A new trend called cloud computing is making its presence felt across the globe. It is believed that in the coming years, most computing will happen with the help of the Internet services. All diverse computer programs with varied applications that we commonly use will be doled out with various services like subscriptions provided to the Internet cloud. This is an effective and unique style of IT or information technology by making computer services and network less complicated and easily accessible by centralising memory, storage and processing. Microsoft leads from the front in this domain. 

Microsoft provides license and also supports different kinds of products and services that are predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions. Microsoft provides us a wide platform for developing solutions, programming languages, various developmental tools as well as application servers for various kinds of functions.

Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform that is developed by Microsoft for small scale as well as large scale organisations. It is a one stop solution and therefore it can replace multiple web application and affirm different combinations of enterprise website requirements. This is related with document management systems as well as web content management.

The multi-purpose platform from Microsoft SharePoint allows managing and provisioning for intranet portals, extranets and websites, social networking tools, collaboration spaces, managing different documents and files, business intelligence tooling, process/information integration, enterprise search as well as third party developed solution.

SharePoint can accommodate several web applications at one place. As a cloud computing solution or as a part of office 365 and BPOS it can be used as a free product. It offers different methods of customisation and configuration of web areas that have granular governance arrangements. Some of the most common applications of Microsoft SharePoint are:

·         Intranet Portal

·         Extranet sites

·         Internet sites

·         Enterprise content and document management

Now some of the reasons why we should use Microsoft SharePoint services:

• It extends exchange server
• This is highly customisable
• The solutions are scalable
• Extends InfoPath
• Dynamically analysed storage system
• It can also be data transport mechanism
• Can be backed up by single operation

If you look for Hosted Microsoft CRM, then you will know that it too helps customers by centralising all the details of the clients, their correspondences, for finding out business prospects as well as capture workflow. But, at the end of the day, you need to choose the business model that works best for you.