The basics of SharePoint - SharePoint Tutorial

- [Instructor] SharePoint is used differently by different teams and in different organizations. For some of us, SharePoint is a collaborative workspace. For others, SharePoint is simply a place to store documents, almost like a network share, and for others, SharePoint is a workflow engine that's used to automate tasks that are done on an everyday basis, but SharePoint is more than any of these individual functions. SharePoint's not an individual application like Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, or even a suite of applications, like Outlook. SharePoint is more than simply a program. SharePoint is a platform that organizations use to do the thing that SharePoint does best, which is to create powerful websites with features that allow you and I to work together in ways that we hadn't previously imagined. SharePoint is installed on one of your organization's servers. So, unlike an application like Word or Adobe Reader, we don't install SharePoint locally on our desktop. Rather, we connect to SharePoint, although there are some related applications we use with SharePoint that usually are installed locally. For example, we might want to use the desktop application SharePoint Designer to change how SharePoint appears, or we might use PowerBI desktop to create visualizations that we use in our SharePoint site, but SharePoint itself lives on a server, and we connect to that server using a browser from our desktop or laptop, from a tablet, from a mobile device, but for many of us, our first introduction to SharePoint, and perhaps, even, the primary way that we use SharePoint, isn't using a browser, per se. It's by using the Office products that we used before we started using SharePoint. For example, we can create and save Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel documents on our SharePoint site. We can edit our documents using Office Online in a browser, or by using Office 2019 on desktop, or Office 2016, or we can work with our files using apps on a mobile device. These core office products are made to work with Microsoft SharePoint, and so it's very easy to collaborate on Office documents simply by placing them in a SharePoint environment, and because my document is hosted on a server, I don't necessarily need to have access to my own desktop or laptop to be able to go retrieve a document. I can use a kiosk at a hotel, for example, as long as my organization allows me to connect to SharePoint from outside of my network. I can also use other applications to work with SharePoint. For example, when I'm working with Microsoft Outlook, I can have a calendar in SharePoint that I connect to Outlook, perhaps a calendar of events that my team is responsible for. Or, my department might create a common calendar in SharePoint that allows us to see when different people are in the office, or out of the office, or attending conferences. We can create group or team calendars in SharePoint, that every single member of the team, or every member of your organization, can view using Outlook, and the same is true for contacts and tasks. We have these core Office applications that are well supported by every version of SharePoint, and then we have other members of the Office family like Visio and Project that also have integration with SharePoint, but we still don't have an answer to the question, "What is SharePoint?" Microsoft has been asked this question ever since the very first version of SharePoint was released. Let me tell you how Microsoft explains what SharePoint is. They start by saying that organizations use Microsoft SharePoint to create websites, to create full featured websites, places where people can work together, save documents, search to find information. With our site in place, we can then invite other members of our team to work on the site with us, and because we all have a site in common, we have a common platform for collaboration. When my team saves things together in a particular site, we can then not only share those documents, but we have a single source of truth about where our documents are. When I ask, "Where's the latest version of the calendar?" or, "Where's the latest reviewed draft "of the policy we're working on?" I don't have to ask where the most recent version is, or whose inbox it is in, because it's on our team site. Together, we create this community of people who have access to a common set of information that's kept current. I can invite one set of people to one site, another set of people to different SharePoint site. Each of these becomes its own community. Teams can be based on attributes like geography or work on a common project, but teams can also be ad hoc communities of people, to help plan an event that only occurs once, or to bounce around some ideas about how we might solve a particular problem or meet a particular opportunity. SharePoint teams can be long lived, they can be short lived, and because SharePoint has really great security and content controls, we can make sure that people only have access to documents that they should be able to see. So, we'll be generating lots and lots of content for project teams, institutional content. The HR department will have all their policy manuals in SharePoint. This is success, but it also creates a problem, because how do we find our documents? All of this content that we have created together? SharePoint provides really great search capability that will alow us to go in and search all the content that we've created, and all the content that's shared with us, but because we've aggregated all this content in one place rather than putting it in a bunch of individual network shares somewhere, we can aggregate information about the content that we have. We can gain insights that we wouldn't be able to if all these documents were in different people's inboxes, on different people's desktops, or in different network shares. This is the SharePoint product as designed, but our final piece of the SharePoint puzzle is a feature called composites, and composites is the extensibility of SharePoint, the ability to create new things with SharePoint that are very specifically customized to your business. For example, you can add a workflow to a document library, or a list, or even a site. You can create customized content, custom lists, custom libraries, all type of applications that will allow SharePoint to solve your business's challenges. There's huge out of the box capability to create sites, to invite people to these communities, to manage our content, to search through it, to garner business insights, but composites truly make SharePoint useful in every business setting. So, what is SharePoint? It's certainly not an application like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, although it works with all of those, and it's not a set of apps like Outlook. SharePoint is a platform that organizations use to build solutions that allow them to address their organizations' challenges, and with SharePoint, it's easy for you and I as users, because we use the same applications we've always used, but now, we use them with SharePoint. Outlook with SharePoint, Word with SharePoint, Excel with SharePoint, and SharePoint enhances the user experience and allows us to collaborate and do more together than we could possibly have done alone.