What Is Sharepoint?
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is both complex and large to cater for small, medium and large site installations. However, the endless optional extra breeds confusion for those that are new to SharePoint. This can quickly become a problem for people that have to work with SharePoint, like customers. This page is a brief summary of those products and technologies that make up SharePoint. It is by no means complete.
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0
This is the platform upon which SharePoint is built. In much the same way that the .NET framework provides the core services and API that developers use to build software, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is the service-oriented foundation for all SharePoint products and technologies. The following is a list of core services WSS provides:
- Provisioning of Web Applications – The structure, creation, removal, logging, reporting and usage of web applications. Web applications are light on files that live under IIS and heavy on content that resides in databases. This makes it easier to manage and scale up and down SharePoint sites.
Backup and Restore Strategies – Given that the majority of SharePoint sites are held within the database, WSS provides a number of command-line tools to facilitate site backup and restore.
Basic Enterprise Content Management – WSS provides strategies for versioning items and associating meta, through site columns, to content types and other items. In addition, the fine-grained permission model and role-based security across web applications lies at the core of SharePoint.
De-centralised, Role-based Administration – WSS makes clear boundaries between those that are responsible for administering servers and those that manage SharePoint sites. Morever, the administration is de-centralised. This means that when a collection of sites is created by an authorised user, the farm administrator does not automatically have access to those new sites. Instead, the site collection adminstrator is responsible for the new sites and can it turn delegate ownership to targetted users.
Server Farms – WSS defines basic principles for the server farm topology. This determines how web front end servers, application server and SQL server databases are deployed in a SharePoint installation. SharePoint 2007 builds upon these principles.
Object Models and Web Services – These are the two primary APIs for accessing SharePoint content. For server side components, tight integration through the object model. For client side access to content, web services are the recommended API.
Collaboration Tools – WSS is bountiful here with various differnt tools such as document libraries, calendar, tasks, blogs, rss and wikis.
SharePoint Server 2007 Standard
The Standard Edition of SharePoint is a layer that rests on top of WSS to provide additional functionality.
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- The Records Repository for implementing a Records Managment strategy
- The Document Center provides a centralised vault for approved documents.
- Retention Policies for content to assist in meeting legal and regulatory compliance requirements.
- Content types that are custom, domain-specific, first-class citizens across the organisation.
- Auditing policies that provide tracking at the content type level.
- The clear separation of “look and feel” from “underlying content” through Page Layouts.
Search – SharePoint content is stored in the database. The databases are indexed and primed for search. Within WSS the search scope is constrained to this site and below. For the standard edition, there are no such restrictions. A lot of effort has been invested in SharePoint search to facilitate content aggregation.
Shared Services Providers (SSP) – The familiar provider-oriented architectural pattern has been applied within SharePoint to enable custom services to be made available and shared across all web applications. Out of the box SharePoint comes with a number of SSPs for search, my sites, personalisation, audiences, user profiles and publish links to office applications.
Site Collection Auditing – Site collection administrators can switch on auditing to report on when documents or items are checked in and out, deleted, restored, edited, opened, downloaded, viewed, moved or copied. There is additional auditing for searching site content and the modifications of users, permissions, content types and columns. The configuration of auditing comes out of the box with the Standard Edition but you need to get your hands dirty programmatically to do this in WSS.
Portals – A comprehension platform for aggregating sites and their content for the intranet, extranet and internet. The Standard Edition comes with two Portal templates, Collaboration and Publishing, targeting the small-medium intranets and large intranets/internets respectively.
Advanced Enterprise Content Management – Build upon the basic ECM features baked into the WSS, the Standard Edition adds a few more tools and techniques to address key business requirements:
SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise
The Enterprise Edition builds on the Standard Edition to add three key services that individually can be must-haves for the business.
- Forms Server – This is an interesting one. The idea is to empower users to create forms to capture content via the web or mobile devices, thereby taking the need for IT specialists out of the loop.
Excel Calculation Services – Excel is a powerful application and is much loved. Everything in one document has meant Excel is very hard to wrestle away from those that use it extensively. Yes, a database is a better place for the data but then you’ve got to factor in the cost of the build to migrate it there, the necessary client side applications to access the data, and the need to adapt to the continually changing data and access requirements. Excel Calculation Services is a pragmatic midway solution that puts Excel onto the server. Business users can carry on as before and IT folks can optimize and centrally/securely administer the data.
Business Data Catalog – Again, empowerment of the business users. With the BDC administrators, rather than developers, can hook into key third party systems such as Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel and SQL and make that data available to business users and indexable for searching purposes.
SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites
Just a different way of licensing the Enterprise Edition. It targets public facing web sites, so external users not internal users. It’s a per server license and does not need CALs.
