What you need for this course

- [Instructor] If you would like to work along with me in this course, from time to time or all the way through, there are a few things that you will need. First, you will need to have SharePoint Online. To be clear, there are two different SharePoint products. The first product is SharePoint Server which is installed on one or more servers at your organization. It's also referred to as SharePoint on premises or on-prem. This course, however, focuses on SharePoint Online, which is often licensed for organizational use with Microsoft Office, so it's sometimes also referred to as SharePoint for Office 365, or SharePoint for Office, or Microsoft 365 SharePoint, and this also lives on a server, but that server isn't at your organization. That server is a Microsoft server in the cloud. All versions of SharePoint run in a browser, so it's good to know which browsers work and that's somewhat dependent upon your operating system. Here's a general rule. Microsoft Edge Chromium is your best bet in a Windows environment. If you were running an older browser like even something as recent as Internet Explorer 11, that is no longer supported for use with Office or SharePoint as of August of 2021. So if you're using Windows 10 or 11, you can use Microsoft Edge Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and you can use the slightly older version, the legacy version of Microsoft Edge, but there might be a few things that don't work quite the way you'd like them to, the way they would work if you were using one of these other supported browsers. And when I name Firefox or Chrome or Safari, I'm talking about the latest versions of those browsers, not the version you got two years ago. If you happen to be using an older version of Windows like Windows 8, 8.1, or 7 with Service Pack 1, you can also download Microsoft Edge Chromium if you're not already running it or Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome. And if you happen to be using Windows Vista Service Pack 2, there are a few of you still out there, then swing to Firefox or Chrome. For our Mac users, if you are using one of the more recent operating systems for Mac, 10.8 or later, then I would choose Apple Safari, but you could also use Google Chrome. They are both well supported. What supported means is that the SharePoint features work, and if you use a browser that is less well supported, some SharePoint features may not work. That's true with all of the websites you use. And finally, in a Linux environment, use Firefox or Chrome. You can also use SharePoint on a mobile device, for example, an a Android tablet or phone or an iPad or iPhone, and while there are mobile browsers, we will use the SharePoint apps rather than run SharePoint in a mobile browser if you are using one of the newer operating systems, iOS 10 or later. If you want to download the mobile apps for iOS or for Android, you will find the iOS apps in the Apple Store and the Android apps in Google Play, the same place you get all of your other applications, just look for SharePoint. And if you'd like to work along with me and you don't yet have SharePoint Online, consider a short-term subscription or, better yet, a free trial. If you search in your browser for "Try Microsoft 365 Business Standard," you will find a version that includes SharePoint. You'll find a link for a free trial, and that way, you can take not only SharePoint Online, but Office 365 and Microsoft Teams all out for a spin.