Quick view on Microsoft SharePoint

Quick view on Microsoft SharePoint

SharePoint is a platform for intranets, document management, reporting and business collaboration. It has a lot of capabilities to meet most business needs. We can say that Microsoft SharePoint is one of the biggest productivity frameworks released during the last 15 years. These days, SharePoint is becoming more common in the enterprise world.

Central Administration

SharePoint Central Administration(SPCA) can be used for administrative tasks. SPCA is used to configure servers in SharePoint.

The main areas/features of SPCA are

• Application Management
• Monitoring
• Security
• System Settings
• Upgrade and Migration
• Configuration Wizards
• Back Up Restore

Fig 1 : SharePoint Hierarchy

SharePoint Farm is actually a set of servers which have different roles and responsibilities. Main server roles in SharePoint are:

• Front End web servers
• Application servers
• Database servers

Using SPCA, we can create web applications and under each web application- site collections and under site collections – sites and under sites – libraries, lists etc.

Key Factor

Using SharePoint websites, we can store and manage our data in a more flexible way. Document management is one of the key reasons behind why SharePoint is used in business collaboration sites. By providing a unique user experience, SharePoint helps to share content, applications and data. We can customize sites by changing their appearance and by adding functionalities without writing a single line of code. That’s the power of SharePoint.

Main Capabilities

• Sites: Site is the most visible feature of SharePoint which includes the engine for building up websites, features etc.
• Composites: Composites include features such as external Data Connectivity, Open Work Flow Engine.
• Communities: Communities have many capabilities such as Social Networking, Blogging, Wiki pages, Feeds etc.
• Insights: Excel Services, Visio Services, MSQL Reporting Services, Access Services
• Search: One of the important feature of SharePoint is its Search engine. It supports high volumes of contents and searches.
• Content: Supports Record Management features, Multimedia content etc.

Fig 2 : SharePoint Server Object Model Hierarchy

Object Model

SharePoint offers structured object model. With the help of this model we can use SharePoint objects to achieve many features in SharePoint.

Namespace: Microsoft.SharePoint

Site collection object–

SPSite siteCollectionObject = SPContext.Current.Site;

Current web site object –

SPWeb webSiteObject = SPContext.Current.Web;