Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010 is a business collaboration platform that facilitates collaboration, manages content, implements business processes, and handles access to information. In addition to providing out-of-the-box solutions to common business processes, you can customize SharePoint for your business needs.

As part of the Microsoft Application Platform, it integrates easily with your existing systems, providing IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability. Using Microsoft SharePoint Server, you can exchange XML and binary messages between Microsoft® BizTalk® Server 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 document libraries. You can publish the reporting documents from Microsoft® SQL Server® Reporting Services to SharePoint sites and get report viewing and management services.

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Features

Sites
​SharePoint 2010 Sites provides a single infrastructure for all your business Web sites. Share documents with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers. 

Communities
SharePoint 2010 Communities let’s people work together in ways that are most effective for them. How? By providing great collaboration tools that anyone can use to share ideas, find people and expertise, and locate business information. Even better, SharePoint 2010 lets you manage these tools from a single, powerful platform. With SharePoint 2010 Communities, your people can be more creative and productive—and you can rest easy knowing that they’re working in a secure, well-managed environment.

Composites
SharePoint 2010 Composites provides building blocks that you can use to assemble, connect, and configure collaborative business solutions. From simple sites to complex applications, you can rapidly respond to specific business needs with custom solutions.

Content
SharePoint 2010 Content makes Enterprise Content Management (ECM) easy for everyone. Combining traditional content management, social capabilities, and powerful search, it is as natural to manage as it is to use. With its simple, “behind-the-scenes” administration, you can quickly set up compliance policies, while its familiar interface lets your people work just as they would in Microsoft Office. The result is well-managed information that is easy to find, share, and use.

Insights
SharePoint 2010 Insights lets everyone access the business information they need to make good decisions. With powerful features like interactive dashboards and scorecards, people can use the information in databases, reports, and business applications to address specific needs. Even better, they can work naturally and confidently, thanks to a familiar user experience. Because SharePoint 2010 Insights uses well-known applications and interfaces, people are comfortable from the start, and they know how to get the data they need. For example, anyone can use Excel Services to publish Microsoft Excel workbooks in SharePoint 2010. From there, an entire team can access and analyze the same data and rest assured that everyone has the right information.

Search
​SharePoint 2010 Search helps your people find the information they need to get their jobs done. It provides intranet search, people search, and a platform to build search-driven applications—all on a single, cost-effective infrastructure. But what’s so unique about SharePoint 2010 Search is its combination of relevance, refinement, and people. This new approach to search provides an experience that is highly personalized, efficient, and effective.

The upgrade from SharePoint 2007 is designed to be smooth and predictable. New functionality improves governance and allows you to manage how others use SharePoint. For example, if you want to maintain a centralized SharePoint deployment instead of taking a more decentralized approach, improved governance functionality can block decentralized deployments through Group Policy settings or track them with Active Directory marker support. Also, sandboxed solutions provide a safe way for site administrators to upload custom user code.

For cloud computing, Microsoft SharePoint Online is a hosted collaboration platform with the same robust capabilities as Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. Microsoft SharePoint Online provides a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently collaborate with their team members, find organizational resources, and manage content and workflow, all without the infrastructure associated with on-premises software and hardware.

To learn more, visit the Microsoft SharePoint Server home page.