A Comprehensive Overview of Sharepoint – Part I [Archive]

Today’s information workers have a constant need to collaborate, share information and find information they are looking for. This need exists around projects and teams, meetings and documents and furthermore on a department and company wide level. But also with customers, partners and vendors as organizational boundaries are more and more disappearing. Typical approaches have been to create file shares, email distribution lists, public folders on your mail server and many more. But these traditional approaches are difficult to manage, provide limited search capabilities and also limited access from remote locations. The latest approach to solve such needs are enterprise portals.

Enterprise portals provide web access to information and documents which make them ideal for remote access. The typical structure adopted by most enterprises is to have one enterprise wide portal which is the default page opened when employees launch their browser. There you find current information about the company, its strategy, etc. From there you find your way to portals around departments, ongoing projects and other topics. Most portals used nowadays are still fairly simple. More advanced portal solutions provide already search and indexing capabilities, document libraries with more advanced document management capabilities but most importantly robust management tools. Organizations are constantly creating new projects and virtual teams around projects. The latest portal solutions make it very easy to create new portals, manage them and then to discard those when no longer needed but most importantly being able to search across all existing portals. Large organizations like Microsoft, HP, GE, etc. have hundreds of such projects and teams going on every year.

There are many portal solutions on the market, for example from IBM, Microsoft, Plumtree, Vignette, etc. Microsoft’s latest portal solution is “Windows SharePoint Services” and “SharePoint Portal Server 2003″. This article will not evaluate different portal solutions but rather explain how to use and develop for “Windows SharePoint Services” and “SharePoint Portal Server 2003″ from Microsoft. The first article explains the differences between these two technologies and how to install and configure each. The second article looks at how to use both from a user and administrator perspective. The last article looks at how to extend it by using its SDK and create web parts.

The differences between WSS and SPS

WSS stands for “Windows SharePoint Services” and is the successor of “SharePoint Team Services”. It runs only on Windows 2003 Server (Web, Standard, Enterprise or Datacenter Edition) and requires IIS 6.x, ASP.NET and the .NET framework 1.1. WSS is available for free and can be downloaded from this location. Make sure that you also apply the latest Service Pack (SP1 at the time of this article). WSS can utilize SQL Server 2000 or MSDE 2000 (SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine) as its data store.

“SharePoint Portal Server”, short SPS, builds on top of “Windows SharePoint Services”. When you install SPS it will automatically install WSS if not present. This assures that it is very easy to migrate from WSS to SPS and that any components developed for WSS can be used on SPS. It has the same system requirements as WSS, so Windows 2003 Server with IIS 6.x, ASP.NET and the .NET framework 1.1. It can also utilize SQL Server 2000 or MSDE 2000 for its data store. Also make sure to apply the latest Service Packs for SPS, which is SP1 at the time of this article (this requires to first install SP1 of WSS).
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