Читать книгу SharePoint For Dummies - Rosemarie Withee - Страница 35

Microsoft offers SharePoint over the Internet in a product called SharePoint Online. With SharePoint Online, Microsoft takes care of all the heavy lifting. To get SharePoint going, someone has to procure and set up the servers, and install the operating system, databases, web server, and SharePoint server. This all has to be done in a special climate-controlled facility called a data center. The data center has to be secure and redundant. After all, what if a disaster happened and the data center computers in the data center — or worse, the data center itself — were destroyed? Finally, the whole setup must be scalable so that as more users begin using SharePoint for mission-critical business processes, the servers and sites can keep up with the added load. And that isn’t the end — after everything is up and running, someone still needs to manage all the updates and keep the servers humming smoothly. Whew! What a lot of work.

With a hosted solution, you or your organization pay someone else to do all this for you — you simply use the final product, SharePoint. With SharePoint Online, Microsoft sells its SharePoint platform as a service, so the actual servers and software are run in its data centers, managed and maintained by its employees. You, being a customer of Microsoft, connect to this managed version of SharePoint over a secure channel of the Internet and use it to develop business solutions on the SharePoint platform. (Maybe a better name would be “SharePoint Infrastructure Hosted and Managed by Microsoft,” though it’s too cumbersome for marketing.) Figure 2-1 illustrates this point.

FIGURE 2-1: The SharePoint platform runs in the Microsoft data center and is accessed in a secure channel over the Internet.

Microsoft is not the only company that offers SharePoint over the Internet. Other companies also offer SharePoint hosting, though Microsoft seems to have cornered the market recently because they also offer so many other things for the same price as SharePoint. In our view, one of the biggest competitors to SharePoint has become WordPress. WordPress is another web platform that includes endless plugins to extend it. Another competitor to SharePoint Online is an internal SharePoint site hosted by your local IT department.

SharePoint Online is when Microsoft manages SharePoint in its data centers and you access it over the Internet. SharePoint On-Premises is when your local IT gurus manage SharePoint in your company data center.