SharePoint is a set of software that helps people in an organization to work together via the Web. Companies use it to build and run internal websites, also known as intranets, for departments, project teams, the whole company and individual employees.
SharePoint sites makes Word, Excel and PowerPoint files shareable so different people can edit them. It also has a search engine that combs through documents and websites in the corporate network.
“If you talk to CIOs [chief information officers]: What is your pain point? ‘It’s collaboration. People are coming to me constantly saying they want to collaborate better, more easily; they want to find data in a more structured fashion,’ ” she said. “SharePoint has created a great position for itself in being able to answer some of those pain points.”
Since the last release in 2007, SharePoint 2010 has added features for social networking, enterprise search and cloud computing.
The new SharePoint turns My Sites, a feature for individual employees to set up a personal website in a corporate network, into sites that look more like Facebook and LinkedIn. Workers can profess areas of expertise, update their status, follow each other, tag documents and even “like” documents.
Windows Phone 7, the upcoming mobile-phone platform that’s expected to start selling during the holidays, will have a mobile version of SharePoint 2010. The 2010 version of SharePoint has also been redesigned to include the ribbonlike toolbar that was added to Office 2007.
SharePoint’s biggest competitor is IBM Lotus Notes. But other companies are launching products to both nibble away at and leapfrog past Microsoft.
