SharePoint Online is a cloud-based modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) collaboration platform designed to help you to create, store, organize, visualize, and share data, content, and applications. Not only is SharePoint Online a content management platform, but it is also an application development platform. One of SharePoint Online's strengths is the ability to search for data across an enterprise content set, including connected resources such as on-premises SharePoint Server environments or on-premises file servers (with the configuration of SharePoint Hybrid).
In addition to content management capabilities for your online data, SharePoint Online can also connect to on-premises database services. The value proposition of SharePoint Online is to enable users and administrators to focus on providing value to their organizations instead of managing infrastructure:
With SharePoint Online (as well as other services in the Microsoft 365 suite), organizations don't need to purchase and deploy infrastructure of their own. Instead, they can quickly adopt a pre-configured platform as a subscription service and begin using it almost immediately.
For content creators, SharePoint Online features both easy-to-use what you see is what you get drag and drop design, publishing, and categorization tools for content authors, as well as interfaces for coding more complex sites and queries. As a manager of a SharePoint site, you can publish news, upload documents, add links to resources, and visualize data from other parts of the Office 365 ecosystem. Microsoft enables content consumers to access resources via browsers on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices, as well as native mobile applications for Android and iOS platforms:
SharePoint Online, like other services in the Microsoft 365 platform, is licensed on a per-user basis. The following table shows general features and limits of the SharePoint Online service:
|
Feature |
Office 365 Business Essentials or Business Premium |
Office 365 Enterprise E1, E3, or E5, or SharePoint Online Plan 1 or 2 |
Office 365 Enterprise F1 |
|
Storage |
1 TB per organization, plus 10 GB per license purchased |
1 TB per organization, plus 10 GB per license purchased |
1 TB per organization |
|
Storage for site collections |
Up to 25 TB per site collection or group |
Up to 25 TB per site collection or group |
Up to 25 TB per site collection or group |
|
Site collections per organization |
500,000 |
500,000 |
500,000 |
|
Number of users |
Up to 300 |
1-500,000 |
1-500,000 |
For a more detailed and up-to-date listing of the SharePoint Online features and availability, please refer to the SharePoint Online service description at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescriptions/sharepoint-online-service-description/sharepoint-online-service-description#feature-availability-across-office-365-plans.
You can purchase an unlimited amount of additional storage for your SharePoint Online environment.