What is Microsoft SharePoint? According to Wikipedia: “SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and its usage varies substantially among organizations.”

With SharePoint you can set up an Intranet site for your group of people. It is essentially an internal website. It’s a place where your team can go and share. You can share files so that each person has access to that file. You can set up shared Calendars, Lists, and newsposts. It is about sharing and being informed.

Learning SharePoint for Beginners

You might wish to have a look at the YouTube video called How to use Microsoft SharePoint. It is by Kevin Stratvert and is about 22 minutes long. You might consider taking an online course to learn even more.

SharePoint Versions

There are two types of SharePoint: online and on-premises.

• SharePoint On-Premise – your data is at the company location on your own servers
• SharePoint Online – your data is in the cloud on Microsoft servers

For the on-premise versions, there are Standard and Enterprise. Enterprise has more features than the Standard version. The online version has everything that the Enterprise version has. It is recommended to use the online version unless you are against using online versions of software for security reasons.

To get the SharePoint software you need either a work or school Microsoft 365 account. Once you start SharePoint you go the the Start page. Below is a screenshot of Kevin Statvert’s example in his video mentioned above.

In the above screenshot under the Frequent Site section it looks like Kevin is a member of three team sites (Live, Work and Give) and a member of one Communication site called Communication site. Above that, you can see some of the news from the sites Kevin is a member of. Since there could be a lot of news items, you may want to save it for later by clicking on the bookmark icon at the bottom of the news item and it will be added to the Saved for Later section on the left. In the Frequent Sites section you can click the star icon at the top of the site to add it to your Following section at the top left of the page.

In the top left corner you can create a new site.

Sites

When it comes to sites there are two different types of SharePoint sites: team sites and communication sites. Communication sites are for everyone in your organization and team sites are for a specific group of people in your organization. You can have as many sites as you like. It’s very flexible. You can have a company-wide site, a department site, a regional site, a special project site, a site for the board of directors, a site for top executives, a hobby site, a site for those people that specialize in a specific industry, and a social site.

Modern vs. Classic

There are two “flavours” of SharePoint. By default SharePoint is Modern. Each looks different from the other. There are some features and apps that only exist in the old classic and do not yet exist in the Modern version. Eventually, all of these apps and features will be available in the Modern version.