Core Capabilities

SharePoint Community Wiki

SharePoint 2010 can be analyzed in terms of its capabilities. These capabilities are:

Composites – SharePoint provides a large number of tools and technologies. However, it is by allowing new tools and technologies to be created by combining these existing facilities that SharePoint becomes a powerful platform for addressing business problems. Frequently, business challenges can be addressed without the need for any custom code by using SharePoint Designer to implement code-free solutions.

Content – SharePoint provides Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) facilities. This allows cradle-to-grave management of content within SharePoint while allowing people to use the Office productivity tools with which they are already comfortable. SharePoint allows an organization to implement Records Management in a variety of ways including both in-place and through a Record Center. It provides facilities for consistently applying management policies to content, allowing content to be preserved and subsequently disposed according to approved organization policy.

Sites – A SharePoint site is a basic unit of administration for a SharePoint Web Site. Although there are many different types of SharePoint sites, including document center, record center, wiki, search site, and blogs, they may all be administered and managed with the same set of tools.

Insights – SharePoint allows access to business intelligence information in order to improve the quality of decision-making. Insights – the name given to this capability – allows information from a variety of sources including external databases, line-of-business applications and the Internet, to be combined and analyzed to provide tailored information.

Search – SharePoint 2010 Search provides facilities to allow people to find the information that they need. SharePoint Search recognizes that executing a search query usually represents the beginning rather than the end of a search activity. Through a combination of search refinement and relevance, SharePoint 2010 Search allows a set of search results to be filtered and processed until the right information is returned.

Communities – SharePoint is designed to make it easy for people to work together. Naturally, it is easier to work together when there is a place to do this, and this is what the Communities capability of SharePoint provides. As well as allowing collaboration on deliverable items such as content, SharePoint Communities provides facilities for people to find expertise and like-minded colleagues.