Introducing SharePoint Online for Developers

SharePoint Online is a core part of Office 365, which is a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud service from Microsoft. SharePoint Online (SPO) is one of the services in Office 365 that companies and organizations typically purchase when they move parts or all of their infrastructure and services to a public cloud service.

In this chapter, we'll take a lap around Office 365 and SharePoint Online, with a strong focus on development models and features that are relevant to you as a developer. In addition we'll provision a new SharePoint site collection that will aid us in testing code we'll write in upcoming chapters. At the end of this chapter, you'll have a good overview of SharePoint Online and the development models that have been, and some of which still are, available to you in on-premises SharePoint and SharePoint Online.