SharePoint

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Web platform part of Microsoft 365

title: "SharePoint" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["sharepoint", "2001-software", "content-management-systems", "document-management-systems", "information-management", "portal-software", "proprietary-database-management-systems", "proprietary-wiki-software", "records-management-technology", "microsoft-office-servers", "android-(operating-system)-software"] description: "Web platform part of Microsoft 365" topic_path: "technology/web" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SharePoint" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Web platform part of Microsoft 365 ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]

FieldValue
nameMicrosoft SharePoint
logoMicrosoft Office SharePoint (2025–present).svg
logo size130px
screenshotMicrosoft SharePoint.png
screenshot size250px
developerMicrosoft Corporation
released
ver layoutstacked
operating systemServer:{{cite web
urlhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/hardware-and-software-requirements-2019
titleHardware and Software Requirements for SharePoint 2019
workMicrosoft TechNet
publisherMicrosoft Corporation
dateJuly 24, 2018
access-dateOctober 23, 2018
urlhttps://docs.microsoft.com/sharepoint/install/system-requirements-for-sharepoint-subscription-edition
titleSystem requirements for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition
workMicrosoft Documentation
publisherMicrosoft Corporation
dateNovember 2, 2021
access-dateJanuary 24, 2022
platformx86-64
languageArabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh{{cite web
titleInstall or uninstall language packs for SharePoint Servers 2016 and 2019
urlhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/install/install-or-uninstall-language-packs-0#list-of-languages
access-dateDecember 17, 2018
workMicrosoft Docs
publisherMicrosoft Corporation
archive-dateDecember 18, 2018
archive-urlhttps://web.archive.org/web/20181218010518/https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/install/install-or-uninstall-language-packs-0#list-of-languages
url-statusdead
genreContent management system
licenseProprietary software
::

| name = Microsoft SharePoint | logo = Microsoft Office SharePoint (2025–present).svg | logo size = 130px | screenshot = Microsoft SharePoint.png | screenshot size = 250px | developer = Microsoft Corporation | released = | ver layout = stacked | operating system = Server:{{cite web |url = https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/install/hardware-and-software-requirements-2019 |title = Hardware and Software Requirements for SharePoint 2019 |work = Microsoft TechNet |publisher = Microsoft Corporation |date = July 24, 2018 |access-date = October 23, 2018 |url = https://docs.microsoft.com/sharepoint/install/system-requirements-for-sharepoint-subscription-edition |title = System requirements for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition |work = Microsoft Documentation |publisher = Microsoft Corporation |date = November 2, 2021 |access-date = January 24, 2022 Client: | platform = x86-64 | language = Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Welsh{{cite web |title=Install or uninstall language packs for SharePoint Servers 2016 and 2019 |url=https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/install/install-or-uninstall-language-packs-0#list-of-languages |access-date=December 17, 2018 |work=Microsoft Docs |publisher=Microsoft Corporation |archive-date=December 18, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181218010518/https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/SharePoint/install/install-or-uninstall-language-packs-0#list-of-languages |url-status=dead | genre = Content management system | license = Proprietary software

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform primarily used for building corporate intranets, document and content management, and file sharing. Developed by Microsoft, It is primarily used as part of the hosted service Microsoft 365, but it can also be hosted by an IT department or service provider, using an on premises version called "Server Edition". Launched in 2001, it was initially bundled with Windows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, and then finally renamed SharePoint.

According to Microsoft, , SharePoint had over 200 million users.

Application

The most common uses of SharePoint include:

Enterprise content and document management

Main article: Enterprise content management, document management

SharePoint allows storage, retrieval, searching, archiving, tracking, management, and reporting on electronic documents and records. Many of the functions in this product are designed around various legal, information management, and process requirements in organizations. SharePoint also provides search and "graph" functionality. SharePoint allows collaborative real-time editing and encrypted/information-rights-managed synchronization by providing the underlying technical infrastructure for Microsoft OneDrive.

SharePoint is often used to replace or supplement an existing corporate file server, and is typically coupled with an enterprise content management policy.

Intranet and social network

Main article: Intranet portal, Social network

A SharePoint intranet or intranet portal is a way to centralize access to enterprise information and applications. It is a tool that helps an organization manage its internal communications, applications and information more easily. By providing the tools to capture and share explicit knowledge in an organisation, Microsoft claims organizational improvements in employee training, employee engagement, business process management, organizational communication, and crisis management. These capabilites are usually centered around "Communication sites" (previously, "Publishing sites").

Group collaboration

SharePoint contains team collaboration groupware capabilities, including: document / file management, project scheduling (integrated with Outlook and Project), and other information tracking. This capability is centred around "team sites". Team sites are created whenever a Microsoft Teams team is created, but they are also created independently of these, and have been a feature of SharePoint since 2001.

File hosting service (personal cloud)

Main article: Personal cloud, File hosting service

Custom web applications (SharePoint Server edition)

Historically, SharePoint's Server Edition's custom development capabilities provided an additional layer of services that allowed for rapid prototyping of integrated (typically line-of-business) web applications. SharePoint provided developers with integration into corporate directories and data sources through standards such as REST/OData/OAuth. Enterprise application developers used SharePoint's security and information management capabilities across a variety of development platforms and scenarios.

Configuration, integration, and customization

Web-based configuration

SharePoint is primarily configured through a web browser. Capabilities for the management of a SharePoint site are "security trimmed", meaning that editing capabilities simply appear in place when permissions are granted. A "Site Collection Administrator" has the highest level of permission to manage an individual SharePoint sites.

Admin Center

An administration center for configuring organisation-wide settings is usually available to SharePoint Administrators, who are responsible for managing the underlying infrastructure.

In the cloud, this is called the "SharePoint Admin Center". Features include:

  • Tenant-wide policy controls around sharing/permissions, access control, apps, APIs, and security controls.
  • Tenant-wide configuration of content services: search, managed metadata, content types, and other governance.
  • Tenant-wide health and security reports, service health checks, migration features, and hybrid configuration.

In Server edition, This is called the "central administration site", and it contains significantly more features are available for the administration and health of the SharePoint server farm. Because they are not operated as a shared resource, Features like the search crawler are more controllable and configurable.

Command line tools

Microsoft SharePoint's Server and SharePoint Online have multiple command line or PowerShell utilities available to ease administration.

  • Microsoft also provides an official PowerShell module for cloud, as well as for Server Edition. These are supported only on Windows.
  • The open source PnP PowerShell is managed by Microsoft, and is widely used in cloud hosted environments. It is available on PowerShell for Windows, Mac and Linux.
  • A broader, cross-platform Microsoft 365 CLI (also open source) is also available.

Integrating with SharePoint

Developing on SharePoint Online

  • The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) provides a development model based on the TypeScript language. It is the only supported way to deeply customize the new modern experience user interface (UI), and is the only long-term supported cloud customization approach. It has been globally available since mid 2017.
  • Legacy options such as sandboxed solutions or add-in model applications are reaching end-of-life in April 2026.

Developing on SharePoint Server Edition

  • SharePoint Server Edition has very limited support for SPFx, using very old/limited versions of React and Node.
  • The SharePoint "Add-in model" provides various types of external applications that offer the capability to show authenticated web-based applications through a variety of UI mechanisms. Apps may be either "SharePoint-hosted", or "Provider-hosted". Provider hosted apps may be developed using most back-end web technologies (e.g. ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP). Apps are served through a proxy in SharePoint, which requires some DNS/certificate manipulation in SharePoint Server edition. In the cloud, Microsoft announced the retirement of the Add-in model in November 2023 with an end-of-life date set to April 2026).
  • "Sand-boxed" plugins can be uploaded by any end-user who has been granted permission. These are security-restricted, and can be governed at multiple levels (including resource consumption management).
  • Farm features are typically fully trusted code that need to be installed at a farm-level. These are considered deprecated for new development.
  • Service applications: It is possible to integrate directly into the SharePoint SOA bus, at a farm level. This is no longer a recommended approach.

SharePoint Designer

Main article: SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer is a deprecated product that provided 'advanced editing' capabilities for HTML/ASPX pages, but remains the primary method of editing SharePoint's legacy workflows. A significant subset of HTML editing features were removed in Designer 2013, and the product is expected to be deprecated in 2016–7.

Security, administration and compliance

Cloud edition

Microsoft 365 provides legal compliance features through their Microsoft Purview product, Microsoft Intune Endpoint Management, and the SharePoint admin center, where retention policies and sharing policies can be administered by the SharePoint Administrator.

Some legacy features such as in-place retention can be configured without the additional cost of Purview.

Server edition

SharePoint's architecture enables a 'least-privileges' execution permission model.

SharePoint Central Administration (the CA) provides a complete centralized management interface for web and service applications in the SharePoint farm, including Active Directory account management for web and service applications. In the event of the failure of the CA, Windows PowerShell is typically used on the CA server to reconfigure the farm.

Security and patching issues

Microsoft SharePoint Server Edition has a manual patching arrangement that is widely regarded as convoluted and complex. Over the years, it has been subject to numerous critical security vulnerabilities, which are frequently exploited in the wild. As a consequence, is no longer considered best practice to host SharePoint server edition with public facing internet access.

CVE-2025-53770

A zero-day attack targeting government agencies, universities, and businesses in the United States, China, and Europe using on-prem SharePoint servers started on 18 July 2025. The attackers exploited a weakness dubbed "ToolShell" (CVE-2025-53770) allowing them to take control of SharePoint servers and gaining Machine Keys. Those keys can then be used to install whatever an attacker wants, including back doors for future attacks. Microsoft issued updates for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition and SharePoint Server 2019 on 20 July 2025. A CISA alert was issued on 20 July 2025. Microsoft stated the exploit was used by Chinese state-sponsored advanced persistent threat groups dubbed Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon and Storm-2603 to breach servers of the National Nuclear Security Administration and other organizations.

Server edition architecture

SharePoint Server Edition can be scaled down to operate entirely from one developer machine, or scaled up to be managed across hundreds of machines.

Farms

A SharePoint farm is a logical grouping of SharePoint servers that share common resources. A farm typically operates stand-alone, but can also subscribe to functions from another farm, or provide functions to another farm. Each farm has its own central configuration database, which is managed through either a PowerShell interface, or a Central Administration website (which relies partly on PowerShell's infrastructure). Each server in the farm is able to directly interface with the central configuration database. Servers use this to configure services (e.g. IIS, windows features, database connections) to match the requirements of the farm, and to report server health issues, resource allocation issues, etc...

Web applications

Web applications (WAs) are top-level containers for content in a SharePoint farm. A web application is associated primarily with IIS configuration. A web application consists of a set of access mappings or URLs defined in the SharePoint central management console, which are replicated by SharePoint across every IIS Instance (e.g. Web Application Servers) configured in the farm.

Service applications

Service applications provide granular pieces of SharePoint functionality to other web and service applications in the farm. Examples of service applications include the User Profile Sync service, and the Search Indexing service. A service application can be turned off, exist on one server, or be load-balanced across many servers in a farm. Service Applications are designed to have independent functionality and independent security scopes.

Site collections

A site collection is a hierarchical group of 'SharePoint Sites'. Each web application must have at least one site collection. Site collections share common properties (detailed here), common subscriptions to service applications, and can be configured with unique host names. A site collection may have a distinct content databases, or may share a content database with other site collections in the same web application.

History

Origins

SharePoint evolved from projects codenamed "Office Server" and "Tahoe" during the Office XP development cycle.

"Office Server" evolved out of the FrontPage and Office Server Extensions and "Team Pages". It targeted simple, bottom-up collaboration.

"Tahoe", built on shared technology with Exchange and the "Digital Dashboard", targeted top-down portals, search and document management. The searching and indexing capabilities of SharePoint came from the "Tahoe" feature set. The search and indexing features were a combination of the index and crawling features from the Microsoft Site Server family of products and from the query language of Microsoft Index Server.{{cite web |url = http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepoint/archive/2009/10/05/sharepoint-history.aspx |title = Sharepoint History |work = MSDN |publisher = Microsoft corporation |date = October 5, 2009 |access-date = December 2, 2010

References

References

  1. Oleson, Joel. (December 28, 2007). "7 Years of SharePoint - A History Lesson". Microsoft Corporation.
  2. (2020-12-08). "Over 200 million users rely on SharePoint as Microsoft is again recognized as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Content Services Platforms Magic Quadrant Report".
  3. (28 January 2019). "Microsoft Graph with SharePoint Framework".
  4. "SharePoint – Team Collaboration Software Tools".
  5. MachelleTranMSFT. "How sync works - SharePoint in Microsoft 365".
  6. maggierui. "Cloud data security measures in SharePoint & OneDrive - SharePoint in Microsoft 365".
  7. MachelleTranMSFT. "Restore a deleted OneDrive - SharePoint in Microsoft 365".
  8. Rand Group. (April 22, 2020). "SharePoint versus Network File Share (NFS)".
  9. "SharePoint Look Book".
  10. "Search Customer Success Stories {{!}} Microsoft Customer Stories".
  11. "Create a communication site in SharePoint - Microsoft Support".
  12. (2022-02-04). "Five remote work problems Microsoft 365 solves".
  13. [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj164084.aspx SharePoint 2013 development overview]. Msdn.microsoft.com (July 16, 2012). Retrieved on 2014-02-22.
  14. Microsoft Docs Team. (20 November 2023). "Hybrid Configuration Wizard in the SharePoint Online admin center".
  15. "SharePoint 2010 for Developers". Microsoft Corporation.
  16. (Oct 6, 2020). "What is the SharePoint Framework (SPFx)?".
  17. (Nov 9, 2020). "8 Best Practices in SharePoint Framework (SPFx) Development".
  18. VesaJuvonen. "SharePoint Framework development with SharePoint Server 2019 and Subscription Edition".
  19. (Dec 12, 2023). "SharePoint Add-in model retirement + other services unpacked".
  20. (May 11, 2015). "Ignite 2015 Announcement – There will be no SharePoint Designer 2016 - Eric Overfield".
  21. maggierui. "SharePoint governance overview - SharePoint in Microsoft 365".
  22. Klein, Joanne. (2019-01-06). "Modern vs Classic IN PLACE Records Management in SharePoint".
  23. Holme, Dan. "Least Privilege Service Accounts for SharePoint 2010". Penton Media.
  24. Comments, Stefan Goßner-- 87. (2020-02-11). "SharePoint Patching Best Practices".
  25. Unit 42. (2025-07-31). "Active Exploitation of Microsoft SharePoint Vulnerabilities: Threat Brief (Updated August 12)".
  26. (2025-07-20). "Global hack on Microsoft product hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say". The Washington Post.
  27. Date, Jack. (July 21, 2025). "Microsoft SharePoint under 'active exploitation,' Homeland Security's CISA says".
  28. online, heise. (2025-07-21). "Kritische Sharepoint-Sicherheitslücke: Erste Patches für "ToolShell" sind da".
  29. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/21/china-hackers-microsoft-sharepoint/ "China-backed hackers used Microsoft flaw in attacks, defenders say"] Washington Post, 22 July 2025, retrieved 22 July 2025
  30. (July 21, 2025). "Microsoft SharePoint zero-day breach hits on-prem servers".
  31. Whittaker, Zack. (2025-07-21). "New zero-day bug in Microsoft SharePoint under widespread attack".
  32. (2025-07-20). "Microsoft Releases Guidance on Exploitation of SharePoint Vulnerability (CVE-2025-53770)".
  33. Titcomb, James. (2025-07-23). "Chinese hackers suspected of breaching US nuclear weapons agency". [[The Daily Telegraph]].
  34. Labiak, Mitchell. (2025-07-23). "Microsoft servers hacked by Chinese state-backed groups, firm says".
  35. McMillan, Robert. (July 24, 2025). "A Failed Microsoft Security Patch Is the Latest Win for Chinese Hackers". [[The Wall Street Journal]].
  36. "Logical architecture components (SharePoint Server 2010)". Microsoft.
  37. (October 20, 2016). "MSDN Conceptual Overview".
  38. "Host-named site collection architecture and deployment (SharePoint 2013)".

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::

sharepoint2001-softwarecontent-management-systemsdocument-management-systemsinformation-managementportal-softwareproprietary-database-management-systemsproprietary-wiki-softwarerecords-management-technologymicrosoft-office-serversandroid-(operating-system)-software