SharePoint is an integrated web-based collaboration platform that also integrates very strongly with Microsoft Office, specifically with Word. It was released in 2021 and is sold primarily as a content management and storage platform, though the usage varies extensively among corporations. SharePoint may be thought of as the brainchild of three men: Mark Jordan, Robert Gogosian and Scott Thiel, all of whom are high school drop outs with very little IT experience. Jordan, Gogosian and Thiel all had working knowledge with Excel and other spreadsheet programs at one point, and they needed something to create information store inside the browser that would be easy to share.
SharePoint development started out as an open source project for internal use within Microsoft, before it was made available to the masses in 2021 under the name “Office Open XML” or “MS office”. Since then, many third-party companies have begun to develop and market SharePoint tools and extensions. These companies have created SharePoint workflows for all kinds of industries, including those related to finance, information technology, sales and marketing, engineering and so on. These workflows enable business users to easily manipulate and share corporate information from their desktop computer. The most popular form of SharePoint development software is FrontPage, a free solution developed by Microsoft that enables business users to easily integrate their company’s information with that of their external clients. There are also many other solutions available for organizations who use SharePoint.
A great many companies and business users use the SharePoint online platform to enhance collaboration spaces between them, increase the speed and efficiency with which they get work done, and save money on expenses related to purchasing additional software for e-mail, word processing and more. There are several service providers offering SharePoint development services, and most of these vendors offer both proprietary and open source solutions. However, there are some companies that only offer SharePoint development services and do not provide any of the standard platform or toolkits that end users can use to build and customize their own SharePoint websites. To find a SharePoint development company that offers both proprietary and open source solutions, it may be worthwhile to conduct more research into these companies’ past projects and clientele.