Chapter One
Getting to Know SharePoint
In This Chapter
* Identifying the technologies that enable SharePoint
* Figuring out licensing requirements
* Discovering SharePoint's role in your organization
* Deciding which projects to start with
* Getting ready to implement SharePoint
If you believe everything you read on the Internet (and who doesn't?), you know that SharePoint is either an over-hyped Microsoft product with no real business value or it's the next Messiah in information and knowledge management. So, which is it? Only you can answer that question.
SharePoint's usefulness in your organization is determined by whether SharePoint has a role in your existing information systems environment. To determine SharePoint's role, you really have to understand what SharePoint is and what it does. However, simply having this knowledge doesn't guarantee you a successful SharePoint implementation. However, it does give you a strong foundation, which is what this chapter is all about.
Understanding SharePoint Technology
SharePoint is a family of technologies from Microsoft that provides a server infrastructure to support the needs of information workers and their employers. These needs include collaboration, knowing who's online, document storage, and the ability to inform and be informed. The companies that hire information workers need to audit, monitor, organize, retain, and protect information.
SharePoint makes it possible for companies to engage all their information workers through the tools people are using already - Office clients (such as Word and Excel), Internet browsers (such as Internet Explorer), and e-mail clients (such as Outlook). Obviously, SharePoint works best with Office 2007. Whether you're using Office 2007 or OpenOffice, SharePoint gives employers a means to connect with workers where they work - at their desktops.
By reaching workers where they work, companies can use SharePoint as a key component for implementing new strategic initiatives and internal communications plans. Beyond sending blast e-mails and convening one-time town hall meetings, companies can use SharePoint to integrate information about campaigns, achievement of performance objectives, and company news into workers' daily routines. Sound like information overload? It need not be. SharePoint makes it easy to target content so that people see only the information that's relevant to achieving their objectives.
With SharePoint, companies can create a managed information environment that isn't centrally managed. Yes, it's secure, protected, and audited, but workers make decisions about how information is organized. If workers change their minds about the organizing structure, it can be changed easily. By evaluating the ways that employees set up their work environments in SharePoint - where they store documents, the properties they affix to documents, and with whom they're collaborating - the information environment created in SharePoint can provide companies with valuable feedback. When's the last time your information environment told you how many Word documents pertained to a particular customer account or product? You can get that kind of information from SharePoint.
SharePoint also provides workers with the ability to connect with each other. Instead of sending files back and forth via e-mail, workers can set up information environments that make it easy to collaborate on documents or share a calendar.
SharePoint uses a Web site infrastructure to deliver the bulk of its features. Users can use a Web browser or familiar Office clients, such as Word and Excel, to access SharePoint's features. Office clients enable information workers to use familiar tools in new ways, which reduces training and support costs and increases solution development opportunities. SharePoint offers organizations a much faster return on investment because SharePoint fits neatly into most companies' existing technology infrastructures.
SharePoint isn't a new technology. The ability to provision team sites for use with Office clients was first introduced in May 2001 (as shown in Figure 1-1) with a product called SharePoint Team Services. SharePoint Portal Server 2001, a product for connecting team sites, was released in June 2001. With each subsequent release, more and more features were added. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) version 3, which was released in November 2006, represents a major re-architecting of the product.
Starting with the 2003 release, WSS became a component of the Windows Server operating system. The portal product, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, released alongside Office 2003. The latest release, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, is now officially part of the Microsoft Office suite of products.
In the days of client/server applications, an application commonly consisted of a relatively short stack of technologies. A Windows application might be written in a programming language, such as Visual Basic, that accesses a database on a database server. As long as you had network connectivity and your database was up and running, probability was high that you could use the application. More importantly, installing, supporting, maintaining, and troubleshooting the application was relatively easy.
In the same way that today's information workers don't work in isolation, neither can SharePoint. To support the needs of workers and their employers, SharePoint requires a relatively high stack of technologies. Understanding SharePoint's technologies in broad terms is important because this knowledge helps you do the following:
Identify opportunities for reuse and customization: When you gain an understanding of the technologies SharePoint uses, you can leverage some of your existing infrastructure. You don't have to start at square one. Also, you can extend SharePoint to find new ways to use the infrastructure.
Troubleshoot SharePoint: You'll encounter many points of failure in SharePoint - and discover that many aren't actually part of the SharePoint software proper. By understanding how SharePoint works and which technologies SharePoint uses, you can develop a systematic approach to troubleshooting.
Understand the skills necessary to implement and support SharePoint: SharePoint requires a lot of skills, and it's not likely that you have all of them. I know I sure don't. You have to make arrangements to acquire the skills you don't have in-house.
The SharePoint family of technologies consists of several products. In this book, I focus on the two primary SharePoint products: Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Each of these products has a different role in the stack of SharePoint technologies.
See the section, "Licensing SharePoint," later in this chapter, for a complete rundown of all the products available in the SharePoint family.
Laying the foundation
The core product in the family of SharePoint technologies is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). Because WSS is the foundational product, no other product in the SharePoint family is possible without it.
WSS is a full-blown ASP.NET 2.0 Web application, which means it runs hosted inside ASP.NET. When you install WSS, you have to install ASP.NET and everything it requires to run, including the following:
Internet Information Services (IIS) version 6 or 7: This is Microsoft's Web server, which is used to host SharePoint. Most typical SharePoint usage scenarios can configure IIS from within SharePoint. You don't have to manage IIS directly very often.
.NET Framework version 2.0 and 3.0: This is a set of software that installs ASP.NET and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). After you enable ASP.NET 2.0 on the server, you don't have to do anything else to configure .NET.
SQL Server 2000 or later: This is Microsoft's database management system. SharePoint can create all the databases it needs, or you can create them yourself. You're responsible for managing backups of your data.
Windows Server 2003 or later: This is Microsoft's server operating system. Monitor the servers that host SharePoint just like you would any server.
I walk you through installing these technologies on your server in Chapter 2. Figure 1-2 shows the stack of technologies required to run WSS. Note that these are logical servers. Your implementation may include several physical servers.
TECHNICAL STUFF
ASP.NET is the Microsoft platform for building Web applications. A Web application is more sophisticated than a Web site, which may only display information. Web applications can provide services, such as electronic commerce. Much of the ability to customize and extend SharePoint comes from ASP.NET 2.0.
You can think of the technologies listed in Figure 1-2 as SharePoint's enabling technologies. SharePoint requires these technologies in order to function properly. SharePoint integrates with many other technologies to provide extra functionality, such as Microsoft Exchange Server. See Chapter 9 for more information on such technologies.
WSS provides the core set of services consumed by all products in the SharePoint family, especially MOSS 2007. These services include the following:
Data storage and content management: WSS provides lists and libraries as structures for storing data. Lists are primarily used to store tabular data, whereas libraries store files. WSS provides a robust set of services for managing the data and files stored in lists and libraries, services that allow you to do the following: Associate metadata with list items and files (see Chapter 7).
Create versions of list items and files (see Chapter 15).
Check out files for editing (see Chapter 15).
Index sites, lists, and libraries for searching purposes (see Chapter 14).
Manage content approval (see Chapter 15).
Use list items and libraries in a business process (See Chapter 8)
WSS includes many specialized kinds of lists and libraries that you can use to perform certain tasks. See Chapter 4 for a complete run-down of the lists and libraries you encounter in SharePoint.
Web platform and site model: All SharePoint's features are delivered via a hierarchy of Web sites. It takes only a few mouse clicks to generate sites with SharePoint's site provisioning model (see Chapter 4). SharePoint generates a full-featured Web site based on an XML configuration file. (WSS includes many of these configuration files that allow you to create a variety of SharePoint sites to suit the needs of your business. You can also customize the files or create your own.) Because SharePoint is an ASP.NET Web application, SharePoint is an excellent platform for delivering Web applications that include a Web part framework, navigation, and dynamic form and page generation. SharePoint gives you a viable alternative to building ASP.NET Web applications from scratch.
Security: SharePoint provides a security-trimmed user interface so that users see only the options they have permissions for. SharePoint uses groups and roles for granting access to secure content, and virtually everything in SharePoint is securable. The most common authentication scenario for SharePoint is Active Directory, although SharePoint supports custom authentication schemes (such as forms-based authentication) as well. See Chapter 6 for more details on SharePoint's security features.
Management: SharePoint provides a multi-tiered administration model that makes it possible to isolate technical administrators from sensitive content. Administrators can't see the files and other content that information workers save in SharePoint sites. Additional administration features include auditing, monitoring, and backing up and restoring tools. SharePoint provides specialized administration Web sites. All administrative features are also accessible from the command line and via code. Chapter 18 walks you through accessing the SharePoint administrative features.
Services: A number of services are provided by SharePoint that support SharePoint's other core services. These include notification services, such as RSS feeds, alerts, and inbound e-mail (see Chapter 10). WSS indexes all list, library, and site content so these items can be searched (see Chapter 14). SharePoint also provides migration tools to assist with deploying SharePoint.
Application programming interfaces (APIs): SharePoint has a powerful object model and Web services. Everything you can do from the SharePoint user interface uses SharePoint APIs; thus, you can write code to access all SharePoint's features. SharePoint makes available numerous before-and-after events that make it possible to customize SharePoint's default behavior.
Kicking it up a notch
Given that WSS is an application platform, it makes sense that Microsoft has released several products that are built upon that application platform. MOSS 2007 is one such product; it's essentially a WSS application.
As a WSS application, MOSS consumes WSS resources and extends WSS to provide completely new features. Similar to how WSS consists of a set of services, MOSS adds the following services:
Core services are the foundational features that enable MOSS 2007 applications. Core services of MOSS 2007 include personalization, search, business data catalog, and Excel Services. MOSS 2007's core services are shared services because they're shared across an entire SharePoint deployment.
Application Services are the building blocks for creating applications in MOSS 2007. Examples include dashboards, workflows, and user profiles. These services are mixed and matched to provide a myriad of MOSS 2007 applications. MOSS combines the services of WSS, along with its own core services and application services to create MOSS 2007 applications (see Figure 1-3). MOSS 2007 includes the following SharePoint applications right out of the box:
Portals are an essential user interface feature of SharePoint and are used to aggregate content, highlight featured content, and provide access to other SharePoint resources (see Chapter 11).
Enterprise content management consists of document and records management (see Chapter 15) as well as Web content management (see Chapter 16). WSS also provides document management, but MOSS adds to those features with information management policies and document information panels. I like to think of Web content management as MOSS's publishing feature. Web content management makes it possible to publish content to a site that's intended to be read by many people.
People and personalization encompasses all the features related to managing user profiles, targeting content to audiences, and personalizing portal content. See Chapters 12 and 13.
Enterprise search provides the ability to index all content within SharePoint and content outside SharePoint. Search is configurable so that you can manage the relevancy of results delivered to users. See Chapter 14.
Business process integration provides the ability to integrate data from outside sources with SharePoint (see Chapter 17). MOSS can render InfoPath forms in the browser to automate business forms (see Chapter 8).
Business intelligence provides support for reports, dashboards, and Excel Services (see Chapter 17). Excel Services creates server-side versions of Excel spreadsheets and renders them in a Web page. (Continues...)
Excerpted from Microsoft SharePoint 2007 For Dummiesby Vanessa L. Williams Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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