Simple explanation from business point of view.
No technical jargon.
Estimated reading time 3 min
What is SharePoint?
It is a piece of software which helps us share various things. These could be documents, data, pictures, calendars, reports, emails, notes and much more.
Sharing is of two types. Sharing with self and sharing with others.
Self sharing? It just means, your information can be available to you from your laptop, home pc, desktop, tablets and mobile phones (of all brands). This gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility.
Even after sharing an item with others, you maintain full control over it: see an audit trail, get notified when someone changes something, versions are stored automatically, you can edit the SAME document with other team members at the same time and work using familiar Office tools all the while.
All this can be done without knowing programming, web designing or HTML.
NO NEED to talk to IT. What a relief!
More details
The concept is very simple. Put the item in SharePoint and then share it with your team.
Storing things in SharePoint is better than sending mails with attachments. Once you send anything as an attachment, you lose all the control over it.
Of course you will need to create some space to store the files and data. This is called a website.
Usually a regular user like you and me cannot create a web site. As you already know, we need someone from IT with the knowledge of web servers, HTML, web design and programming to create a web site. All this takes too much time and effort.
Now our life is transformed. Anybody can create a web site in few seconds using SharePoint. No programming required. No need to approach IT.
Sounds good?
What is the use of an empty web site?
Well, let us go one step further. Ok, I can create a web site quickly. So what?
It will be an empty web site. What do I do with it?
Well the only way to answer this is to SHOW you what can be done.
We will do this with a series of articles and videos.
The next article will explain how to share documents with colleagues.
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One Response
A little addition is that Microsoft has decided to drop the public site from SharePoint Online starting this year. Existing users will have to move, new users cannot create public facing website using SharePoint. Wix and GoDaddy would be possible replacements.