1.1. SharePoint Products and Technologies
SharePoint is a set of products and technologies with informative and collaborative web-based capabilities that help people create, organize, distribute, and maintain stored knowledge. SharePoint web sites and pages are commonly used to build intranet and extranet portals and team sites, as well as public-facing Internet sites. SharePoint is a great platform upon which to build applications and provides many key services in the greater story of the Microsoft Application Platform.
SharePoint shows great maturity in terms of its user interface, database design, and workflow and communication features. It provides a standard interface with standard navigation, enabling users to focus on tools and information, not on learning how to navigate new menu controls. SharePoint helps resolve database and business logic issues by providing a powerful complement to structured data—that is, a managed environment to store unstructured data that gets the information and business rules onto the network and out of local Excel files. SharePoint takes advantage of the first workflow platform built into an operating system and makes it easy for developers and power users to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to automate business processes.
SharePoint integrates with IM and email, though you will still want Office Communications Server (OCS, formerly LCS) to audit and manage IM messaging as effectively as you manage email. SharePoint reduces the load on email ...
