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SharePoint 2010 is a collaboration platform developed by Microsoft Corporation. The product has been available in various versions since 2001. The current version - SharePoint 2010 - is the fourth major version.

SharePoint 2010 is designed to allow companies to collaborate, share documents, build web sites -amp; intranets, as well implement enterprise search, complex reporting and dashboards.

There are six main components that comprise the feature offering of SharePoint. They are:

Sites

SharePoint allows businesses to build highly functional web sites and intranets. Content owners have a number of tools for managing content structure and layout. Share Developers have access to the entire SharePoint API set to programmatically control the site. In addition, users can use Microsoft Office programs including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Visio to interact with content.

Composites

Due to the point-and-click user interface, users can rapidly build enterprise solutions without needing to code. Enterprise functions such as workflow can be easily configured by power users, without the need for a developer. SharePoint also provides powerful integration with Access and external data sources.

Insights

A key SharePoint feature is its reporting functionality. As well as providing an easy-to-use UI for managers, users are also able to build reports into company wide dashboards and real-time scorecards. All reporting tools allow data to be drilled into and exported to Excel for further analysis.

Enterprise Search

As enterprises grow, they tend to have multiple sources of content. Organising and implementing a taxonomy across the corporate content base is difficult and time-consuming. With SharePoint's search capabilities, much of this labour intensive work can be avoided. Numerous document types are all natively search by SharePoint, allowing users to search across documents, spreadsheets, presentations, data files, databases, images as well as text content.

Content Management

Due to SharePoint's close integration with Microsoft Office, content owners can use a multitude of tools to manage content. Documents can be saved directly to SharePoint right from Word, allowing content creators to use the tools they are most proficient with. This increases productivity across the workplace.

Communities

An integral part of the Microsoft vision with SharePoint has been to provide companies with a toolset that allows them to build communities around topics and company assets. Using Wikis, team sites and workflow capabilities, content owners and content consumers can collaborate on documents, web sites, reports and other assets.