Sharepoint has one key advantage over other content management systems: It is integrated into Microsoft Windows and the Microsoft Office Suite, by far the de facto standard of productivity software. Microsoft is solidly behind its Sharepoint software and includes a free version with its popular server software. Furthermore, anyone with experience using Windows will find the Sharepoint interface comfortably familiar and intuitive.
Mike Koss, one of the key developers of Sharepoint, claims to have based the product on Wikiwiki Web. Wikis are database-driven websites that allow visitors to edit their contents. Each version of a page is stored in a database and can be recovered or compared to other editions. Wikis, while powerful enough to support massive public projects like Wikipedia, are not generally very easy for novice computer users to work with. Most wikis require knowledge of a simple code called “wiki tags,” which function similarly to HTML tags—though much more limited. To put it simply, wiki editors are not typically WYSIWYG—users must switch back and forth between “editor mode” and “reading mode” and may be disconcerted by the visual difference between the two. Simply copying and pasting text from Word usually will result in the loss of formatting codes like bold and underline Hyperlinks are also lost, as are tables and any images placed in the document.
Sharepoint's integration with Office eliminates most of these problems and gives it advantages over the simple interface of most wikis and other CMSs. Sharepoint users can simply click on the file to automatically open the file in Word, and save it by clicking save. Thus, users can work with files on the server with the same ease they work with files on their own PCs. Like wikis, Sharepoint document libraries support versioning. The benefit of this feature is that editing a document does not result in the loss of the previous version. The end result of all this is that Sharepoint makes working with web pages and documents as easy as working with files stored on the users' hard drives or CD-Rs—and they can use powerful word processing software to do it.
Sharepoint's other key features are a drag-and-drop modular structure for dynamic content, a multi-layered and fully scalable permissions system, and expandability via Microsoft's InfoPath tool. This tool allows users to easily create interative forms and reports to be generated on-the-fly. Sharepoint is also part of the .NET development family, which makes it easy to combine and integrate components written in different languages such as C# or Visual Basic. Furthermore, what this means is that like open source CMSs, Sharepoint can be modified and expanded as far as one's development resources and creativity allow (in other words, you're not limited to the features Microsoft has provided).