Microsoft SharePoint is a document management and collaboration platform that assists companies manage their archives documents, reports, and other information that is essential to their business processes. SharePoint’s capabilities for enterprise content management help organizations across all sectors and every department within an company.
SharePoint is managed using an internet browser. It gives most of its features via the internet user interface (UI) and web-based applications. SharePoint can be used to modify the structure of sites and content as well as to create and remove sites, enable or disable products, manage basic workflows and control the performance of analytics.
The latest and most up-to-date version of SharePoint. SharePoint features
SharePoint 2019 will be the most current version of the program. SharePoint forms part of the Office 365 suite, where it’s referred to by the name of SharePoint Online. Microsoft also provides an on-premises version to organizations who would prefer keeping their data on-premise for security or compliance reasons.
SharePoint megamenus can be targeted to audiences by providing a customized display based on permissions granted to users within SharePoint.
Some of the features that are useful in SharePoint include:
The Business Intelligence (BI). SharePoint 2019 integrates to Microsoft Power BI, providing access to BI
Compliance. The SharePoint In-Place Hold Policy Center and Compliance Policy Center allows the central admin of a company create and implement policies. Users can remove files from OneDrive for Business sites.
Accessibility to the Document Library. SharePoint has page landmarks that allow ease of navigability, keyboard shortcuts to perform various tasks, notifications about uploading progress enhanced callout readings , and updates for help documentation.
Expanded file names for files. Support is provided for file names that contain special characters, starting with dots, and more than 128 characters.
Sharing folders. Users can view who is sharing the folder and can invite other users and also approve or deny access requests.
Improved integration better integration Office 365 tools and services which includes Microsoft Sway.
Management of information rights. Digital rights management features safeguard sensitive information and intellectual property from being accessed by unauthorized parties.
Large files are supported. The limit isn’t set to the size of files. The only thing is that Microsoft advises 10 GB limit. There is a 250GB maximum upload limit for files.
MinRole. Administrators are able set up only roles that they require for their SharePoint servers.
Mobile experience. An intuitive mobile interface with a touch screen is now available, providing users a more contemporary experience. It’s simple to change from mobile view to the PC view.
Navigation UI. SharePoint has megamenus, which render and appear on both mobile and desktop platforms to facilitate navigation on the site. Developers are able to natively provide shortcuts to pages within SharePoint.
Project server. Managers of projects are able to request the resources of other managers. They also employ a heat map to track where resources are spending their time. They also have the ability to build multiple timelines. The project server has been upgraded to provide capacity for backup and restoration.
Project Syntex. SharePoint incorporates Microsoft intelligent search, which helps users find relevant metadata in presentations, emails along with the other Office services. Syntex makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatize the processing of content and convert information into knowledge.
Security. SharePoint 2019 supports coauthoring as well as autosave for documents that are encrypted Information barriers, as well as the automatic expiration of access to external resources.
Pin sites’ pages to Pinterest. Users can pin websites to follow them in the premises or via Office 365.
Teams have their own websites. They are places where teams can collaborate on projects and share data from any location. A team site is several related pages and the default document library that can be used for documents, lists for managing data and web parts that can be customized.
Yammer. The Yammer social network platform offers customizable feeds for social media that allow employees engage with each other in SharePoint. SharePoint environment.
The deprecated Microsoft SharePoint features
SharePoint 2016 was focused on traditional document management. The new version of SharePoint SharePoint 2019 Microsoft removed a few collaboration, social media , and enterprise search capabilities which are now part of Office 365. The functions that are removed include:
Delve. A tool for data visualization and discovery which combines elements of social networks and machine learning, as well as the capabilities to search that are part of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite.
Office Graph. A back-end application within Office 365. A back-end tool in the Office 365 Suite that facilitates searches across all integrated applications and uses machine learning to interaction with content and organizational processes.
Sway. A tool for presenting included in Office suite. Office suite.
Teams. A collaboration tool that allows employees to collaborate on a work document no matter where they are.
Yammer. A private microblogging platform and collaboration platform for social networking.
Microsoft is focusing a large portion of its development plans in the direction of SharePoint Online. However it will continue to offer versions on premises because users may be required to comply with compliance requirements, which require keeping certain data on their premises or simply because they can’t transfer all their data to the cloud.
Other features removed from SharePoint 2016’s SharePoint 2016 server include the following:
Excel services. Excel capabilities are not hosted anymore in SharePoint Server. Instead, it’s included in Excel Online in Office Online Server.
FIM is Forefront’s Identity Manager. FIM is a synchronization tool with Active Directory and SharePoint. SharePoint 2016 does not use FIM instead, but rather Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 or an alternative third-party tool.
SharePoint has BI capabilities. Power Pivot along with Power View in BI capabilities are not available with SharePoint 2016. Power Pivot is only available for SharePoint as well as Power View for BI are not available in SharePoint 2016. SharePoint add-ins are only installed using SharePoint 2016 when you are using SQL Server 2016, which is the version that SharePoint 2016 uses.
SharePoint Foundation. SharePoint Foundation is a no-cost version that offers a secure collaborative platform that is web-based. SharePoint Foundation is not included for SharePoint Server 2016 but is available in SharePoint Server 2016, but it is accessible for SharePoint 2013 users. SharePoint 2013.
Standalone installation mode. This feature is no longer offered in SharePoint 2016. It is replaced by an alternative topology called the MinRole topology for farms.
Notes and tags. Users can create new tags as well as access the ones they already have, but Microsoft has discouraged the use of this feature as it was planned to be eliminated.
Work Management Service Application. The app was deleted from SharePoint 2016and includes My Tasks and other associated Exchange Task Sync features.
Following features were removed or removed from SharePoint Server 2019:
Access Services in 2010 and Access Services 2010 and. They will be removed, however they will be in use. Microsoft recommends looking into Microsoft PowerApps and Power Automate.
Aggregated newsfeed. This feed is only be accessible within SharePoint 2019. Microsoft suggests that you use Teams News, Communication Sites, Yammer or Teams
Customized assistance. Microsoft is shifting away from its old help engine and is instead introducing the cloud-based customer assistance tool that integrates with Office 365.
Machine Translation Service. This service is currently being discontinued and will not be available. Multilingual sites for communication are highly advised for users.
Multi-tenancy. Microsoft deleted this feature due to the cost of more complicated multi-tenancy solutions for SharePoint in the premises.
PDF reader. The built-in PDF reader feature was eliminated because the majority of web browsers include their own PDF reading features.
Site mailboxes. Site mailboxes are being deprecated but will continue to be supported. Microsoft suggests customers to use the shared mailbox alternative.
SharePoint 2019 changes in the architecture of SharePoint and also options
SharePoint 2019 features architectural deployment models, which were first introduced in SharePoint 2016 in Microsoft’s effort to create SharePoint an offering that is cloud-first. Microsoft declared that it was launching SharePoint 2019, it wanted to enhance a number of cloud-first technologies that were introduced in 2016.
For instance, SharePoint 2013 and previous versions relied on deployments of services to fix servers that were not working. SharePoint 2016 came with MinRole. which is a simplified topology with an individual server within the SharePoint farm which is running an explicit set services based on its purpose and does not have any other services running. This allows for greater flexibility, quick fixes and rapid updates to all servers, leading to quicker and more reliable service. SharePoint makes use of MinRole as its MinRole farm topology within SharePoint Server 2019 and Online.
SharePoint server farms comprise web-facing servers as well as application servers and database servers.
At the core SharePoint’s architecture deployment models are basically identical to those that were launched in the year 2016. There are four models of architecture for SharePoint 2019.
SharePoint Online. SharePoint is delivered using a software-as-a-service subscription model. Microsoft offers updates on a regular basis however, the users are accountable for SharePoint administration.
SharePoint on premises. Customers are in control of the scheduling for deployments, maintenance and modifications to their SharePoint environments in themselves data centers.
SharePoint hybrid. It is a mix of the SharePoint Online subscription and an on-premise version of SharePoint. By using this method, users can integrate SharePoint Online services to the overall SharePoint environment and create the foundation to eventually move SharePoint websites and applications into the cloud.
SharePoint in Azure. Customers can extend their on-premises SharePoint farms to Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure-as-a-service cloud for production, disaster recovery and testing SharePoint Server 2019 environments. This is a variant that is a SharePoint hybrid.
Microsoft SharePoint Versions and the history
SharePoint has been around in a variety of forms since the year 2001. It now has over 200 million users across 250,000 businesses. There were nine SharePoint versions made available since 2001 The most notable of these was SharePoint 2010 Enterprise being the first enterprise-specific version.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 was released in 2010 and has a close connection to Microsoft Office and Active Directory. The advantages of SharePoint 2010 were the capability to build and develop websites without programming expertise. These websites can be utilized to manage collaboration tools, such as discussion boards, document libraries and shared task lists. They also have blogs, calendars shared, wikis , and surveys.
SharePoint 2013 was released as an collaboration platform that could be customized websites in November 2012.
The initial version of SharePoint 2013 provided a more user-friendly interface for users, and also new social media features for enterprises. These features grew on previous capabilities for web management, which included blogs, shared calendars survey, wikis documents libraries, as well as shared task list.
SharePoint 2013 also launched with the community forum that allows users to interact with one with each other and organize discussions. It came with a microblogging option and improved search capabilities and also e-discovery features as well as claims-based authentication and mobile support. The BI tools included in SharePoint 2013 let users set goals and process and to create custom models of data, reports and dashboards.
SharePoint Server 2016 has the identical version of the code that is used in SharePoint Online. This means that on-premises users have the same capabilities for support and performance in the SharePoint server farms due to some architecture changes.
Microsoft SharePoint competitors
Although Microsoft SharePoint is a market leader in document management and collaboration but other cloud-based competitors have also entered the market, such as Box, Dropbox and Google Drive. Beyond document management the market for collaboration software has grown with the emergence of new players in the market, including Salesforce Slack and Chatter and Aurea Jive.
To this, the year 2017, Microsoft released its own collaboration tool, Teams, to complement SharePoint 2016. Teams is still being used together with SharePoint in the present. Vendors like Sitecore Atlassian Confluence and WordPress all have a stake in SharePoint in the market for web-based content management.
