| Microsoft SharePoint | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
.svg) | |||||||||||
 | |||||||||||
| Developer | Microsoft Corporation | ||||||||||
| Initial release | 28 March 2001; 24 years ago (2001-03-28) | ||||||||||
| Stable release(s)[±] | |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
| Operating system | Server:[5][6]Client: | ||||||||||
| Platform | x86-64 | ||||||||||
| Available in | Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh[7] | ||||||||||
| Type | Content management system | ||||||||||
| License | Proprietary software | ||||||||||
| Website | www | ||||||||||
SharePoint is aweb-basedcollaborative platform primarily used for building corporateintranets, document and content management, and file sharing. Developed byMicrosoft, It is primarily used as part of the hosted serviceMicrosoft 365, but it can also be hosted by an IT department or service provider, using anon premises version called "Server Edition". Launched in 2001,[8] it was initially bundled withWindows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and then finally renamed SharePoint.
According to Microsoft, as of December 2020[update], SharePoint had over 200 million users.[9]
The most common uses of SharePoint include:
SharePoint allows storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting onelectronic documents and records. Many of the functions in this product are designed around various legal, information management, and process requirements in organizations. SharePoint also provides search and "graph" functionality.[10][11] SharePoint allowscollaborative real-time editing[12] and encrypted/information-rights-managed[13] synchronization by providing the underlying technical infrastructure forMicrosoft OneDrive.[14]
SharePoint is often used to replace or supplement an existing corporatefile server, and is typically coupled with anenterprise content management policy.[15]
A SharePointintranet orintranet portal is a way to centralize access to enterprise information and applications. It is a tool that helps an organization manage its internal communications, applications andinformation more easily. By providing the tools to capture and shareexplicit knowledge in an organisation, Microsoft claims organizational improvements inemployee training,employee engagement,business process management,organizational communication, andcrisis management.[16][17] These capabilites are usually centered around "Communication sites" (previously, "Publishing sites").[18]
SharePoint contains team collaborationgroupware capabilities, including:document / file management,project scheduling (integrated withOutlook andProject), and other information tracking.[19] This capability is centred around "team sites". Team sites are created whenever aMicrosoft Teams team is created, but they are also created independently of these, and have been a feature of SharePoint since 2001.
SharePoint sites are the hosting infrastructure forOneDrive For Business, which allows storage and synchronization of an individual's personal work documents, as well as public/private file sharing of those documents.
Historically, SharePoint's Server Edition's custom development capabilities provided an additional layer of services that allowed for rapid prototyping of integrated (typicallyline-of-business) web applications.[20] SharePoint provided developers with integration into corporate directories and data sources through standards such asREST/OData/OAuth. Enterprise application developers used SharePoint's security and information management capabilities across a variety of development platforms and scenarios.
SharePoint is primarily configured through a web browser. Capabilities for the management of a SharePoint site are "security trimmed", meaning that editing capabilities simply appear in place when permissions are granted. A "Site Collection Administrator" has the highest level of permission to manage an individual SharePoint sites.
An administration center for configuring organisation-wide settings is usually available to SharePoint Administrators, who are responsible for managing the underlying infrastructure.
In the cloud, this is called the "SharePoint Admin Center". Features include:
In Server edition, This is called the "central administration site", and it contains significantly more features are available for the administration and health of the SharePoint server farm. Because they are not operated as a shared resource, Features like the search crawler are more controllable and configurable.
Microsoft SharePoint's Server and SharePoint Online have multiple command line orPowerShell utilities available to ease administration.
SharePoint Designer is a deprecated product that provided 'advanced editing' capabilities for HTML/ASPX pages, but remains the primary method of editing SharePoint's legacy workflows. A significant subset of HTML editing features were removed in Designer 2013, and the product is expected to be deprecated in 2016–7.[27]
Microsoft 365 provides legal compliance features through theirMicrosoft Purview product,Microsoft Intune Endpoint Management, and the SharePoint admin center, where retention policies and sharing policies can be administered by the SharePoint Administrator.[28]
Some legacy features such as in-place retention can be configured without the additional cost of Purview.[29]
SharePoint's architecture enables a 'least-privileges' execution permission model.[30]
SharePoint Central Administration (the CA) provides a complete centralized management interface for web and service applications in the SharePoint farm, includingActive Directory account management for web and service applications. In the event of the failure of the CA, Windows PowerShell is typically used on the CA server to reconfigure the farm.
Microsoft SharePoint Server Edition has a manual patching arrangement that is widely regarded as convoluted and complex.[31] Over the years, it has been subject to numerous critical security vulnerabilities, which are frequently exploited in the wild.[32] As a consequence, is no longer considered best practice to host SharePoint server edition with public facing internet access.
Azero-day attack targeting government agencies, universities, and businesses in the United States, China, and Europe usingon-prem SharePoint servers started on 18 July 2025.[33][34] The attackers exploited a weakness dubbed "ToolShell" (CVE-2025-53770) allowing them to take control of SharePoint servers and gaining Machine Keys.[35] Those keys can then be used to install whatever an attacker wants, including back doors for future attacks.[36] Microsoft issued updates for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition and SharePoint Server 2019 on 20 July 2025.[35][37] ACISA alert was issued on 20 July 2025.[38][39] Microsoft stated the exploit was used byChinese state-sponsored advanced persistent threat groups dubbed Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon and Storm-2603 to breach servers of theNational Nuclear Security Administration and other organizations.[40][41][42]
SharePoint Server Edition can be scaled down to operate entirely from one developer machine, or scaled up to be managed across hundreds of machines.[43]
A SharePoint farm is a logical grouping of SharePoint servers that share common resources.[44] A farm typically operates stand-alone, but can also subscribe to functions from another farm, or provide functions to another farm. Each farm has its own central configuration database, which is managed through either a PowerShell interface, or a Central Administration website (which relies partly on PowerShell's infrastructure). Each server in the farm is able to directly interface with the central configuration database. Servers use this to configure services (e.g.IIS, windows features, database connections) to match the requirements of the farm, and to report server health issues, resource allocation issues, etc...
Web applications (WAs) are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm. A web application is associated primarily withIIS configuration. A web application consists of a set of access mappings or URLs defined in the SharePoint central management console, which are replicated by SharePoint across every IIS Instance (e.g. Web Application Servers) configured in the farm.
Service applications provide granular pieces of SharePoint functionality to other web and service applications in the farm. Examples of service applications include the User Profile Sync service, and the Search Indexing service. A service application can be turned off, exist on one server, or be load-balanced across many servers in a farm. Service Applications are designed to have independent functionality and independent security scopes.[43]
A site collection is a hierarchical group of 'SharePoint Sites'. Each web application must have at least one site collection. Site collections share common properties (detailed here), common subscriptions to service applications, and can be configured with unique host names.[45] A site collection may have a distinct content databases, or may share a content database with other site collections in the same web application.[43]
SharePoint evolved from projects codenamed "Office Server" and "Tahoe" during theOffice XP development cycle.
"Office Server" evolved out of theFrontPage and Office Server Extensions and "Team Pages". It targeted simple, bottom-up collaboration.
"Tahoe", built on shared technology with Exchange and the "Digital Dashboard", targeted top-down portals, search and document management. The searching and indexing capabilities of SharePoint came from the "Tahoe" feature set. The search and indexing features were a combination of the index and crawling features from the Microsoft Site Server family of products and from the query language of Microsoft Index Server.[46]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)Microsoft development tools | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Development environments |
| ||||||
| Languages | |||||||
| APIs and frameworks |
| ||||||
| Database |
| ||||||
| Source control | |||||||
| Testing and debugging | |||||||
| Delivery | |||||||
