanley , discusses these issues in some depth and offers helpful best practices.