Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft has had immense success with its intranet and extranet

portal software named SharePoint. Currently, this is available in two flavors-Windows

SharePoint Services 2.0, which is free for install on Windows Server 2003 and

SharePoint Portal Server 2003, and is a commercial product that builds upon the

WSS (Windows SharePoint Services) provided infrastructure and delivers a

enterprise scale portal server that can scale to tens of thousands of websites

on a single server.

With the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007, the

SharePoint suite gets a major upgrade and is integrated into the Office Server

stack. This article is the first of a series that looks at SharePoint

technologies and how you can work with them.

Applies To: CIOs USP: Learn about the various features SharePoint Server 2007 Primary Link: office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX010909721033.aspx Google Keywords: sharepoint 2007

WSS 3.0



As before, WSS remains the core platform for SharePoint services. This new
version is built from the ground up to utilize ASP.NET 2.0 features running on

IIS 6.0 or 7.0.

This means that the SharePoint sites now contain all the cool

new features of ASP.NET 2.0 like Master Pages, rich controls and most

importantly, use the same Web Part infrastructure that ASP.NET 2.0 provides out

of the box rather than rolling its own custom implementation.

This means that if you've written Web Parts for some other

application you can start using them in WSS3 without any changes directly. WSS

adds a number of very important features other than the ones provided by using

ASP.NET 2.0. This includes support for forms authentication, easier site

management and customization, a Recycle Bin, document and item level security,

force check out for edit operations and support for mobile devices.

WSS also works with SQL Server 2000, 2005, MSDE or SQL Express.

At the client end, Internet Explorer 6.0 or above, Office 2003 or Office 2007

are the ideal clients to use the features provided. Collaboration services are

included within WSS3 to enable multiple users to collaborate on say, documents

stored in a site, simultaneously.

MOSS 2007



MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007) builds upon the WSS3
infrastructure and provides many different enterprise-class solutions. In fact,

the product that was known as SharePoint Portal Server has now been integrated

into this new product as one solution. MOSS actually contains a number of such

solutions for a large number of enterprise requirements. The following list

takes a look at these.

• Portal and Search: Provides the same infrastructure
  
  as what SharePoint Portal Server used to do. This allows you to create
  
  intranet and extranet portals quickly and perform searches within all the
  
  levels of these portals.

• WCM (Web Content Mgmt): This solution allows you to
  
  create Internet sites quickly and customize it to your requirements. A full
  
  fledged CMS, this solution used to be part of MCMS (Microsoft's Content
  
  Management Server) and is now part of the Standard edition of MOSS 2007.
  
  Content approval processes as well as managing development, staging and
  
  production servers are also part of this solution.
  
  
  
  Note that MCMS had other stuff as well that too has gotten integrated into
  MOSS. See below for more information.
  

• Business Process Management: Allows automating and
  
  managing business processes in your organization using workflows.

• Enterprise Content Mgmt: Another part of the content
  
  management solution, this is available only in the Enterprise edition of
  
  MOSS. This allows you to manage content of your organization.
  
  
  
  For instance, you organization may have a rule saying that all legal
  documents need to be kept in a record repository once a case is closed for a
  
  period of 7 years. You can now set up content management rules that perform
  
  such actions and manage your content for you within the ECM space.
  

• Business Intelligence: This solution allows you to
  
  store and analyze data from various sources within SharePoint itself.
  
  SharePoint also integrates a number of other services (which we will talk
  
  about a little later) that allow you to integrate and use Office
  
  applications for this.

Developer enhancements



As developers you can now leverage SharePoint for your applications with much
better ease. There are a number of new things in SharePoint that allow you to

work at an even better way than before.

ASP.NET 2.0



As mentioned before, ASP.NET 2.0 is the core on which SharePoint is built.

This means you can take advantage of all the cool ASP.NET 2.0

features in SharePoint as well. For instance, you want to change the logo for

the entire set of sites that you are hosting. This is very simple to do. Just

open the site master file and change the logo there. It will apply to all the

pages within the site in seconds.

SharePoint designer



FrontPage is dead, long live FrontPage. Well, not really. FrontPage has now
morphed into a new application named Office SharePoint Designer. This is the

next version of FrontPage, but enhanced to work with SharePoint in a much more

tighter manner. You can perform almost any kind of customization with this. It

lets you develop SharePoint based applications and workflow solutions. It can

access data from a variety of sources such as XML, SQL Server and Web services.

Win Workflow Foundation



One of the biggest drawbacks of earlier versions of SharePoint was that it did
not have a built in workflow engine that you could tell to do some tasks. The

good news is that WSS3/MOSS have the .NET 3.0 Workflow Foundation built in-

which means you can set up workflows all over the place. SharePoint comes with a

large number of standard content workflows built in (for instance, content

approval, content publishing, content discussion, etc.) which you can apply and

even customize right from the Web itself. You can also create simple workflows

graphically using SharePoint Designer and extremely complex workflows as well

using VS.NET 2005.

InfoPath & Forms Services



This feature works in the BI space and allows you to create InfoPath based forms
that work both from within InfoPath or from within the browser through

SharePoint. This means that you can now have extremely rich forms to gather

business data but do not require InfoPath installed on all



machines. The data is also gathered and stored for analysis by SharePoint
automatically or based on rules you set.

Excel services



This is a completely new service that allows you to store and server Excel files
off the SharePoint server. You can create files in Excel 2007 and set up

publishing rules that can incorporate things like which sheets to show, which

formulas are fixed or hidden, which cells or ranges are editable, etc. Once

published, a user can click the file in SharePoint to open it in Excel with

these rules set.

All formula calculations also occur on the server and not within

Excel itself which makes centralizing Excel formulas a breeze.

As you can see, SharePoint has indeed come a long way in this

new release. The large number of features and development options allow you to

create very rich and dynamic sites for intranet, extranet and Internet usage. We

will continue on this series by taking a look at each feature in detail.

Vinod Unny, Enterprise Infotech