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I meet with a handful of business leaders every week, and I regularly get asked the question “What is SharePoint?” 

Most people, especially busy executives, don’t have 60 minutes to hear a presentation and demonstration about SharePoint.  So here’s how the conversation usually goes:

Busy Business Executive:  What is SharePoint?

Me:  “SharePoint is an Enterprise Collaboration Portal”

Busy Business Executive:  So, what does that mean?

Me:  SharePoint enables employees, vendors, and business partners to share, find, and manage content easily with features like document management, search, and wikis.  You can also use SharePoint to aggregate data from different systems and create graphical key performance indicator dashboards, which allows people to manage by exception.

Sometimes, this explanation is enough for the person I’m talking with to understand why SharePoint is such a popular and beneficial business productivity tool.   Other times, I get a blank stare or an unconvincing response such as “I see.” 

I recently came across this fun, animated 3-minute video on YouTube which does a very good job explaining what SharePoint can do and why a business would want to implement SharePoint.



Once you have a conceptual understanding of the business problems that SharePoint aims to address, the detailed feature descriptions make a lot more sense.  You can also follow this link to learn more about Microsoft SharePoint or view one of my earlier SharePoint video blogs that provides a SharePoint feature overview.