1.1. SharePoint Products and Technologies

SharePoint is a set of products and technologies with informative and collaborative web-based capabilities that help people create, organize, distribute, and maintain stored knowledge. SharePoint web sites and pages are commonly used to build intranet and extranet portals and team sites, as well as public-facing Internet sites. SharePoint is a great platform upon which to build applications and provides many key services in the greater story of the Microsoft Application Platform.

SharePoint shows great maturity in terms of its user interface, database design, and workflow and communication features. It provides a standard interface with standard navigation, enabling users to focus on tools and information, not on learning how to navigate new menu controls. SharePoint helps resolve database and business logic issues by providing a powerful complement to structured data—that is, a managed environment to store unstructured data that gets the information and business rules onto the network and out of local Excel files. SharePoint takes advantage of the first workflow platform built into an operating system and makes it easy for developers and power users to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to automate business processes.

SharePoint integrates with IM and email, though you will still want Office Communications Server (OCS, formerly LCS) to audit and manage IM messaging as effectively as you manage email. SharePoint reduces the load on email by providing effective alternatives: appropriate, organic team sites for teams to share information, where teams can use document libraries with versioning, apply enforced "checkout" for editing, and provide links to documents rather than create versioning nightmares by emailing attachments to the whole team for review.

The set of SharePoint Products and Technologies includes two platforms: Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). In a nutshell, WSS is used to create web sites for team collaboration on a common project. MOSS builds on WSS with capabilities for portal publishing, enterprise search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process automation, and business intelligence (BI) reporting and analysis tools. While WSS will serve well the needs of small companies and individual departments, MOSS is designed to be an "enterprise-class" platform to manage and control a company's diverse knowledge assets.

1.1.1. Windows SharePoint Services

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a technology provided as an extension to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (and above). WSS is free, and if it was not provided as an option when you installed Windows Server, you can download and install it from the Microsoft Downloads site (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/default.aspx) at any time. According to the Product Team, WSS "provides a platform for collaboration applications, offering a common framework for document management and a common repository for storing documents of all types."

WSS includes Site Templates for Team Sites, Document Workspaces, Meeting Workspaces, blogs, and Wikis. Since any site can be saved as a template, it is easy to create your own library of templates for reuse. Microsoft makes a collection available for downloading, and still more templates are available on the web.

Each WSS site may include document libraries, form libraries, calendars, announcements, task lists, issues lists, and custom lists. Each of these is simply a special instance of a list, and each list contains items or rows. What makes each distinct are the columns stored, and the views provided. For example, a calendar contains columns for the event name, start and end dates, and a description. It provides calendar views that you can switch from Daily, to Weekly, to Monthly. But whatever the columns and views, a calendar is simply a collection of items in a list.

WSS 3.0 reintroduced the concept of the content type. Companies work with many different types of content—expense reports, presentations, proposals, memos and more—and each of these types might have its own template and metadata fields. Content types let you define and consistently apply the rules for each type, for any page, library, or list in which you've allowed a type to be stored.

Content types can also be inherited, so you might have a base "Presentation" type with fields to store Product, Intended Audience, Duration, and Status (Draft or Final). This type may in turn be inherited by "Internal Presentation," which sets a base PowerPoint template, and "External Presentation," which sets both a document template and additional fields for Event Name and Event Date.

1.1.2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS or OSS) comes in two versions: Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition. Standard Edition is a Microsoft product built upon WSS. MOSS extends WSS with functionality for web content management (WCM), records management (RM), integrated digital rights management (DRM), workflows, Single Sign-On (SSO), document retention and auditing policies, expanded search including People Search, and site variations to ease the maintenance of multilingual sites. MOSS also provides a My Site for each user, with both a private view for storing personal information and a public view to share photos, personal information, and more.

In MOSS, content types can also be associated with workflow and lifecycle policies. For example, you might have a base Presentation type, which sets a policy to "review or delete six months after last update." This type may in turn be inherited by Internal Presentation, which sets a base PowerPoint template, and External Presentation, which sets both a document template and a workflow so that all external presentations first obtain the approval of the marketing and legal departments.

Among the WCM features of OSS is the Page Layout. In MOSS, a Master Page may contain a Page Layout, which in turn contains HTML and fields. Page Layouts are great for organizing the body of a page. Each Page Layout is associated with a content type, and the content is stored in the type's fields. For example, you could have a Page Layout for products with a two-column display and a photo in the top left, and another for news items with a banner and a three-column layout. You can associate either of these with a Site Template, for example the Publishing Site, to provide multiple layouts without having to create a new Site Template. In WSS the Site Template and Master Page control page layout. In MOSS, Page Layouts provide many more combinations.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server: Enterprise Edition contains the features of Standard Edition plus the following: a Forms Server to publish browser-based forms from InfoPath, an Excel Server for spreadsheet publishing, the Business Data Catalog to ease the displaying and searching of external data stores, and data visualization features for reporting and business intelligence.

Both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 are .NET 2.0 applications with XML web service interaction layers and ASP.NET presentation layers (described in depth in Chapter 2).

SharePoint is a secure, reliable, scalable platform for developing enterprise web applications. This book shows you how to accomplish just that.