Frequently Asked SharePoint® Questions
- What is a SharePoint® site?
- A SharePoint site is a tool for collaboration, just like a telephone is a tool for communication, or a meeting is a tool for decision making.
A SharePoint site helps groups of people (whether work teams or social groups) share information and work together. For example, a SharePoint site can help you:
- Coordinate projects, calendars, and schedules.
- Discuss ideas and review documents or proposals.
- Share information and keep in touch with other people.
- What does Microsoft® mean by “Collaboration”?
- Collaboration is fundamentally about people working together, both in real-time and asynchronously. This means sharing ideas and data, sharing calendars, messages, thoughts, impressions, work results, observations, and so much more in a conversation that takes place in a truly abstract way. (ref: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms788699(office.11).aspx)
- What are some of the typical scenarios for which an organization might use Office SharePoint Designer® 2007?
- Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is used in a wide range of industries for a variety of functions and workflow enabled applications, which include:
SharePoint Portal replaces your desktop with web based portal. SharePoint Server offers “My Site” feature aka “My Workspace” for you to customize your own home page. Using this feature you can arrange web parts and quick links (Quick Launch) that help you do your routine job more quickly. You can set hot links to quickly access your power point presentation or office document from shared document library, or links, blogs, surveys etc to have information accessible on a simple mouse-click. And best part is all this is done within a web based managed IT environment so that your work and portal customization stay aligned with corporate goals and objectives and SharePoint portal helps you keep updated with latest and greatest news and happenings within your company.
It is very important for corporation to ensure that critical information is not being published on public domain that violates data privacy policies and procedures of the company. SharePoint offers integrated security environment for your corporation to include your network users (thru seamless Active Directory integration) so that portal can be access by legitimate users only. On top of that, it has various levels and types of security roles such as contributor, read only and administrator that will help you structure security access to your business users based on their designation and position within the company. SharePoint intranet/extranet portal can also be run under secure socket layer (SSL) enabled server to ensure 128 bit data encryption, which is popularly used by many e-commerce and web applications.
SharePoint can also synchronize with Shared calendar from your outlook. This is a very important feature used by team members working on a project from distance locations or offshore regions. Project manager can schedule calendar according to team member working on specific location along with his/her availability status within shared project calendar web part, which in turn provides up-to-date status of team member’s availability to each other.
Small to large size companies are having a shared drive to store hundreds of thousand of document scattered among hundreds of folders and sub-folders. Only way to search them is to use windows explorer search. SharePoint provides a systematic document library that imitates your windows explorer folder structure with search capability to find a document by file name, content and other business metadata information attached with the document such as keywords, description and other log. On top of all, it provides built-in versioning and remote accessibility via web. Similarly, SharePoint list is wonderful way of to replace your hundreds of excel lists with limited accessibility via your active directory security on web.