SharePoint Online is part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem that lets you create and share content, knowledge and applications thus empowering collaboration and productivity in organizations. At its core, it is a content management system that gives its users areas (sites, lists, and libraries) where they can organize and collaborate on documents, data, and news. It also lets userssecurelyshare the content,not justwith their peers,but also with collaboratorsoutside the organization. Users are also able to find this content through powerful enterprise search capabilities. Additionally, SharePoint enables an organization to effectively communicate through rich pages and engaging tools and web parts.
SharePoint integrates well with a lot of other tools within and outside of the Microsoft 365 family, such as Microsoft Teams, Groups, One Drive, and Microsoft Office Suite, to name a few. SharePoint can be accessed through a variety of browsers, such as Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, as well as on various desktop and mobile platforms.
We briefly discussed in Chapter 1, Overview of Microsoft 365, that SharePoint is available both as a standalon e installation ( on-premises) and as a cloud offering (through Microsoft 365). H owever, our book is focused on SharePoint Online . The recipes and related details in the next 4 chapters are focused on SharePoint Online but thekeyconceptsapply to boththe versions of SharePoint. All references of SharePoint in these chapters and in general throughout the book refer to SharePoint Online unless mentioned otherwise .
In this introductory chapter, we will look at the following recipes, which will show you how to carry out some of the more common tasks in SharePoint Online:
- Gettingto the SharePoint start page
- Creating a modern site
- Viewing site contents
- Creating a list
- Adding an item to a list
- Creating a document library
- Uploading documents to a library
- Sharing a document
- Searching content
While this chapter covers the more commonly used scenarios, dedicated chapters later in this book will dive into many of the different areas of SharePoint in more detail. You will find references to these chapters in the See also sections of each recipe in this chapter.