What are SharePoint Products and Technologies?

Note: Source from MSDN

SharePoint Products and Technologies provide a foundation for collaboration, business intelligence, enterprise content management, people and personalization services, Enterprise Search, integration of LOB data, and processes.

SharePoint Products and Technologies include the following:

·            Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. A set of services for collaboration and a foundation for building Web-based applications on Windows Server. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is included in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows Server 2008, and is also available separately as a download.

·         Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. A single, integrated application that provides sites (locations) where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow, and make use of business insight to reach better-informed decisions. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. For more information, see the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 frequently asked questions.

·         Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. A designer and developer tool that enables you to quickly build solutions that include both design and workflow.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 are built on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework and the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Windows Workflow Foundation (WF)

SharePoint Products and Technologies

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a technology that includes a set of tools for collaboration. These tools provide easy access to documents, content, people, and information. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 also provides eight capabilities or services that enable developers to create rich and scalable Web-based applications, thus providing the means for collaboration. Following are the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (see Figure 1).

·         Administration. The classes and features of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace provide administrators with the tools and means for deploying, migrating, maintaining, and administrating their SharePoint sites and SharePoint-based solutions. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Administration Resource Center.

·         Data management. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides an intuitive, robust environment for data collaboration and storage. It includes a range of ways to manage the content and metadata of your important business documents and data. Integrated property promotion and demotion maintain synchronization between metadata in Windows SharePoint Services and the metadata in the Office documents.

·         Information services. Information services in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include inbound e-mail, e-mail alert notifications, and search. These features help teams to stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information. Windows SharePoint Services can help users make well-informed decisions and get work done.

·         Pages and user interface (UI). The page model in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0. This creates dynamic new ways to customize and manage page design. The SharePoint pages viewed in the browser are constructed through the control templates of master pages and .ascx files. You can create custom templates that override the default templates, or programmatically modify the menus, treeviews, and navigational areas that are displayed on pages. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Pages and User Interface Resource Center.

·         Provisioning. When you create a list or a site, a definition or a template determines how the list or site will be instantiated. Unlike a traditional ASP.NET application, a physical ASPX page does not need to exist for every page on the server. Windows SharePoint Services treats any page that is not customized as a virtual file, which can allow a small number of files to appear in many places. You can learn more about how this works in Understanding and Creating Customized and Uncustomized Files in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. A definition or template determines, for example, the lists, files, Web Parts, Features, or settings with which to provision the new list or site. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Provisioning Resource Center.

·         Security. Security features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and the underlying ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0, help give you protection from unauthorized changes to your data, whether deliberate or inadvertent, and help ensure that sensitive information is available only to those authorized to see it. SharePoint Products and Technologies help provide a secure platform by integrating with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows Server to provide authentication and authorization mechanisms. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Security Resource Center.

·         Web Parts. Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services provide developers with a way to create UI elements that support both customization and personalization. A site owner or a site member with the appropriate permissions can customize Web Part Pages by using a browser or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to add, reconfigure, or remove Web Parts. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Web Parts Resource Center.

·         Workflow. Workflows implement custom business processes that you can attach to SharePoint documents and list items. You can use workflows to control almost any aspect of an item in Windows SharePoint Services, including the life cycle of that item. For more information, see the xx.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a managed object model that enables you to programmatically customize SharePoint sites. You can integrate this object model into your ASP.NET application to enable programmatic access to documents, content, people, and information from your application. For more information, see Programming in Windows SharePoint Services.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a server product that builds on the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology. It provides a consistent, familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration, and site customization. Additionally, Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows you to:

·         Conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data.

·         Participate in forms-driven business processes.

·         Access and analyze large amounts of business data.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 also allows you to create Web-based solutions and sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, or business intelligence needs. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in components to help you create rich Web-based solutions. As a result, Office SharePoint Server 2007 can greatly reduce the development time and provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities

Office SharePoint Server 2007 also allows you to create Web-based solutions and sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, or business intelligence needs. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in components to help you create rich Web-based solutions. As a result, Office SharePoint Server 2007 can greatly reduce the development time and provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs.

Figure 2 shows the capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides six capabilities or services that enable developers to customize and extend rich and scalable Web-based applications, as follows:

·         Collaboration and social computing. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides Web Parts that enable functionality for social computing, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, e-mail integration, and task coordination. All of these components use information about your organization, communities, and electronic communications in Public My Site pages to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests. For more information, see Collaboration Help and How-to.

·         Portals. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a world class enterprise portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business. It provides built-in My Site personal sites, content syndication, user profiles and a profile store, audience targeting, mobile device support, portal site templates, document aggregation Web Parts, and more. For more information, see Developer-Oriented Videos on Building Portals.

·         Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides extensive and extensible content gathering, indexing, and querying ability. This service supports full-text searching by using a Structured Query Language (SQL-based) query syntax, and provides a new keyword syntax to support keyword searches. For more information, see the Enterprise Search Resource Center for SharePoint Server.

·         Enterprise content management. Enterprise content management (ECM) features provide ways to manage the content and metadata of business documents stored in Office SharePoint Server 2007 document libraries. ECM is a key infrastructure component that can help companies manage and organize high volumes of unstructured content such as forms, documents, records, e-mail messages, videos, instant messages (IMs), and Web pages. For more information, see the Enterprise Content Management Resource Center for SharePoint Server.

·         Business process and forms. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in electronic forms and workflow templates. InfoPath Forms Services, included in Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables you to publish InfoPath form templates, designed in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, to Office SharePoint Server 2007 as ASP.NET Web applications. You can open these in your browser to provide a similar experience to filling out and editing a form in InfoPath. For more information, see the InfoPath Forms Services Resource Center for SharePoint Server. In addition, Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in workflows for document approval, feedback collection, signature collection, and disposition approval, and three-state workflows and a translation management workflow. You can also write custom code to create, maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling you to streamline your business processes. For more information, see the Workflow Resource Center.

·         Business intelligence. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides infrastructure to create dashboards that allows decision-makers to access information. Excel Services server technology, included in Office SharePoint Server 2007, is a shared service that enables you to load, calculate, and display Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can use the Excel Services programmability framework to extend Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services functionalities to work with Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, query tables on Excel Services, external workbook references, SQL write-back, and user-defined functions (UDFs). For more information, see the Excel Services Resource Center. Additionally, the Business Data Catalog functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables you to present LOB data within Office SharePoint Server. By using the Business Data Catalog, you can bring key data from different business applications to SharePoint lists, Web Parts, search, user profiles, and custom applications. The Business Data Catalog allows you to pull data from Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Office Access, or other databases by using a connection string. It also allows you to pull business data from back-end server applications such as SAP, Siebel, or other LOB systems by using Web services. You can use the Business Data Catalog: Metadata Model to define an LOB entity and the How to: Get Started with Using the Administration Object Model to manage metadata programmatically. For more information, see the Business Data Catalog Resource Center for SharePoint Server.

SharePoint Architecture

User Management in SharePoint with different options and architecture is a very complex subject, and thus it will be worthwhile for us to discuss and understand the out-of-the-box SharePoint user management, security and architecture. The chart in Figure 1 represents the logical SharePoint technology architecture. SharePoint is in its third major release and is comprised of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) version 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). WSS v3 is a free add-on to the Windows 2003 Server, running on top of SQL Server, Windows 2003 Server and ASP.NET 2.0. MOSS is available in various editions (Standard vs. Enterprise) and options (Excel Services, Content Management, etc.), and runs on top of WSS.

Since MOSS is built on Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), they share similar architecture and foundations.  MOSS provides more application level features and services.  It also has different and more extensive User Profile management than WSS.  The important point about this architecture is that SharePoint relies on many user management and security principles from the Network Operating system, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and ASP.Net foundation.  In the rest of this section we will take a look at:

•       WSS and MOSS architecture
•       SharePoint Security (Authentication and Authorization)
•       SharePoint User Profiles in MOSS and WSS

Windows SharePoint Services Architecture



WSS is the core platform for SharePoint services.  WSS is a logical three-tier that contains a Front End Web Server, a Search and Index server and a Database Server

WSS is essentially a web-based ASP.NET application that extends an IIS web site processing HTML requests through a set of ASP.NET (.aspx) pages, .Net application programming interface (API), and XML web services.  It processes and executes the business logic using a combination of .Net and SharePoint objects assemblies.  The data is stored in the backend SQL database.  SharePoint presents the information to end users in the standard HTML format compatible with most web browsers.  An IIS web site that has been extended with WSS is called a Web Application (virtual server in previous WSS versions).  SharePoint Web Applications use an HttpModule and an HttpHandler    to re-route incoming traffic to the SharePoint business logic, thus enabling the SharePoint Web Application to coexist with other IIS web applications.  Note that this architecture also allows SharePoint and other web applications to share the same user security infrastructure, mainly Windows Server and ASP.NET.

The Search and Index server is an executable (MSSearch.exe) that is installed as web services in Windows Server.  Its primary job is to index the content of the database to enable searching on SharePoint lists, documents, and files.  Note that MOSS uses entirely different search architecture than WSS.

WSS uses Microsoft SQL Server to store both the configuration and the content in the databases. When WSS is installed it creates a configuration database that stores the metadata, physical configuration and information about every web application that has been extended, as well as all the servers and their roles in the farm. WSS also create an Admin database that stores the content of the Central Administrator tool.  In addition, for every extended virtual server, WSS creates a Content Database that stores the actual site content.  Note that WSS stores the user information in its content database.

WSS is also designed to be scalable.  In a large or medium server farm, you can assign a multiple cluster database backend and install load balanced architecture for the front end web server as shown in Figure 3.  Note that there is only a single Configuration database for all SharePoint servers in the farm.

MOSS Architecture

Although MOSS runs on top of the WSS platform, MOSS provides a number of extended applications and features, such as: Advanced content management and publishing sites, the ability to search the contents of external databases, and more site templates and workspaces

Instead of running the Search and Index on the same box as WSS, MOSS uses another application server called Shared Services. This is a collection of application servers (a set of services) that can be configured on one server and shared across many different MOSS portal sites and WSS sites. The services on these servers include enterprise level applications such as Search, Index, User Profile, Content Management, My Sites, Business Data Catalogue, Form Services, Excel Services, Job Scheduling and Usage Reporting.

Another important architectural difference from WSS is the Search database is created for each Shared Services Provider (SSP) database in the farm. The SSP Search database contains search related information such as crawl properties, document properties and propagation properties. 

From the user management perspective, MOSS also has several additional services that differentiate it from WSS: Audience, User Profiles database, and Single-Sign-On (SSO).  The SSP database contains important data such as the Business Data Catalogue, Site Usage data, BI information and several tables for user management:

• User Profile information that is imported from a directory service such as Active Directory.
• Audiences and organizational hierarchies.
• Security information.

SharePoint Hierarchy

Another important topic that you need to understand related to SharePoint user management is the hierarchy, or scope of the SharePoint architecture.  The security and user permissions are applied based on the scope.  SharePoint uses the following hierarchy

1.     Farm: This is the highest available level, and refers to all SharePoint installations within a server farm. It can contain multiple servers, but each farm has a single configuration database.

2.     Web Application: A Web Application is the container for all sites on a particular server, on a specified IP address and port. Web applications map to one IIS web site, which also map to exactly one SSP. This is what was called Virtual Server in SPv2. As previously mentioned, this is an IIS site that is extended to work with SharePoint.

3.     Site Collection: A site collection is a top level site where all sites within a particular web application are grouped. Each site collection can share the same content database, or have its own content database (see the link in the reference external link at the end of this article).

4.     Web: Refers to an individual site within a site collection. This is the lowest available level.




What is SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint is a web application platform developed by Microsoft. First launched in 2001, SharePoint is typically associated with web content management and document management systems, but it is actually a much broader platform of web technologies, capable of being configured to suit a wide range of solution areas.

SharePoint is designed as a broad, central application platform for common enterprise web requirements. SharePoint's multi-purpose design allows for management and provisioning of intranet portals, extranets, websites, document & file management, collaboration spaces, social tools, enterprise search, business intelligence, process integration, system integration, workflow automation, and core infrastructure for third-party solutions. SharePoint's core infrastructure is also suited to providing a base technology platform for custom developed applications.

SharePoint is capable of supporting multiple organizations on a single 'server farm'. Microsoft provides SharePoint Foundation at no cost, but sells premium editions with additional functionality, and also provides SharePoint as a service in their cloud computing as part of their Office 365 platform (and previously as part of their Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) offering). The product is also sold through a cloud model by many third-party vendors.

When sharepoint has been used in an organization, it makes it easy to create a collaborative website among the employees. This is because the skills and expertise needed for such an accomplishment are very minimal thus turns out to be more favorable in an organization set up. It is easy for a person to access and fulfill all his communication needs and it does a lot of work if used properly. Sharepoint does not handle issues like updating content and defining specific accounts since they come automatically. Sharepoint unlike other software is able to manage information in a professional and effective manner. With schedules, documents, issue log and budget, information management tasks are effectively centralized to the advantage of the user.

Business processes in an organization are made automatic under a sharepoint. There is no need to stress yourself making a certain process successful when sharepoint is there to take care of that. Dashboards are in addition easy to create using specific parts of the web like charts and key performance indicators courtesy of sharepoint. The other big advantage of using sharepoint in an organization is that it is easy to integrate with other existing data sources without difficulties. If you have been having a lot of problems related to data management, communication and any other area in your organization then the solution lies with sharepoint.