What are the different ways SharePoint 2013 can be installed and can be used?

There are mainly 3 different ways to install SharePoint 2013

•         SharePoint Foundation
•          SharePoint server
•          Office 365. 

SharePoint foundation

SharePoint foundation is mainly solution for those organizations who are manageable, secure and web collaboration platform. Basic collaboration feature has been provided with SharePoint foundation.

1.          SharePoint foundation is free installer provided by Microsoft and represents mainly the foundation parts of SharePoint.
2.         Features included administration, security , user and Team site collaboration and a number of apps (like document libraries and list )
3.         In short, it provides a basic set of features that enable you to get to both starting using and development for SharePoint.

Main features of SharePoint foundation

1. Effective document and task collaboration: In a central location all the accesses of data has been provided by the team site.
2. Reduces the headache of implementation and deployment resources: For windows server customers, SharePoint foundation server is available as a free download which helps them for their implementation time and cost are greatly reduced.
3. There will be better control on important data in the organization: Features for data such as information management and security has been provided by SharePoint Foundation.
4. Collaboration: you can customize and extend SharePoint foundation web to use for collaboration.

So basically content storage and collaboration are the two basic core features provided by SharePoint Foundation.  It is used for the team and small organization who wants to improve their work with one another in a much secure, easy to use, and collaborative work space.

SharePoint Server

SharePoint server offers lots of rich and advanced features compare to SharePoint foundation, which you can use for your organizations solutions.

Main features of SharePoint server.

1. Web content management: SharePoint server supports web content management system where you can submit the content on the internet.
2. Advance search: Search facility is available with SharePoint server versions offers more flexibility. You can configure customized search results pages with customized search web parts. 
3. Enterprise services: using these services you can build custom solutions quickly and easily.
4. Business Connectivity services: Using this feature you can connect to external source data source and display business data via user profiles, web parts or SharePoint lists.
5. Records Management: SharePoint server provide excellent support for content management which brings uniformity, scalibility, feasibility.
6. Social Networking and computing:  Enhance feature of social networking has been introduced in SharePoint server 2013

Office 365

SharePoint online is the term used when we use SharePoint from office 365. It is third party service and fully based on cloud.  Organizations can use this option as an alternate solution for the on-premise deployment of SharePoint.

Main Features of office 365

·         Licensing of SharePoint online through office 365 based on multiple factors like number of users, the quantity of data you need to store and what are features you required.

·         Rich applications can be developed both as SharePoint-hosted and cloud-hosted apps without investing cost on on-premise SharePoint development.

·         You can develop .Net applications using C# and visual basic and deploy onto SharePoint as .WSP or .Apps . HTML5 and JavaScript lighter weights apps also you can deploy.

·         As a developer you have all rights to customize any of the SharePoint editions so whether it is SharePoint foundation, SharePoint server or office 365 (SharePoint online)