What is SharePoint?

Before you talk about SharePoint development, it's important to say what SharePoint is.

During my work, I often encounter situations where customers don't know much about SharePoint. There are customers who say that SharePoint sucks, what Dropbox can do, and that SharePoint can't do it, and it's obvious that this kind of customer treats SharePoint as a cloud disk. So what is SharePoint?

According to Microsoft, SharePoint is an enterprise-wide collaboration platform. That's a little abstract:) Let's take a look at the history of SharePoint. In fact, at the very beginning, SharePoint wasn't such a big guy.

1. Development history of SharePoint.

1) In fact, at the beginning of SharePoint, it was just a small product, starting with SharePoint Team Service 1.0, which was part of FrontPage.

2) later released SharePoint Team Service2.0. The biggest difference from the first version is that all the documents are stored in the database, not ordinary file documents stored in the directory structure. and version control is supported.

3) Later, SharePoint Team Service 3.0 was released. We typically call it Moss (Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server), which starts to support WFF and. NET 3.0. The release of this version and Office 20,071 marks the birth of Microsoft's next-generation enterprise collaboration software platform.

4) Microsoft subsequently released SharePoint 2010.

5) Now the latest version is SharePoint 2013. This version is exactly what SharePoint is deploying on Office365.

2. What is SharePoint?

In the eyes of different people, there is a different understanding of SharePoint. In some people's eyes, SharePoint is a document storage center. Others believe that SharePoint is where information is shared. Or think of SharePoint as a tool to quickly create sites, and others to think of SharePoint as a platform for building enterprise applications.

In fact, these views are not wrong. Different people's eyes, different usage, you can think of SharePoint as a different thing. For those who use SharePoint as a document store, we understand that he will compare SharePoint with Dropbox, because he doesn't fully understand SharePoint, but simply understands SharePoint as a document storage center.

In fact, SharePoint can actually implement document storage. And, in the early days of SharePoint, it was really used for document storage. But today's SharePoint is far more than a document store center.

So, back to the initial question: What exactly is SharePoint? SharePoint is an enterprise-level enterprise collaboration platform. With this platform, you can share documents, you can work with coworkers to accomplish a task, you can automatically trigger a workflow, and so on, you can even interact and communicate with other products and platforms.

Most of the features mentioned above, in fact, through the management and design of SharePoint Administrator, basically can be achieved. However, if you want to implement some of the more advanced custom features that match your actual business, you'll need two development of SharePoint. So, next, we'll look at the structure of SharePoint from the perspective of the SharePoint developer.

3. The SharePoint structure in the developer's eyes.

If you are looking at SharePoint from a developer's perspective, the basic structure of SharePoint is as shown here:

That is, every document in SharePoint, every item, every site, and so on, can be accessed through its corresponding. NET object.

So the question is, how can you interact with SharePoint as a developer?

4. How do developers interact with SharePoint?

1) from the date that SharePoint supports two development, the most traditional way to interact with SharePoint is the SharePoint server-side programming model. All server-side objects are preceded by an SP. Like SPSite, SPWeb.

2) Since SharePoint 2010, SharePoint has introduced the Csom access pattern (Client-side object model) so that access code for SharePoint objects is no longer limited to the need to run in SharePoint Server side, but makes requests through the client, which enables access to the SharePoint server.

In SharePoint2010, it's just support. NET client. The client object for SharePoint is essentially a one by one-based relationship with its server-side objects, just removing the SP prefix. For example, the server-side site collection is SPSite, then the client is site.

Only the Csom access pattern is proposed because SharePoint is already a platform that needs to interact with other systems, and if code quality is not high if you run custom code directly on the SharePoint server to access SharePoint Server objects , it can cause a sharp drop in SharePoint performance. Some customers who don't understand will blame SharePoint products for problems. To alleviate this problem, in addition to the SharePoint farm solution, we introduced the SharePoint sandbox solution (sandbox solution) in the server-side programming model.

In a sandboxed solution, customer-defined server-side code runs in a separate process and is isolated from the SharePoint standalone application pool process w3wp.exe to some extent mitigating the impact on SharePoint servers. The SharePoint structure for Sandboxed Solutions is as follows:

3) Since SharePoint 2010, we have also introduced SharePoint Powershell. This allows developers to write PowerShell script to enable access and settings for SharePoint.

4) Since SharePoint 2013, in addition to support. NET client, it also introduces rest support, enabling support for multiple types of clients.

5) in SharePoint 2013, SharePoint has introduced a new concept Sharpoint App (SharePoint program). Compared to Web Part in traditional SharePoint, the SharePoint app is a lightweight program that implements access to SharePoint through the Csom. As a result, SharePoint apps can be deployed in 3 types:

A) SharePoint Host (that is, SharePoint Web App is deployed on SharePoint server, the Web app can only access SharePoint via JS, CSS, HTML5 these client technologies)

b) Auto-host (that is, SharePoint Web App is automatically deployed on Windows Azure websites that SharePoint automatically creates for you, and Web apps that are deployed on Windows Azure websites can pass. NET technology and SharePoint interaction)

c) Provider host (that is, SharePoint Web App is deployed on any server you customize, either Windows Azure or your on-premise server, or your PHP, etc.). Can be interacted with by any technology and SharePoint)

In my opinion, Microsoft is the portal to make SharePoint a collaborative platform. With this unified portal, we can integrate SharePoint with other systems, and these so-called "other systems" may be enterprise applications deployed anywhere. Of course, Microsoft wants "other systems" to be deployed on Microsoft Azure to create a full Windows Azure-based SharePoint-Portal platform.

So, those of you who think that SharePoint Online is just a document store center, seem to be a little bit dismissive of SharePoint, OH:)

Related resources:

Microsoft Office 365 free Trial Links:

Https://portal.office.com/Signup/MainSignUp15.aspx? dap=false&quoteid=79a957e9-ad59-4d82-b787-a46955934171&ali=1&alo=1&lc=1033

What is SharePoint?