Beginning SharePoint 2013 Development

GETTING TO KNOW SHAREPOINT

Simply put, SharePoint 2013 (also referred to as SharePoint after this point) is a platform to support collaboration — a central Web-based portal for you to manage your own and your colleague’s documents, social activities, data, and information. This definition is pretty broad, but try framing it within a scenario: you manage projects on a daily basis and must also manage teams of people across those projects. Within the project, people are having meetings, creating documents, exchanging ideas, managing schedules, and so on. Without a central place to manage these activities and documents, you’re using file shares on servers; you’re exchanging documents via mail; and you’re using one or more different types of management software to help keep a common view of activities. Within this one scenario, you should be able to see the problem. A file share can go down anytime, so what’s the backup? Documents aren’t versioned. Context is lost around a project as elements are spread out across different technologies. And security around those documents is difficult to manage and control in an effective in an effective and efficient way.

Project management is but one scenario that paints a picture of collaboration. Many others exist, and this is why SharePoint has seen such broad adoption. Often companies see great advantages with SharePoint through simple document management; that is, being able to store, version, create, and manage documents in one central place. ...