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.