SharePoint Online

Office 365 services are taking over many tasks currently handled by SharePoint and are signaling the end of some SharePoint technologies. To take advantage of new capabilities for collaboration, compliance, and other areas, organizations might need to move SharePoint technologies to other Office 365 services. Consequently, organizations might want to limit technical and licensing investments in SharePoint.

SharePoint Online Background

SharePoint Online is a Microsoft-hosted service based on SharePoint Server 2013 that is part of Office 365. (Microsoft also offers a dedicated SharePoint hosting service, not discussed here, for governments and large commercial customers.) SharePoint Online delivers most SharePoint Server functions, including team collaboration, corporate portal hosting, enterprise search, and content management. SharePoint Online works with the OneDrive for Business technology for file sharing. (See the chapter “OneDrive for Business“.)

SharePoint Online lacks some BI, reporting, Web site customization, and server-side development capabilities that are available to SharePoint Server customers on-premises or in third-party hosting services. However, SharePoint Online and the Microsoft-hosted OneDrive for Business have some capabilities that are not available for on-premises- and partner-hosted installations. For example, they offer external sharing features to aid selective sharing of documents with users who are not members of the organization. Some SharePoint BI features are included in a separate Microsoft-hosted service, Power BI. (See the sidebar “Power BI“.)