SharePoint, and what are the implications of this request

Question

of the final client) we are to develop/deploy this website with SharePoint I have no real idea of what is SharePoint, and what are the implications of this request. Can you briefly explain … what is SharePoint? Do you need a license to deploy a SharePoint website? What do you need to develop for it? (license, tools) Does it need to run on a IIS server? What language will/could be used

Answer 1

SharePoint is a platform developed by Microsoft. It is still a part of Microsoft Office Family. It is available as an on-premise solution (SharePoint Server), or cloud solution (SharePoint Online). On top of SharePoint, you could build websites, manage their contents, customize their look and feel, manage users permission to the site, etc.

As a web based platform, yes, SharePoint will run on IIS. After you create websites in SharePoint, you could also see that the websites are deployed in IIS.

You do not need license when you use the SharePoint Foundation, but of course it has less feature compared to the on-premise / cloud solution. To use on-premise solution, you need licenses based on your SharePoint Server Farm configurations, and also Client Access License (CAL) for each user and device who will be able to access your SharePoint site. Ah, also don't forget the SQL Server licenses for on-premise solutions (SharePoint store its configuration, sites, site contents on SQL Server Databases). For online solution, the license uses a per-user-basis licensing system.

To develop custom solutions in SharePoint, there are some important tools you need to use:

• Visual Studio 2013, 2015 for SharePoint 2013
• Visual Studio 2010, 2012 for SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint Designer (adjust it to the SharePoint Version) to build workflow solutions, and allows you to manage your SharePoint site easier. It also allows you to edit some look-and-feel related items, such as master-pages.

As for development language, you will mainly use C# (of course with HTML, CSS, Javascript as you will build something on the web) as its server-side programming language. JQuery will help a lot on the front-end. Although SharePoint itself already provides some great basic functionality to manage your site contents, someday you will find that you need to build a custom solution on top of it to solve your problem / business requirement.

For more information about how to develop solutions in SharePoint, you could refer to this question.