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SharePoint

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SharePoint
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SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform primarily used for building corporate intranets, document and content management, and file sharing. Developed by Microsoft, It is primarily used as part of the hosted service Microsoft 365, but it can also be hosted by an IT department or service provider, using an on premises version called "Server Edition". Launched in 2001,[4] it was initially bundled with Windows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and then finally renamed to SharePoint.

Quick facts Microsoft SharePoint, Developer(s) ...

According to Microsoft, as of December 2020, SharePoint had over 200 million users.[5]

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Application

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The most common uses of SharePoint include:

Enterprise content and document management

Main articles: Enterprise content management and document management

SharePoint allows storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting on electronic 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.[6][7] SharePoint allows collaborative real-time editing[8] and encrypted/information-rights-managed[9] synchronization by providing the underlying technical infrastructure for Microsoft OneDrive.[10]

SharePoint is often used to replace or supplement an existing corporate file server, and is typically coupled with an enterprise content management policy.[11]

Intranet and social network

Main articles: Intranet portal and Social network

A SharePoint intranet or intranet 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 and information more easily. Microsoft claims that this has organizational benefits such as increased employee engagement, centralizing process management, reducing new staff on-boarding costs, and providing the means to capture and share tacit knowledge (e.g. via tools such as wikis, media libraries, web-page editing, etc.)[12]. These capabilites are usually centered around "Communication sites", which are hooked in to "Hub Sites". In the past, "Publishing sites" were used.

Group collaboration

SharePoint contains team collaboration groupware capabilities, including: document management, project scheduling (integrated with Outlook and Project), and other information tracking.[13] This capability is usually centred around "team sites". Team sites can be independent, but they are also created whenever a Microsoft Teams team is created. SharePoint functionality is embedded in Microsoft Teams, Office, and Windows (via OneDrive).

File hosting service (personal cloud)

Main articles: Personal cloud and File hosting service

SharePoint sites are the hosting infrastructure for OneDrive For Business, which allows storage and synchronization of an individual's personal work documents, as well as public/private file sharing of those documents.

Custom web applications (SharePoint Server edition)

Historically, SharePoint's Server Edition's custom development capabilities provided an additional layer of services that allowed for rapid prototyping of integrated (typically line-of-business) web applications.[14] SharePoint provided developers with integration into corporate directories and data sources through standards such as REST/OData/OAuth. Enterprise application developers used SharePoint's security and information management capabilities across a variety of development platforms and scenarios.

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Configuration, integration, and customization

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Web-based configuration

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.

Admin Center

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:

  • Tenant-wide policy controls around sharing/permissions, access control, apps, APIs, and security controls.
  • Tenant-wide configuration of content services: search, managed metadata, content types, and other governance.
  • Tenant-wide health and security reports, service health checks, migration features, and hybrid configuration.

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.

Command line tools

Microsoft SharePoint's Server and SharePoint Online have multiple command line or PowerShell utilities available to ease administration.

  • Microsoft also provides an official PowerShell module for cloud, as well as for Server Edition. These are supported only on Windows.
  • The open source PnP PowerShell is managed by Microsoft, and is widely used in cloud hosted environments. It is available on PowerShell for Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • A broader, cross-platform Microsoft 365 CLI (also open source) is also available.

Integrating with SharePoint

Developing on SharePoint Online

  • The SharePoint Framework (SPFx)[16][17] provides a development model based on the TypeScript language. It is the only supported way to deeply customize the new modern experience user interface (UI), and is the only long-term supported cloud customization approach. It has been globally available since mid 2017.
  • Legacy options such as sandboxed solutions or add-in model applications are reaching end-of-life in April 2026.

Developing on SharePoint Server Edition

  • SharePoint Server Edition has very limited support for SPFx, using very old/limited versions of React and Node.[18]
  • The SharePoint "Add-in model" provides various types of external applications that offer the capability to show authenticated web-based applications through a variety of UI mechanisms. Apps may be either "SharePoint-hosted", or "Provider-hosted". Provider hosted apps may be developed using most back-end web technologies (e.g. ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP). Apps are served through a proxy in SharePoint, which requires some DNS/certificate manipulation in SharePoint Server edition. In the cloud, Microsoft announced the retirement of the Add-in model in November 2023 with an end-of-life date set to April 2026).[19]
  • "Sand-boxed" plugins can be uploaded by any end-user who has been granted permission. These are security-restricted, and can be governed at multiple levels (including resource consumption management).
  • Farm features are typically fully trusted code that need to be installed at a farm-level. These are considered deprecated for new development.
  • Service applications: It is possible to integrate directly into the SharePoint SOA bus, at a farm level. This is no longer a recommended approach.

SharePoint Designer

Main article: SharePoint Designer

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.[20]

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Security, administration & compliance

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Cloud edition

Microsoft 365 provides legal compliance features through their Microsoft Purview product, Microsoft Intune Endpoint Management, and the SharePoint admin center, where retention policies and sharing policies can be administered by the SharePoint Administrator.[21]

Some legacy features such as in-place retention can be configured without the additional cost of Purview.[22]

Server edition

SharePoint's architecture enables a 'least-privileges' execution permission model.[23]

SharePoint Central Administration (the CA) provides a complete centralized management interface for web and service applications in the SharePoint farm, including Active 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.

Security and patching issues

Microsoft SharePoint Server Edition has a manual patching arrangement that is widely regarded as convoluted and complex.[24] Over the years, it has been subject to numerous critical security vulnerabilities, which are frequently exploited in the wild.[25] As a consequence, is no longer considered best practice to host SharePoint server edition with public facing internet access.

CVE-2025-53770

A zero-day attack targeting government agencies, universities, and businesses in the United States, China, and Europe using on-prem SharePoint servers started on 18 July 2025.[26][27] The attackers exploited a weakness dubbed "ToolShell" (CVE-2025-53770) allowing them to take control of SharePoint servers and gaining Machine Keys.[28] Those keys can then be used to install whatever an attacker wants, including back doors for future attacks.[29] Microsoft issued updates for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition and SharePoint Server 2019 on 20 July 2025.[28][30] A CISA alert was issued on 20 July 2025.[31][32] Microsoft stated the exploit was used by Chinese state-sponsored advanced persistent threat groups dubbed Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon and Storm-2603 to breach servers of the National Nuclear Security Administration and other organizations.[33][34][35]

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Server edition architecture

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SharePoint Server Edition can be scaled down to operate entirely from one developer machine, or scaled up to be managed across hundreds of machines.[36]

Farms

A SharePoint farm is a logical grouping of SharePoint servers that share common resources.[37] 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

Web applications (WAs) are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm. A web application is associated primarily with IIS 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

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.[36]

Site collections

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.[38] A site collection may have a distinct content databases, or may share a content database with other site collections in the same web application.[36]

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History

Origins

SharePoint evolved from projects codenamed "Office Server" and "Tahoe" during the Office XP development cycle.

"Office Server" evolved out of the FrontPage 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.[39]

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See also

References

External links

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