Page 146 - MS Office 365 for Dummies 3rd Ed (2019)

FIGURING OUT SharePoint APPS AND PAGE TERMINOLOGY
Don’t be confused by the term SharePoint app. In past versions of SharePoint, these were just called lists and libraries. In the future, they might be called add-ins. Microsoft is continually refining the terminology around SharePoint functionality, but the concept doesn’t change. A SharePoint list, library, app, or add-in is a self-contained component of SharePoint that you can customize to fit your specific business needs.
A SharePoint page is just a web page. There are many different ways to create and con- figure and customize pages, but at the end of the day it is just a web page like any other web page. SharePoint just makes creating, customizing, and publishing, sharing, and promoting the page a lot easier than if you were to try to do it by writing HTML code from scratch.
When you use your web browser to develop new functionality or customize existing functionality, the result is called an app. For example, let’s say you create a blank SharePoint list, then add some columns and workflow behavior to it and call it an expense manager. You have just created your very own SharePoint app called Expense Manager. Of course, this is a very simple example. Apps can get incredibly complicated. But the idea is the same, regardless of how complex your apps become.
When you customize a SharePoint list or library, you’re creating your very own SharePoint app. Apps are covered in detail later in the chapter.
Using a Web Browser as a Development Tool
To a user, browsing a SharePoint site looks like a regular website — with some fancy SharePoint capabilities. Those SharePoint capabilities enable easy collabo- ration, access to business information, and a boost to business intelligence, all through the web. In SharePoint terms, a site is a container for SharePoint pages. This entire ball of functionality, also called a platform (because you can build on it), is the Microsoft product called SharePoint. One of the things that makes Share- Point so exciting is that you don’t even have to drop out of your web browser to tell SharePoint what to do. As long as you have access to SharePoint and a current browser, you’re ready to start developing a site.
130 PART3 ExploringSharePointOnline