Get Started with SharePoint Development
The terms SharePoint and Office 365 space aren’t relatively new. In fact, I have come across many of you (former techies) who haven’t heard of the same. Keeping that in mind, I have come up with this 10 min read that emphasizes how to manage SharePoint and Office 365 now!
Define SharePoint
Mainly accessed through a browser, SharePoint is a web-based application that provides a secure place to organize, store, and share information. After so many years of its existence, the platform seems to be no longer limited to being a simple collaboration and document management. It can be used as an intranet, extranet, or a wiki-style website.
Now there are two names often heard in the SharePoint development realm; SharePoint server and SharePoint online. SharePoint Server also is known as on-premise or on-prem is said when you have your very own IT department that manages the servers. Whereas SharePoint online on the other hand is when Microsoft manages and maintains SharePoint servers in their own data center. However, both online, as well as on-premise, are very similar when it comes to Functionality; what makes the difference is the way they are accessed.
Its benefits include
SharePoint empowers expanded profitability and perceivability for data laborers over all verticals in organizations and it’s done in both ways enormous and little. All the highlights of SharePoint are based on intranet-based cross-cooperation empowering secure sharing, content administration, and work process joint effort highlights among numerous others.
At the point when considered as a site coordinated effort stage, SharePoint ends up being very simple to keep up at its crucial level; simple for business clients to comprehend. It is likewise boundlessly adaptable and hugely versatile, there are a wide range of ways that organizations use the stage to acknowledge expanded profitability and rate of profitability.
It has been more than a decade since SharePoint has been increasing the working efficiency of all the fortune 500 companies as an intranet platform crossing all business sectors. Plus, the platform offers a wide range of features that result in making it way easier for people to work together on ad-hoc projects and building up standard business methods for data sharing, report distributing, and recording information.
• Security controls
• Co-authoring
• Versioning
• Integration with exchange
1. Context around documents & folders — Earlier a document storage functionality was folder located on a server somewhere. And one of the obvious reasons leading to an increase in SharePoint development was that it brings context around the folder itself by tracking different versions of the document. In SharePoint it’s not just some file located in a folder; it comprises a wide range of information there.
2. Enable constant communication with all staff — Earlier, I used to send a group email and copy everyone due to which lots and lots of information was misplaced and often disregarded. SharePoint brings joint effort to the table with the goal that all staff can see significant data and correspondence as needs be.
3. Store all information in a central location — The technology brings all the information to one internal place so staff can quickly find the relevant information they need. All you require to do is simply post the message and everyone will be able to access it from there.
With SharePoint, you get the ability to:
• Approve documents even before they are visible
• “Checkout” documents so that there is no other authoring or editing done on them
• Get relevant notifications as soon as the documents are uploaded or changes are made
• Make workflows using if/then logic to automate actions such as moving or emailing documents as well as recording information.
Now have you ever come across the term a SharePoint app? SharePoint applications are combinations that prevail with regards to adding highlights to the standard Collaboration spaces on the stage. However, a few of them are totally out of the box available with the platform but many others that add features and options do not come with the platform but there are many others that add features and options that do not come with the regular SharePoint platform. This may be anything from a library where users can store and exchange documents and files, to schedule modules, to incredible work process applications like Nintex which empower numerous repeatable legitimate activities in SharePoint effortlessly.
Important Terminology for Beginners
#1 Ribbon Feature — With the release of SharePoint 2013, the user interface and navigation came up with a major change; the ribbon feature. It allows you to perform functions and controls seamlessly by displaying many tools and commands. The option keeps on changing depending on what you are working on.
#2 Site Contents — Site contents displays all of the contents and subsites that have been added to your site. Here you can even add apps such as document libraries, lists, and many other apps. Even if you don’t add anything, the empty site will incorporate blank out-of-the-box content.
#3 Site Settings — Site settings comprises of general settings that can assist you administer the site. The general settings are divided into the following categories: — User and permissions, web design galleries, site administration, look and feel site actions, and site collection administration settings. All you need to know is where to find the settings that were just listed.
Understanding SharePoint Sites
Mentioned on the SharePoint intranet where groups can without much of a stretch work together, search, and spare critical data. Representatives can without much of a stretch welcome others to deal with a site nearby them, conceding endorsement dependent on department, geography, common tasks and the list goes on.
Earlier data points were scattered across organizations hiding in desperate employee inboxes, hard drives, or laptops and now they are all together as well as all actionable.
Gone are the days when people do not feel the need for clunky and outdated filling systems; all thanks to the rise in SharePoint development. There was a time when things seemed to be pretty much challenging as one needed to shift through digital files to locate the specific PowerPoint that you need. This is the point at which the SharePoint search tool came into being. At the point when you consider how much information your organization makes on an ordinary premise, the principle thought of navigating documents can trigger a stress headache.
So what needs to be done is by entering keywords that you are looking for, the tool displays the files you need whether it’s a slideshow or an Excel sheet or an audio/visual file or a word doc. These can be found on an instant basis.
Lists, libraries, and columns
List and libraries are the two major pillars of SharePoint. Here I would like to emphasize how users can organize content within them.
SharePoint Lists — As the name implies, whatever content created in SharePoint will be saved in the form of a list. Compared to an outstanding spreadsheet, a SharePoint list contains headings with underlying data rows. For example, sales groups may hold a list in the form of a list of all prospective customers.
Now you must be wondering why we can’t simply use a spreadsheet instead of getting into all this. Well, one of the prime explanations behind utilizing the tool is that SharePoint lets you communicate with the information in progressively powerful and vivid manners where experts can get to, alter, add to or update the rundown without beginning things without any preparation or even connection and synchronize the information to Microsoft outlook and individual clients. Aside from this, they can likewise compose courses of events and assignments for increasingly productive tasks for the executives.
SharePoint Libraries — Unlike SharePoint lists, SharePoint libraries are containing space for your team’s individual lists. For any customer, associate, or even internal department one could easily have a separate library. When the users click on the library they will approach the substance and all the reports related with that focus.
SharePoint Columns — As soon as you open your lists and libraries, you will find data automatically organized into multiple columns. Consider these columns as file tags that assist in adding extra information to the document, categorize documents into lists, organize documents for effective storage and search functions.
By doling out various classifications; you can filter, sort, and gathering the information in a progressively multifaceted manner. As it becomes way easier for the user to locate.
SharePoint Online: Using it the right way — One of the finest ways to use the technology is considering a reliable SharePoint development company that knows what all can be done out-of-the-box and without coding.
Use metadata to tag and find your documents — Many of you have this misconception of using folders to store all the files in different organizers and drawers. But metadata can quickly tag the documents so that they can be found quickly.
By choosing folder structure although the documents will be found in one place physically stored at a time but with metadata, you can add multiple tags to each document making it way easier to find content with different search parameters
Centralize and reuse — Metadata is stored with the help of columns. And it doesn’t matter what kind of column you choose to create whether it is created with a document library or list which can be reused somewhere else or configurations are centralized or reusable across a site collection.
Therefore, wherever possible, I also suggest using site columns, so that they can be reused.
Design a site architecture that accounts for the 5000 list view threshold — Many of you are found complaining that SharePoint has 5000 items limit which is not true at all. The limit of documents in a document library is not a limit; its a view threshold because it hurts performance. So when you get more than 5,000 things, SharePoint quits demonstrating them to you. Keep in mind: everything is put away within SQL Server — there’s questions engaged with this.
You have to design your site engineering so you don’t hit that number for an archive library. Or then again — if you must choose between limited options — include a type of ordering and channel sections that is you’re utilizing.
Go to your SharePoint settings again, to your Library settings. Have you at any point addressed what this is? This is not web crawler for SQL Server.
What this permits you to do is pick which segment will be listed so that SQL Server can manufacture a file for that data and not need to question inevitably. This lets you pull much more data in your rundown — undeniably over 5,000 things. Be that as it may, you need to set this up before you hit as far as possible.
Do not replace SharePoint with a relational database — Yes you heard it right, SharePoint isn’t a spot to supplant your social databases. What you have to take a gander at is the means by which to associate outside information to your SharePoint.
Assign permission to groups instead of users — First of all never give authorization straightforwardly to an individual client. Never do this. Never do this. Never do this. Continuously offer authorizations to groups.
At whatever point you change the participation of a SharePoint group, whenever search passes with an incremental crawl, it will dispatch a full slither to recalculate the whole access control list — which is going to bring hours and hinder your condition. You don’t need to drive full crawls.
Just offer consents to SharePoint gatherings. What’s more, the individuals from the SharePoint gatherings should be Active Directory gatherings, not singular clients. It’s best practice.
