result is that a person’s view of SharePoint is greatly affected by how that person uses the product. It’s important to keep this in mind when talking with people about SharePoint. If you ask ten people to define SharePoint, you’re likely to get ten different answers, as illustrated in Figure 1-8.
FIGURE 1-8: There are many different ways to define SharePoint.
SharePoint is a platform, so the user roles an organization defines depend on the organization itself. Here are some examples of the possible roles of users in SharePoint:
Anonymous visitors: People who browse to a website that just happens to be using the SharePoint platform. Anonymous visitors just see SharePoint as a website and nothing else.
SharePoint visitors: People who browse to the site and authenticate so that SharePoint knows who they are. Visitors might still just see a SharePoint site as any other website, except they notice their name in the top-right corner of the screen and know they must log in to reach the site. Visitors might not use any of the features of SharePoint, however, and just browse the information posted to the website.
SharePoint casual users: People who know all the company documents are posted to SharePoint and know they can upload their own documents to their personal SharePoint site. Casual users might realize that they are using SharePoint, or they might just think of the platform as the name the organization has given to SharePoint. For example, we have seen organizations give their web platform tool names such as Source or Smart or Knowledge Center. SharePoint is the name of the web platform product from Microsoft, which is often unknown by users of a tool built on the SharePoint platform.
SharePoint users: People who are familiar with SharePoint and its main features. SharePoint users often perform various administrator functions even if they don’t realize it. For example, they might be responsible for an app that stores all the company policies and procedures. Thus, they are an app administrator. Users might also be responsible for a site for a small team, in which case they are site administrators. As you can see, a user can play many different roles.
SharePoint power users: Power users are not only familiar with the main SharePoint features and functionality but also dive deeper. Power users might be familiar with the functionality differences of different features, routing documents using workflows, and building site hierarchies. Power users might also be a site collection administrator and thus responsible for a collection of sites.
SharePoint technical administrators: Technical administrators are people from the IT department who are responsible for SharePoint. Technical administrators are less concerned with using SharePoint for business and more concerned about making sure the platform is available and responsive. An administrator might play many different roles. For example, farm administrators are responsible for all the servers that make up SharePoint, such as web front end servers, applications servers, and database servers. Specialized database administrators focus just on the database components. There are even administrative roles for specific services, such as the search service or user profile service. Depending on the size of the SharePoint implementation, these technical administrator roles might be filled by a single overworked individual or a team with highly specialized skills.
More than a website
SharePoint is called a web platform, as opposed to just a website, because of the sheer amount of functionality and capabilities it includes. In fact, if you already administer a SharePoint website, you can easily create a new website right within the existing website. You can also develop websites with an extraordinary amount of functionality without writing a single line of code. The result is a platform for websites instead of just a single website. The multitude of features and the complexity of the product are what lead to confusion.
One thing that makes SharePoint so special is that you don’t need to be a computer genius or even a power user to be a website developer and administrator in SharePoint. You just need to be comfortable using a computer.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND SHAREPOINT
SharePoint has some similarities with social media services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but differs from them in its intended use. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are designed for consumers as a whole, whereas SharePoint is designed for individual organizations.
SharePoint has many of the social and profile features of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but these features are only available to people within your organization. In other words, only the people in your organization can use the features of SharePoint. Although SharePoint includes social and profile features, it also includes much, much more. Think of SharePoint as a product for business and productivity that also happens to have the social and profile features of sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Taking a Peek at a SharePoint Site
The primary purpose of SharePoint is to provide websites to members of an organization or employees of a company. When you create a website, you select which type of template you want to use to create the site. The dialog box shown in Figure 1-9 shows the different templates available.
FIGURE 1-9: The dialog box used to select a website template when creating a SharePoint site.
