Chapter 2. Understanding Related Server Technologies

IN THIS CHAPTER

Exploring the basics of Internet Information Services

Investigating the nature of FTP and WebDAV sites

Working with FPSE-based Web sites

Introducing WSS and MOSS technologies

In the previous chapter, you learned some basic concepts about creating simple Web pages and Web sites by using SharePoint Designer. This chapter focuses on server-related technologies because they form the foundation and support for the Web content and Web sites that you design in SharePoint Designer. Understanding these technologies is important, and this information helps you decide how best to exploit the features of SharePoint Designer, including which features to use and which ones to avoid. It also helps you understand the internals of Web site administration and management from the perspective of a Web server and helps you build some concepts around Web server management so that you can troubleshoot issues and problems when working with these technologies by using SharePoint Designer.

Simply put, a Web server is a machine that hosts Web sites. When you use a Web browser to visit a Web site, you're actually requesting some Web content from a Web server that hosts the Web site. It's the job of a Web server to serve requests for Web pages and other Web-based content in a timely, scalable, and performance-optimized fashion. The Web server processes the code associated with the Web pages and delivers the resulting output to a Web browser for display.

Besides processing Web pages for display, Web servers also support a variety of technologies that facilitate content management and publishing. Software such as SharePoint Designer relies on the capabilities of Web server computers to provide their publishing features to Web site developers.

Although a number of Web server products are available for you to choose from, I mostly concentrate on Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server. While SharePoint Designer can be used with Web sites hosted by other Web server products, IIS provides the complete package for SharePoint Designer as a Web server. Apart from supporting development technologies such as ASP.NET 2.0 (which is heavily exposed in SharePoint Designer), IIS supports all Web content management and publishing technologies exploited by SharePoint Designer. These include FTP, WebDAV, FPSE, and SharePoint. As a matter of fact, SharePoint v3 can only be installed with IIS 6.0 and above as the Web server platform.