Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 Part A

This is the 1st installment in my blog post series on Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 which is based on what I learn doing the video training course Using Sharepoint 2013 by Infinite Skills. Sharepoint is a website often called a sharepoint site and central repository for workers information. You can share documents and as long as you have the necessary permissions can search for stuff. It allows file sharing and integrates with programs like Exchange 2013 & Office 365. Most work is done within your web browser and information is in the form of files and folders with a lot of stuff being stored in sub folders. A sharepoint site is normally a top level site with lots of subsites and things like libraries forming a hierarchy. Everything is termed a site collection although a small firm might only have a single site. Generally each department within a company will have a sub site. Employees will often have what we call a mysite and all this works equally well as an internet site or intranet site. All sites have a URL which has a hierarchy beginning with the name of the website and working down through the various subcategories. A home page which is the page you first land on in either a main site or a subsite will contain home in the address. Internet Explorer which is also made by Microsoft is fully supported through versions 8-10 and other versions and browsers will work most of the time with mostly minor if any glitches. Active X controls sometimes don't work with other browsers. If you work quite a lot with a particular webpage you can save it as a favorite to make it easy to subsequently find. HTTPS means a site is a secure site requiring a password and user name etc. A lot of the sharepoint pages end with the filetype .aspx which is a file type generic to this program. The foundation version doesn't support mysites but the standard, enterprise and office 365 versions do. If you are merely learning how to use Sharepoint I would recommend getting a single user account of the office 365 version which is just $4 per month and is good value. Sharepoint also integrates with social media sites and you can follow others and have updates about them put on your mysite which centralizes it and saves you having to go to there page.