What is Sharepoint made of?

            Sharepoint can be a pretty scary thing at first. It’s full of a bewildering array of tools: sites, collections, web parts, lists, document libraries, calendars, wikis, meeting spaces… sometimes it just seems like too much – almost as if Sharepoint has too much functionality.

            Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a simpler way to look at Sharepoint? A secret truth behind all the pieces, that puts them all together? There is.

            I was working on Sharepoint for several months before I finally realized this: Sharepoint is built entirely, almost exclusively, on lists. Every piece of information in Sharepoint is stored in a list. If you start poking into the guts of your site, behind the web parts, you’ll find them. Lists. The wikis? Lists. The calendar? Lists again. Even the document library is a list.

            But these are very different kinds of information! They shouldn’t all be lists, right?

            Well, not exactly. A list is just a container full of information kept in some sort of order. It can be a list full of text, with a unique number assigned to each entry. It can be a list of documents, with metatags and other information for organization – a document library. It can be a list of dates and times, with other information added on – a calendar.

            Of course, this begs the question: if these are all lists, why do they look so different? Web parts are the answer. Web parts are components which perform the actual function of displaying lists. Web parts are very particular as to the lists they’ll display, but they display those lists exactly as you want them to display. A web part can turn a list of dates into a calendar, or a list of text entries into a wiki. But at the heart of it, they’re all lists. In fact, CorasWorks uses lists to control the display of menus!

            So, in essence there are three parts to Sharepoint: the Lists, which contain information, the Web Parts, which control how list information is displayed, and Web Sites, which contain Web Parts. There are a few exceptions, but the vast majority of Sharepoint’s functionality comes from these three basic elements.

            For day to day use of Sharepoint, this really isn’t all that important. Whether or not you’re aware of how the parts of Sharepoint interact, they’ll continue to function. To truly understand Sharepoint, though, it’s crucial to realize what the various pieces do and how they interact.