SharePoint Server vs SharePoint Online. What is SharePoint Online.

In this article you will learn the core concepts of SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server vs SharePoint Online, SharePoint Online benefits, and SharePoint Online versions.

What is SharePoint Online

Web based collaboration tool: SharePoint Online is a Web-based platform which is developed by Microsoft. All you need is a web browser to access SharePoint Online, and to do everything within SharePoint. In nutshell, SharePoint Online is basically a tool that you can use to create a number of sites and content to collaborate with internal or external users. Since this is a web-based tool, you can access it from any device and from anywhere.

Personal Intranet: By using SharePoint, organizations create intranet sites or project-based sites. Intranet sites are designed for your internal employees. Intranet sites are different to the Internet sites. For example, Microsoft.com is an Internet site which is accessible by anyone. But the intranet sites are created by an organization for their users only and those can be accessed by the internal users only. But using SharePoint, you can further extend the accessibility of these intranet sites to the external vendors or external organizations.

Collaborative tool: SharePoint is also used as a collaborative tool. Using SharePoint, organizations can collaborate with internal or external users. You can upload documents within SharePoint, and you can share these documents with internal or external users using email or you can directly share the link. Users can work on the same document in real-time and at one place. This is called co-authoring. So it is like a one single place to collaborate.

SharePoint Online Offerings

Let’s understand what are the uses of SharePoint Online. SharePoint Online is actually used in a number of different ways. It is all about your requirement, and how far you want to fully utilize the SharePoint offerings.

Document management system: The first use of SharePoint Online is document storage. SharePoint is a sophisticated library to keep your organisation’s documents. SharePoint provides a single place to store all the documents of your organization. If we talk about OneDrive or Google Drive, they also provide document management feature. But OneDrive and Google Drive, are the personal storage spaces. Also, they provide a typical folder structure to arrange your documents. But in SharePoint, you can associate Metadata as well, so you can group the documents based on your requirement. This way you can easily find the documents within a library or a site.

Knowledge / Project / Task management tool: SharePoint is also used as a content management system where you can create content in SharePoint, you can schedule the content, and you can sort and filter the content based on their metadata. SharePoint is also used for knowledge management. You can create knowledge based articles in SharePoint and you can share them with the users. It can also be used as a project management tool where you can create a number of different document libraries and lists, and you can track the progress of a project. You can also use it as a task management tool. You can create tasks and assign those tasks to different users within your team, and track the progress on those tasks.

Create online forms: You can also create online forms using the lists in SharePoint. Or you can create online forms using Microsoft forms that you can integrate with SharePoint Online.

Automated workflows: You can also create automated workflows within SharePoint and you can automate your business processes. For example, you might want to create a travel form which is a travel approval form. You can create a workflow so that whenever there is a new request, it can actually go to your manager for approval. And once your manager approves it, then it goes to a finance department for approval. So like this you can create a completely automated workflow within SharePoint.

Intranet Sites / News & updates: Organizations can use SharePoint to create intranet sites where they can collaborate with their internal employees, they can publish the news articles, and to share the information about the projects.

Store anything: SharePoint Online can be used as a database. Basically, you can store any type of information within SharePoint Online. You can store videos, images, files, tasks, and other type of information. You can use SharePoint as an inventory to store all of your different assets.

Information sharing: SharePoint Online is also used for information sharing. If you got back in time and if you look at the historical ways of sharing information, we used to have information stored in a network drive. We used to create folders and store the documents within the folders, and then share the drives with other users. Or, we use emails to share files with each other. But let’s say, if we have to share a document with 10 users and we want them to modify the document or add something within the document, this will create 10 copies of a single document. So then you need to create a consolidated copy from these 10 documents. Now the problem with this is, there is no auditing using these methods. We don’t know what actually happened to those documents which we have shared with other parties, whether they have shared the same document with others, what changes they have made into the document, and this is very complicated to manage the documents.

But in SharePoint, you can have everything in one place. You can store all of your documents and content in SharePoint. You can share the documents from a single location with different users. You can also assign required permissions to the users while sharing the documents. And all the users with whom the document is shared, they can work on that document in a single place. You can real-time monitor the changes being done within the document.

SharePoint Online Benefits

Now let’s talk about SharePoint Online benefits and features provided by SharePoint Online.

Ease of management and administration: SharePoint Online gives your users the control of how to manage SharePoint sites, and how to administer the sites. For example, You can easily assign permissions on the sites, you can assign site members, or the site owner permissions, you can modify the sites, and so on.

Easy to customize: SharePoint site has a number of different web parts like news, content, and document libraries. All these components or the web parts can be easily customized. If you have to create an Intranet site or a project site, you can do this from the browser itself. You do not need any 3rd party plugin for this or you do not need to know any sort of coding to achieve this.

Integration with Microsoft 365 Apps: SharePoint Online is a part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The other M365 applications such as, power apps, power automate, Microsoft Exchange Online, Teams, all of these applications can be integrated with SharePoint Online.

Advanced security controls and data security: If you want to share particular document or file with any of your users (internal or external), you can share the documents along with the required permissions. So that the shared document is not accessed by anyone else. The whole security of your SharePoint site can be easily managed by your site owners, site members, or the site admins. The site owners or the admins can decide what level of permissions they want to give to the other users.

Co-authoring and Document Versioning: SharePoint Online provides co-authoring and document versioning. Co-authoring is, when multiple users are working on the same document at the same time. Each user can see others activities on the same document in real-time. Document versioning is, if you create a document today, and next day you make some changes within that document, or if this document is shared with someone else and that user makes any changes within that document, SharePoint stores the versioning of each activity done within the document. So at any point of time you can go back to the document, you can check what was the last modification done on the document. Or let’s say, someone made a mistake within the document, so you can go back to the earlier date when you last modified the document, and you can get the previous version of that document.

Integration with Exchange Online: SharePoint Online is integrated with Exchange Online. SO that the users can easily share the files and documents over the emails.

Reporting: The next feature of SharePoint Online is Reporting. With Power BI You can create a number of reports for the SharePoint sites. Or if you have documents, lists, libraries, you can create views and filter your document libraries which basically gives you a proper reporting, and you can export the information as well.

Automation: The other feature of SharePoint Online is Automation. We can integrate SharePoint Online with Power Automate to configure number of flows. By creating Power Automate flows, we can automate the tasks instead of doing them manually.

SharePoint Online Versions

Now Let’s go through the versions and products of SharePoint. Because it’s good to have basic understanding of this.

The first SharePoint product is called SharePoint Server. We have SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 that comes in 2 flavours, Standard and Enterprise. The SharePoint server is usually deployed in on-premises. On-premises means your own infrastructure where you are responsible to manage the servers. All the files, documents, the entire data of the SharePoint server is stored in on-premises.

But if we talk about the difference between SharePoint Server Standard and Enterprise, the Enterprise version has more advanced features like advanced search, you get advanced social networking capabilities, and you get advanced permission settings.

Then we have SharePoint Online which is the latest and most advanced version of SharePoint. SharePoint Online is a part of Microsoft 365. SharePoint Online has all the features and capabilities those are offered by SharePoint Enterprise version. On top of this SharePoint Online is the online version, and the data is stored in Microsoft Datacentres. So you do not have to manage the SharePoint servers like you do in on-premises.

SharePoint Server vs SharePoint Online

If we talk about the difference between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online, SharePoint Server is hosted in on-premises, where as SharePoint Online is hosted in Microsoft Datacentres in Cloud.

In case of SharePoint Server, your IT team is responsible to deploy updates and patches, where as in case of SharePoint Online updates and patching is managed by Microsoft.

In SharePoint Server the data is stored in on-premises server, but the SharePoint Online data is stored in the cloud.

When you deploy SharePoint Server in on-premises, you need to purchase Hardware on which you will deploy SharePoint server, and then you need to pay the software cost to Microsoft. So that you can get license from Microsoft, and you deploy SharePoint on the server. So there is a cost involved.

But in case of SharePoint Online, you do not have to worry about the hardware and software cost. Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based model. That means if you need to use something in Microsoft 365, you need to purchase the subscription and use the services. In case of SharePoint Online, you just need to purchase a subscription either monthly or yearly basis, and you can start using SharePoint Online services.

Conclusion

In this article you learnt what is SharePoint Online, SharePoint Online benefits, SharePoint Online offerings, SharePoint Online versions, and we talked about SharePoint Server vs SharePoint Online.

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