What is Sharepoint

Overview A SharePoint page is built by combining the web parts into a web page, to be accessed using a browser. Any web editor supporting ASP.NET can be used for this purpose, even though Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is the preferred editor. The extent of customization of the page depends on its design. SharePoint is a web-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. It can be used to host web sites which can be used to access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications such as wikis, blogs and many other forms of applications, from within a browser. SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list, or discussion pane. These web parts are composed into web pages, which are then hosted in the SharePoint portal. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend.The term 'SharePoint' is commonly used to refer to one of the following two products:Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) In addition, previous versions of this software used different names (SharePoint Portal Server for example) but are referred to as "SharePoint".The SharePoint family also includes the Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD). WSS pages are ASP.NET applications, as such SharePoint web parts use the ASP.NET web parts infrastructure, and using the ASP.NET APIs, web parts can be written to extend the functionality of WSS. In terms of programmability, WSS exposes an API and object model to programmatically create and manage portals, workspaces and users. In contrast, the MOSS API is more geared towards automation of tasks and integration with other applications.[1] Both WSS and MOSS can use the web parts API to enhance the end user functionality. In addition, WSS document libraries can be exposed over ADO.NET connections to programmatically access the files and revisions in them. At the web server level, WSS configures IIS to forward all requests, regardless of file and content types, to the ASP.NET session hosting the WSS web application, which either makes a certain revision of a certain file available from the database or takes other actions. Unlike regular ASP.NET applications, the .aspx which contains the WSS (and MOSS) application code, resides in SQL Server databases instead of the filesystem. As such, the regular ASP.NET runtime cannot process the file. Instead, WSS plugs a custom Virtual Path Provider component[2] into the ASP.NET pipeline, which fetches the .aspx files from the database for processing. With this feature, introduced with WSS 3.0, both the WSS application as well as the data it generates and manages, could be stored in a database. The first version, called SharePoint Team Services (usually abbreviated to STS), was released at the same time as Office XP and was available as part of Microsoft FrontPage. STS could run on Windows 2000 Server or Windows XP. Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 was marketed as an upgrade to SharePoint Team Services, but was in fact a completely redesigned application[citation needed]. SharePoint Team Services stored documents in ordinary file storage, keeping document metadata in a database. Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 on the other hand, stores both the document and the metadata in a database, and supports basic document versioning for items in Document Libraries. Service Pack 2 for WSS added support for SQL Server 2005 and the use of the .NET Framework 2.0. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was released on November 16, 2006 as part of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite and Windows Server 2008. In fact, Windows Server 2008 supports a separate server role for SharePoint services. WSS 3.0 is built using .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 Windows Workflow Foundation to add workflow capabilities to the basic suite. By the beginning of 2007 WSS 3.0 was made available to the public. Windows 2000 Server is not supported by WSS 3.0, nor is SQL Server 2000. The WSS 3.0 wiki allows RSS export of content and, when viewed in Internet Explorer, provides a WYSIWYG editor. As with MediaWiki, it produces hyperlinks with a double square bracket but unlike MediaWiki it uses HTML for markup. An enhanced wiki is available for SharePoint on Codeplex and is free to download and install. SharePoint solves four main problems: · It’s difficult to keep track of all the documents in even a small office · Email isn’t a great way to share files · We work all over the place · It’s hard to create/maintain web sites on your own SharePoint is a web-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. It can be used to host web sites which can be used to access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications such as wikis, blogs and many other forms of applications, from within a browser. SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list, or discussion pane. These web parts are composed into web pages, which are then hosted in the SharePoint portal. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend. The term 'SharePoint' is commonly used to refer to one of the following two products: Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) In addition, previous versions of this software used different names (SharePoint Portal Server for example) but are referred to as "SharePoint". The SharePoint family also includes the Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD) The SharePoint Family Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a free add-on to Windows Server. WSS offers the base collaborative infrastructure, supporting HTTP and HTTPS based editing of documents, as well as document organization in document libraries, version control capabilities, wikis, and blogs. It also includes end user functionality such as workflows, to-do lists, alerts and discussion boards, which are exposed as web parts to be embedded into SharePoint pages. WSS was previously known as SharePoint Team Services. Though workflows can be created for WSS in SharePoint Designer or VS.NET unlike with MOSS no workflows come installed out-of-the box. Microsoft Search Server Microsoft Search Server (MSS) is an enterprise search platform from Microsoft, based on the search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.[2] MSS shares its architectural underpinnings with the Windows Search platform for both the querying engine as well as the indexer. MOSS search provides the ability to search metadata attached to documents. Microsoft Search Server has been made available as Search Server 2008, which was released on March 2008. A free version, Search Server Express 2008 is also available. The express edition features the same feature-set as the commercial edition, including no limitation on the number of files indexed; however, it is limited to a stand-alone installation and cannot be scaled out to a cluster. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a costed component of the Microsoft Office server suite. MOSS is built on top of WSS and adds more functionality to it, including better document management, enterprise search functionality, navigation features, RSS support, as well as features from Microsoft Content Management Server. The Enterprise edition of MOSS also includes features for business data analysis such as Excel Services and the Business Data Catalog. MOSS also provides integration with Microsoft Office applications, such as project management capabilities with Microsoft Project Server and the ability to expose Microsoft Office InfoPath forms via a browser.[4] It can also host specific libraries, such as PowerPoint Template Libraries provided the server components of the specific application are installed. MOSS was previously known as SharePoint Server and SharePoint Portal Server. Microsoft SharePoint Designer (SPD) Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD) is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, which is primarily aimed at designing SharePoint sites and end-user workflows for WSS sites. It shares its rendering engine with Microsoft Expression Web, its general web designing sibling, and Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 IDE. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) or Windows SharePoint is the basic part of SharePoint, offering collaboration and document management functionality by means of web portals, by providing a centralized repository for shared documents, as well as browser-based management and administration of them. It allows creation of Document libraries, which are collections of files that can be shared for collaborative editing. SharePoint provides access control and revision control for documents in a library. It also includes a collection of web parts, which are web widgets that can be embedded into web pages to provide a certain functionality. SharePoint includes web parts such as workspaces and dashboards, navigation tools, lists, alerts (including e-mail alerts), shared calendar, contact lists and discussion boards. It can be configured to return separate content for Intranet, Extranet and Internet locations. It uses a similar permissions model to Microsoft Windows, via groups of users. Active Directory groups can be added to SharePoint groups to easily tie in permissions. Alternatively, other authentication providers can be added through HTML Forms authentication.