Microsoft has enabled SharePoint Online in Office 365 since 2010, which is a long time in the world of corporate intranets. Still, its true origins are much older than that. SharePoint Online is the latest iteration of Microsoft SharePoint Server, a product that has been around for almost 14 years.
In order to see how SharePoint and Office 365 work together, however, you first need to understand how SharePoint was historically intended to be used.
SharePoint’s Traditional Use Case
For a long time, SharePoint’s most well-known role has been as a platform to create, design and manage workspaces, sites and content. Its role online is just an extension of what it’s been doing on-premises for many years.
Creating sites is meant to be a simple task in SharePoint. Those sites can be very generic, such as a site for a particular project, department or community. Users can post to the site and manage content in a delegated fashion, without the need for a webmaster. Everyone with the proper rights is able to contribute and collaborate.
SharePoint also includes document management capabilities, including records management, compliance settings and workflows. There are also more advanced document management features, such as versioning, metadata tagging and real-time coauthoring. SharePoint is a collaborative team-, group- and company-based document management solution.
With the added capabilities of creating and sharing tasks, calendars, contacts, and content lists, SharePoint transforms into a collaborative workspace by letting you build applications that take advantage of these tools and features. Your organization can create these workspaces and connect them together as an intranet platform to share and communicate information.
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How SharePoint Has Evolved
However, SharePoint has stepped into a new role in recent years through the Office 365 platform. SharePoint Online is now not only a framework for site creation and management, it has also become the key storage platform in Office 365 to support more advanced capabilities.
Microsoft now sees SharePoint as a front-end platform to drive collaborative work, as well as a core back-end component for storing files and content. The use of SharePoint in the back-end is then enabled from the front-end by different models.
For example, you can store and stream videos with Office 365, where SharePoint Online is used as the back-end storage platform to enable the Office Video workload. Office Groups, a new group-based collaboration environment in Office 365 introduced in 2015, leverages SharePoint as the storage component to enable group-based collaboration. OneDrive for Business, a tool for personal cloud-based file sharing, is also enabled from the back-end by the SharePoint platform. SharePoint runs in the background to store content, and the front-end consists of the OneDrive for Business personal file sharing application.
In each of these instances, Microsoft is pooling the resources available in SharePoint as a back-end in service of interesting new capabilities for front-end users.
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Final Thought
SharePoint Online isn’t exactly a new product – its origins lie in SharePoint on-premises. But in recent years, Microsoft has taken this single SharePoint product and started to break it up into pieces, as it migrates to a cloud-based intranet environment.
There is more to come, of course, as Microsoft continues the process of shifting SharePoint’s role to service new capabilities within the Office 365 framework. Their long-term strategy is to take advantage of the individual SharePoint workloads, enabling them individually on the Office 365 platform.
