Basic Groupware

Communication, information sharing and collaboration are some of the things central to teamwork. MS Windows SharePoint Services is a team website solution that allows you to communicate, share documents, and work together with your colleagues on projects. 

A part of Win Server 2003, SharePoint Services can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website, www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/sharepoint/wss.mspx. It is also available with some versions of MS Office System 2003. This software however, runs only on Win Server 2003. SharePoint Team services 2001 was the earlier version of SharePoint Services, but it is not available for retail now. However, there are some versions of MS Office XP that come with SharePoint Team Services, which may work with Win 2000.

To use SharePoint Services, you need IIS 6 running on Win Server 2003. The installation is simple and installs the Team Website on IIS. It gives you a blank website to which you can add and share content such as files, contact lists, task lists, discussions, announcements and events. You can even have a separate site for every project on which your team is working.

SharePoint website can be accessed through browser and if you have a Win SharePoint Services-compatible client program, such as MS Office 2003 or XP, you can work directly with the site, saving files to libraries, editing documents in the client program, and moving or linking that information to your site.

After installing the website, you can access it through a browser, supply the username and password and you will see the home page of your team web site. To add documents, click on the ‘shared documents’ link on the left hand corner. It will open a new page, where you can upload your files. Now other users can access that file by logging on to the web site and can download or edit the files directly using MS Office. The site also provides version control for files.

There is also a contact feature. To use it, click on the ‘Contacts’ link on the left hand of the main page. This will open a new page where you can add, view, and delete contacts. To import contacts from outlook, just click on the ‘Import Contacts’ button and a dialog box will appear which will let you import contacts. To link the website’s contacts list to outlook’s contact list click on the ‘Link to Outlook’ button and this will add a ‘Sharepoint Team Site — Contacts’ folder to Outlook Contacts list. From there you can directly see all your contacts but cannot make changes, as they can only be made through the website. SharePoint services use integrated Windows security to assign different kinds of rights, read, write, or full access to different users based on their role in the project.

Anoop Mangla