SharePoint is a web application that integrates with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies substantially between organizations. Over three quarters of Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint, but they're not all using it for the same thing. The tricky thing about explaining what SharePoint does is that it isn't any one software program but rather a platform for several different kinds of programs. SharePoint isn't something you buy and install on your own desktop but rather a back-end system that ties all your employees' PCs and mobile devices together, allowing them all to communicate and synchronize their efforts. The basic goal is to make it possible for a company with hundreds of employees spread all over the country or globally to work with the same level of agility and coordination as a company with ten people working out of a single office.

"Out-of-the-box (OOTB)" functionality includes:

INTRANET PORTAL

This is an internally facing site everyone in your company can sign in to and find news, announcements, scheduled tasks, and access to a variety of information. Dashboards can be customized by department and role, and different levels of access can be granted to make sure everyone from interns to CFOs can get the information they need about anything from employee performance to client history to the status of ongoing projects. SharePoint also provides tools for setting up employee social networking platforms and company wikis. A company's intranet portal servers as a kind of meeting room and planning seminar that everyone in the company visits and attends throughout their workdays.

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT & SHARING

SharePoint gives businesses a shared space to store documents so they’re not locked away on any one person’s hard drive. Documents stored on SharePoint can be accessed by anyone in the company-unless the administrator has limited access to a smaller group. This means that you won’t have to travel to multiple offices or wait for multiple emails to get all the files you need for a task. SharePoint also allows you and your coworkers to work simultaneously on a single document, saving previous versions, and tracking updates. So you avoid having to create several different versions of the document by emailing it to all the people whose input you need.

COLLABORATION

It’s easy for everyone to stay up-to-date and coordinate their efforts on projects when you’re talking about a dozen or so people working out of the same office building. SharePoint is designed to extend this ease of interaction beyond small groups in single locations. You can sign in to SharePoint from any desktop or mobile device, and you can use it to have constant access to information on project statuses, client histories, the locations and schedules of coworkers, and anything else related to the project.

EXTRANET PORTAL

SharePoint can be used to set up a site that you share with outside businesses you’re partnering with. Whether the other business is part of your supply chain or simply someone you’re contracting with for a project, you can provide them with access to all the information they may need from your company while giving them a place to upload all the information you may need about theirs.

WEBSITES

You can use SharePoint to build and manage a publicly facing site as well. As a website Content Management System (CMS), SharePoint allows you to sign in and make changes to your pages. You can update information, add text or graphics, and create new pages.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

The comprehensive access SharePoint provides to your business's data also makes it possible to find countless ways to use all that information to make better decisions. SharePoint makes it easy to search through all your company's files, but beyond that it can help you discover larger patterns, and it can display trends over time or relationships between different inputs with intuitively graspable graphs and charts. Once you've decided on a new course of action, SharePoint can also be intstumental in getting everyone company-wide onboard with its implementation.

What really makes SharePoint such a powerful tool though is that it doesn't simply rely on all the features and functions it provides out-of-the-box. With custom development, SharePoint can be customized to streamline pretty much any aspect of business collaboration you can think of.

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SharePoint can refer to one or more SharePoint products or technologies, including:

SHAREPOINT ONLINE

A cloud-based service, hosted by Microsoft, for businesses of all sizes. Instead of installing and deploying SharePoint Server on-premises, any business can subscribe to an Office 365 plan or to the standalone SharePoint Online service. Your employees can then create sites to share documents and information with colleagues, partners, and customers.

SHAREPOINT SERVER

Organizations can deploy and manage SharePoint Server on-premises or through a dedicated cloud offering. It includes all the features of SharePoint Foundation, and it also offers additional features and capabilities, such as Enterprise Content MAnagement, Business Intelligence, Enterprise, Search, Personal Sites, and Newsfeeds.

SHAREPOINT FOUNDATION

No longer available separately as of the SharePoint 2016 release, SharePoint Foundation was the underlying technology for all SharePoint sites. SharePoint Foundation (formerly Windows SharePoint Services) is free for on-premises deployment. You can use SharePoint Foundation to create many types of sites where you can collaborate on webpages, documents, lists, calendars, and data.

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SharePoint has been a phenomenal success for Microsoft and has become their fastest selling server based product ever. According to Microsoft, it has algo generated in excess of one billion dollars in sales revenue; while the only other Microsoft Server products to generate this level of revenue are SQL Server and Exchange Server. Over one hundred million SharePoint licenses have been sold to date worldwide and industry analysts such as Forester Research and Gartner rank SharePoint as a clear leader in a number of different technology markets including Search, Enterprise Content Management, Social Computing, Collaboration, Information Access and Horizontal Portals. While the SharePoint success story goes on-and-on; many organizations struggle to realize the full value from their investments in SharePoint.

The most common causes of SharePoint failure include:

CORPORATE POLITICS

Politics is always the largest barrier to SharePoint success. There are a number of reasons why SharePoint projects can become a political football. Firstly, SharePoint has many potential uses and that can often lead to it being perceived as a threat. For example at a major international insurance company an IT led SharePoint collaboration project lost its $700,000 budget because the Marketing and Communications department responsible for the existing Intranet felt threatened by the introduction of SharePoint which they believed could eventually have become a replacement for their existing Intranet. They spoke to the right people and the collaboration initiative didn't win project approval. Secondly SharePoint can be a catalyst for extensive change within an organization including changes to power structures, and processes. This type of change is usually accompanied by political maneuvering. Thirdly, SharePoint requires different areas of the business to work together, sometimes to the extent of pooling departmental budgets in Enterprise level platforms and solutions. SharePoint is a shared infrastructure and without some ground rules scuffles usually emerge.

ORGANIZATIONS NOT KNOWING WHAT SHAREPOINT IS

Can you clearly describe to someone what SharePoint is because not many people can. Simply put, if you don't know what something is then you're going to struggle to use it successfully; and if you can't write down on a piece of paper what it it, then you don't know.

LACK OF INFORMATION & KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SKILLS

SharePoint is about three (3) things; people, processes, and information. Of course you need experienced IT professionals to design, build, and maintain the technical solution, but you need an information and knowledge management professional to design the business solution first. Have you got someone who fits this description on your SharePoint project? If you're working with a Microsoft partner, then do they have the soft skills and experience as well as the technical skills?

POOR OR LACK OF VISION

Many organizations embark on SharePoint initiatives without clearly understanding what they are trying to achieve. For example here's an extract from a client talking about their aims for a "collaboration" project;.

"In essence, staff want to work better together, to share knowledge, to work informally, to communicate, to connect across boundaries and to innovate. They want to move from a set of happy families defined by organizational structure to a networked community".

This type of high-level and abstract narrative can be a useful motivational tool because the lack of detail invites us to form our own ideas as to how this vision might be realized. Although we might all intuitively agree with the vision at first, we soon need more details. If you can't answer the questions, "What are we trying to achieve?", and "How will we know when we've done it?", then you're not ready to start.

Many organizations struggle to define a clear business case or to measure success of SharePoint initiatives. For example at a major UK retailer the Communications team struggled to gain approval for their Intranet because the $150,000 per annum value realization from printing and distributing savings was outweighed by the $900,000 cost of deploying the SharePoint platform and purchasing licenses. Although they intuitively knew that there were long term gains to be realized from the investment beyond the reduction in printing costs, they found it difficult to quantify and articulate these intangible benefits in the boardroom.

LACK OF EXECUTIVE SUPPORT

Executives are in a unique position to be able to drive change in an organizatino. Visibly active and participatory Executive support gives credibility to a program or initiative. Without such support SharePoint based initiatives can fail either because the proposed projects don't gain approval and funding, or because solutions are delivered but aren't adopted or used by the business.

LACK OF USER ADOPTION

Achieving success with SharePoint requires long lasting changes in the behavior of workers. Weaning information workers off their addiction to email and file shares and away from long established ways of working with line of business applications and Excel is a long term war not a short term battle. For example an international insurance company invested $3.0M in developing and maintaining a SharePoint based portal for underwriters which aggregated information from several line of business systems into a single consolidated user interface. Two years after launch, the IT function estimated that of the 100 potential users of the system, only 8 regularly used it. The others preferred to continue working in the old ways.

INDIVIDUAL CHOICES DERAIL SHAREPOINT INITIATIVES

SharePoint is a shared infrastructure and as such requires agreements on how it should be used and operated. At a technical level a lack of agreed policies, processes and responsibilities can quickly lead to failure of the SharePoint platform. At the business level inconsistencies between the way different departments or teams design the layout, navigation, and structure of their SharePoint sites can make it difficult for users moving between sites.

LACK OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

SharePoint implementations can very quickly become chaotic without the appropriate levels of control and training. Thousands of SharePoint sites can spring up making it difficult for people to find information. People don't know which is the authoritative version of documents. Time and money are wasted as people work on duplicate, un-coordinated developments and customizations. Vital information can be lost as SharePoint sites are deleted in an uncontrolled manner. It is also truism that with SharePoint, "Content is King". Content must be kept up-to-date, accurate, and be easy to find otherwise users will quickly lose confidence in the system. The quality of content relies on the users rather than the IT department.

LACK OF DEFINED REQUIREMENTS

The real value of SharePoint lies not in improving what you are already doing but in changing what you do because you have new capabilities. Simply asking the business what they want, or what their requirements are doesn't seem to work for SharePoint.

If I asked people what they wanted they would just say 'faster horses' - Henry Ford

LACK OF TECHNICAL SKILLS

SharePoint is a vast technology platform comprising of several enterprise class products, and it has the ability to integrate with an almost endless number of external systems and data stores. It requires infrastructure, database administration, data storage, security, software development, and end-user skills. Properly implemented it provides a high performance, scalable and reliable infrastructure. Technical issues such as poor performance, system failure, or extensive down-time will quickly impact upon user confidence and reduce adoption rates.

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PC-era virtualization kicked off in 1987 with Insignia Solutions' SoftPC, which allowed DOS programs to run on Unix workstations. A Mac version that also supported Windows applications appeared in 1989, followed by SoftWindows bundles containing SoftPC and a copy of Windows. Another notable PC virtualization pioneer was Connectix, whose Virtual PC and Virtual Server products were acquired by Microsoft in 2003 and re-released in 2006 and 2004 respectively. VMware, the current market leader in virtualization, released its first product, VMware Workstation, in 1999.

VMware is still widely used today, but the company's most significant releases were arguably its 2001 server virtualization products - GSX Server and ESX Server. GSX Server is an example of a Type 2 (or hosted) hypervisor that, like the Workstation product, runs on top of a conventional operating system. ESX Server is a more efficient Type 1 (or 'bare metal') hypervisor that runs directly on the underlying hardware. From these beginnings, VMware has evolved a market-leading ecosystem of virtualization products based around its vSphere platform.

Virtualization has become the key technology underpinning 'cloud-era' IT infrastructure because the ability to deploy virtual instances of servers, desktop PCs, storage devices and network resources allows existing hardware to be utilized efficiently, and makes for much better manageability, flexibility and scalability.

Enterprise Virtualization includes:

SERVER VIRTUALIZATION

Server virtualization makes perfect sense both for in-house data centers and for service providers in the public cloud. In both cases, utilizing servers to maximum efficiency and having the ability to scale virtual server provision rapidly as workload demand ebbs and flows is vital to keeping costs down and (if you're a service provider) revenues up.

STORAGE VIRTUALIZATION

Storage has always been important, but in the era of Big Data and real-time business analytics, it's becoming a core component of enterprise IT, and one in which virtualization has an increasingly important part to play. The key advantage of storage virtualization, as in other spheres, is to free IT managers from orchestrating multiple units of proprietary hardware by inserting a layer of software - a storage hypervisor - that creates easily manageable virtual 'pools' of efficiently utilized network storage. These days, companies use a wide range of storage hardware, including high-end, mid-range and low-end hard disk arrays, solid-state and hybrid drives and flash memory on PCIe cards. The ability to manage these heterogeneous resources via software that can easily create and migrate virtual disks, and automatically match server workloads to the most appropriate type of storage, is highly desirable. Tiered virtual storage solutions also make vital business tasks like backup and disaster recovery a lot more manageable.

NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION (SDN)

The latest IT infrastructure component to come under the virtualization spotlight is the network. Network virtualization, or Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as it's generally known, decouples the control layer from the physical hardware that routes the network packets. SDN makes it easier for IT managers to configure heterogeneous network components and allows network traffic to be shaped to ensure that, where possible, demaning workloads get the required bandwidth, low latency and quality of service. SDN will often work in conjunction with another developing technology, network fabrics, which are designed to allow any node on the network to connect to any other over multiple physical switches. Some vendors see SDN and network fabrics as tightly integrated, while others - including the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), curator of the OpenFlow SDN protocol - view them as independent.

DESKTOP VIRTUALIZATION (VDI)

Desktop virtualization involves running virtual machines, each with their own desktop OS instance, on a server and accessing them from remote client devices (PCs, notebooks, thin clients, tablets or smartphones) over local- or wide-area networks. There are several deliverty models, ranging from cloud-hosted desktop-as-a-service, to managed hosting, to on-premises deployment. Advantages of desktop virtualization compared to traditional desktop computing include data security (data is stored in the data center rather than on the local device), manageability, wide device support (you can run a virtual desktop on a BYOD tablet or a smartphone if you want to), easier backup and disaster recovery, and lower operational costs when it comes to device troubleshooting, for example. Before desktop virtualization came to prominence there was, and remains, the Terminal Services model, in which multiple remote desktop sessions are hosted by a single server operating system. With Windows Server 2012, Microsoft supports three flavors of desktop virtualization: Personal Desktops(each user gets their own 'stateful' virtual desktop); Pooled Desktops (multiple users share a 'stateless virtual desktop) and Remote Desktop Sessions (formerly known as Terminal Services). Advantages of the terminal services model include rapid application deployment, security and low support costs.

APPLICATION VIRTUALIZATION

Application virtualization decouples the installation of an application from the endpoint that's running it. This can be done via the desktop or server virtualization solutions previously described, or by using application streaming technology: in the latter case, packaged applications are stored on a central server, downloaded over the network and cached on the client. Generally speaking, only a small percentage of an entire application needs to be delivered to the client before it can launch, with additional functionality being delivered on demand. Whatever the delivery model, application virtualization makes for much easier app deployment and management compared to installing and maintaining local installations on multiple endpoints. This is especially true when it comes to tricky areas like licensing and, on client endpoints, application conflicts.

Today's server, storage, network, desktop and application virtualization technologies provide IT managers with the means to create flexible, scalable, manageable and secure infrastructure that utilizes the underlying hardware to maximum efficiency. Some of these technologies - notably software-defined networking - are in the early stages of development while others, such as server virtualization, are mature and widely deployed. IT professionals may still be getting to grips with virtualization in many businesses, and their users and senior management may be a little hazy on the technology and its benefits, but it's here to stay and is undoubtedly the future of business IT.

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Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is the product lifecycle management (governance, development, and maintenance) of application software. AlM encompasses the following disciplines:

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Windows 10 introduces the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which further evolves the Windows Runtime model and brings it into the Windows 10 unified core. As part of the core, the UWP now provides a common app platform available on every device that runs Windows 10. With this evolution, apps that target the UWP can call not only the WinRT APIs that are common to all devices, but also APIs (including Win32 and .NET APIs) that are specific to the device famly the app is running on. The UWP provides a guaranteed core API layer across devices. This means you can create a single app package that can be installed onto a wide range of devices. And, with that single app package, the Windows Store provides a unified distribution channel to reach all the device types your app can run on.

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