The SharePoint platform comprises farms, servers, site collections, sites, web parts, and pages.
A farm is a logical group of servers that have the SharePoint products installed and are configured to work together. A site is a website that contains various SharePoint objects, such as pages, document libraries, or calendars. A site collection is a group of sites, normally organized by department, project, cross-functional group, or other business units. A page is an HTML web page. Pages can be basic, just displaying text, or built from templates (such as a wiki or a publishing portal) that may have different web parts preloaded.
Web parts are codeless widgets or apps that can be used to display or interact with information on a page. In the following diagram, Managers (Site) contains three web parts: a calendar, a task list, and a document library:
The Document Library web part looks like a filesystem interface to SharePoint and can be used to upload and download files, and to perform other file operation tasks.
In addition to the more visible components mentioned previously (such as servers, sites, and web parts), SharePoint Server has less visible components that are used to provide and control the features of the platform.
We'll look at these processes and services in the next section.