A friend asked me earlier this week, "just what is SharePoint?" and I almost laughed, thinking, "well, I've written several thousand words on the topic already, but I suspect I'm going to have to write at least a few thousand more before I'm able to answer that question in the length which I suspect you would prefer." Ultimately, after providing him with what was probably a little more of a history lesson than was desired (or necessary), I settled on something along the lines of SharePoint being an extensible content management and collaboration platform. I should note that the friend in question is fully IT-conversant, and so was not in need of further explanation as to what I had just said.
That conversation did get me thinking about what would be my focus for this week's installment of the "What is SharePoint?" series though. I considered tackling SharePoint Online but quickly realized that beyond saying that SharePoint is available as a Microsoft-hosted service (i.e., as a "cloud-based" offering), there wasn't really much else to say. I then considered addressing the nature of SharePoint security, only to discover that Arpan Shah had already nailed the topic in his blog. As I continued to cast about for the next logical part of the series, it occurred to me that I haven't really spent much time directly addressing SharePoint as a tool for improving collaboration and business processes. Which is somewhat ironic, particularly given that those are the very SharePoint qualities that have always loomed the largest in my mind as an end user.
While beginning to formulate my thoughts on the matter, I remembered that I'd intended to revisit the Google results for "What is SharePoint?" and investigate the video results specifically. Before I could do that, however, I came across SharePoint MVP Tobias Zimmergren's recent post, What is SharePoint - A simple explanation. In that post, Tobias sings the praises of a Common Craft video which, in just over three minutes seeks to explain the capabilities of SharePoint as a team collaboration tool, in plain English and with accompanying animations as appealing as they are effective. I join Tobias (and Microsoft) in recommending the following video as an estimable answer to the question of "what is SharePoint?":
SharePoint in Plain English
I expect I'll return to frame my own thoughts on SharePoint as a collaboration engine at some point, but I'd like to address the fact that I've stepped aside and let a video do the heavy lifting today. You see, there's a righteous train coming down the tracks, and it's called the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009. With the conference just 5 weeks away, and with a massive amount of conference-related deadlines staring me in the face, I'm afraid I'm going to have to dial back the frequency of SharePoint Blank appearances over the weeks in the run-up to the conference. I promise I'm not going to disappear entirely, and I'm certainly not going to be resting on my laurels, but I just wanted to provide a heads up that SharePoint Blank likely won't be appearing with its customary frequency again until after the big show.
Needless to say, I'll still be addressing your questions as often as possible, so please keep them coming ... as always, your SharePoint problem could very well be the topic of the next SharePoint Blank.
Posted
Sep 11 2009, 06:00 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.