Using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Your Intranet, Extranet and Public Website

As many of you may know , Microsoft SharePoint has been the largest-selling software product in the history of the company. In the last 11 years, since the arrival of SharePoint 2001, SharePoint has captured a large share of the collaboration market. Today, SharePoint 2010 is used widely as a content or document management system, for company intranets, extranets and public websites.

We can define these terms as:

Intranet – An intranet is the internal facing portal in your company for your employees

Extranet – An extranet is the protected external facing portal in your company. It is used by business partners, clients and special customers

Public Website – The public website is the public-facing version of your website.

There are many benefits for organizations that use a common tecnology and framework for all of their web properties.  These include:

• Savings in software licensing costs
• A smaller pool of developers competent in similar technologies

Historically, companies have been unable to use a common technology across the web properties because of the cost of the solutions, and the difficulty of using the solutions.

SharePoint 2010 includes a number of rich content management features that help organizations to manage their content and keep it current.  These features include:

• Various page layout options allowing website creators to create pages quickly
• Ability to support rich streaming media
• Ability to roll up content easily
• Common meta data that allows content to be published once and available anywhere
• Better control during the authoring process
• Workflows for content review and approval
• Easy deployment from staging to production
• Web analytics

In our subsequent blog posts, we will be discussing the specific features of SharePoint 2010 and third party products to help create a useful customer portals or extranets.