Benefits of communities:-

   

                  Brief description of benefits of SharePoint communities:

·         Work Together the Way You Want

With SharePoint 2010 Communities, people can work together the way they want using a full set of collaboration tools—from wikis to workflows and team sites to tagging. A single, flexible platform makes it easy to manage these tools and design the right collaborative experiences for different business needs

·         Rely on a Secure Collaboration Platform

The SharePoint 2010 collaboration platform is secure, easy to manage, and scalable. People can work together more safely with the platform’s granular security and privacy controls, centralized policy setting, and detailed reporting and analysis.

·         Extend the Value of Your Community Solutions

SharePoint 2010 provides a single collaboration platform that lets people use the tools and applications they already know. SharePoint 2010:

• Works seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft Business Productivity infrastructure, including Microsoft Office applications, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics.

• Adheres to open standards, so people can use third-party applications and systems.

• Uses Business Connectivity Services to surface information from other business applications.

Related feature of SharePoint communities

·         Tags

Classify and organize large amounts of information in your company by applying tags. Use standardized taxonomy tags defined by the organization and informal social tags defined by employees.

·         Blogs

Use the new SharePoint Ribbon to format blog text and easily upload images.

·         Colleague Suggestions

Keep your colleague network current with an automated service that suggests colleagues based on your reporting structure, communities membership, e-mail distribution lists, Office Communicator contact lists, and analysis of most common Office Outlook e-mail recipients.

·         My Content

Centrally store and manage your documents, favorite links, personal blog, and wiki pages on the My Content section of your My Site. Customize your pages and set access and permission levels for any content in the section.

·         Organization Browser

Navigate your organizational structure to see managers, peers, and direct reports.

·         Photos and Presence

Help people recognize each other with photos. Use presence to email, IM, or call someone with the click of a button.

·         Ratings

Rate SharePoint pages, lists, libraries, and individual documents with a five-star rating system.

·         Recent Activities

Let people know what you're up to with the Recent Activities feed on your profile page.

·         Wikis

Create pages that combine the ease of wikis with the functionality of Web Parts.

Benefits of SharePoint Sites

 Description of Benefits of SharePoint Sites in Brief:-

·         Easily Share and Publish Information

SharePoint sites are easy to make. In fact, the full set of features in SharePoint 2010 Sites can help anyone build a site from start to finish. Several out-of-the-box features provide instant value by helping a site owner build the first page right away. Still other features make it simple to modify pages—change content, add interaction, or apply a design theme. Novice or expert, anyone can quickly create, customize, and publish a site that looks great and meets a specific business need.

·         Ensure Broad Adoption

SharePoint sites are as easy to use as they are to make. That’s because SharePoint 2010 Sites works so well with other technologies that people use to do their jobs. Connections to Microsoft Office make it a snap to save documents directly to SharePoint sites. Even offline, people can access sites, documents, and lists with Microsoft SharePoint Workspace and synchronize changes just by reconnecting. Plus, cross-browser support and a great mobile experience mean that anyone can access and share content, in the office or on the go.

·         Deliver Personalized Experiences

SharePoint 2010 Sites gives people the content they need, the way they want it. Features such as audience targeting, multilingual interface support, and user tagging provide a highly customized Web experience.

Related Features of SharePoint Sites:-

·         WebParts

Use Web Parts to add new functionality to SharePoint sites. Add a Web Part to any page, and a the new functionality will appear when the page is displayed.

·         SharePoint Health Analyzer

Quickly find and fix potential problems across all of the servers in your farm. The SharePoint Health Analyzer monitors farm health and can automatically fix many common configuration and performance problems.

·         Visual Upgrade

Upgrade to SharePoint 2010 but keep the SharePoint 2007 look-and-feel until you are ready to switch. View a site with the SharePoint 2010 user interface before committing to it.

·         Out-Of-Box-Web Parts

Use more than 40 out-of-the-box Web Parts to add functionality anywhere in a site with point-and-click simplicity.

·         Accessebility

Use SharePoint more effectively with improved accessibility, including built-in support for keyboard navigation and support for industry-wide accessibility standards.

·         Cross-Browser Support

Access SharePoint through Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

·         Multilingual User Interface

Take advantage of out-of-the-box support for multilingual experiences in SharePoint 2010. Give your people language options in site navigation, menus, the SharePoint Ribbon, and customized list fields.

·         Streamlined Central Administration

Manage SharePoint 2010 more efficiently with a streamlined Central Administration experience. Use the SharePoint Ribbon to configure and manage your server farm.

·         Unattached Content Database Recovery

Temporarily mount an unattached content database and browse content, back up a site collection, or export sites and lists without a recovery farm.

·         Windows PowerShell Support

Achieve greater control and productivity with Windows PowerShell, a command line shell and scripting language. SharePoint 2010 offers a snap-in so you can take advantage of PowerShell for your SharePoint deployments and manage your server farm and automate tasks with out-of-the-box cmdlets.

Capabilities of SharePoint

We divide SharePoint capabilities in six parts:

1.       Sites.

2.       Communities.

3.       Content.

4.       Search.

5.       Insights

6.       Composite

Let’s have a look on these capabilities in descriptive way:-

1.       Sites

A site is a group of related web pages where an organisation can work on project , cunduct meeting and share information. you can think of SharePoint 2010 Sites as a “one-stop shop” for all your business Web sites. It provides a full set of tools that your people can use to create any kind of site, plus a single infrastructure that simplifies site management. From a team site for colleagues, to an extranet site for partners, to an Internet site for customers, people can share and publish information using one familiar system.

2.       SharePoint 2010 Communities: An Integrated Collaboration Platform

SharePoint 2010 Communities lets 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.

3.       SharePoint 2010 Content: ECM for the Masses

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.

4.       SharePoint 2010 Search: Relevance, Refinement, and People

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.

5.       SharePoint 2010 Insights: BI for Everyone

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.

6.       SharePoint 2010 Composites: Do-It-Yourself Business Solutions

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.