Role of SharePoint Online in Microsoft Office 365

1. Role of SharePoint Online in Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft has enabled SharePoint Online in Office 365 since 2010, which is a long time in the world of corporate intranets. Still, it is true origins are much older than that. SharePoint Online is the latest iteration of Microsoft SharePoint Server, a product that has been around for almost 14 years.In order to see how SharePoint and Online Microsoft Office 365 work together, however, you first need to understand how SharePoint was historically intended to be used. SharePoint's Traditional Use Case For a long time, SharePoint's most well-known role has been as a platform to create, design and manage work-spaces, sites and content. Its role online is just an extension of what it's been doing on-premises for many years. Creating sites is meant to be a simple task in SharePoint. Those sites can be very generic, such as a site for a particular project, department or community. Users can post to the site and manage content in a delegated fashion, without the need for a webmaster. Everyone with the proper rights is able to contribute and collaborate. SharePoint also includes document management capabilities, including records management, compliance settings and workflows. There are also more advanced document management features, such as versioning, metadata tagging and real-time coauthoring. SharePoint is a collaborative team-, group- and company-based document management solution. How SharePoint Has Evolved However, SharePoint has stepped into a new role in recent years through the online Microsoft Office 365 platform. SharePoint Online is now not only a framework for site creation and management, it has also become the key storage platform in Office 365 to support more advanced capabilities. Microsoft now sees SharePoint as a front-end platform to drive collaborative work, as well as a core back-end component for storing files and content. The use of SharePoint in the back-end is then enabled from the front-end by different models.

2. For example, you can store and stream videos with Office 365, where SharePoint Online is used as the back-end storage platform to enable the Office Video workload.