Introducing Microsoft Sharepoint 2007

Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2007 ( MOSS ) is a product sold by Microsoft which has been used by several organizations to provide comprehensive content management and enterprise search, implements and streamline the business processes and facilitates information sharing that is essential for Organizational growth. It also helps to conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data, participate in forms-driven business processes, and access and analyze large amounts of business data. It can be used to host web sites that access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications like wikis and blogs from a browser. Sharepoint sites are actually ASP.NET 2.0 applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend. Like most portal products, SharePoint allows visitors to create custom views of the Web site. This customization can be very simple or very complex, depending on the type and version of the product that is installed.

Features

Sharepoint 2007 has come up with several features which help the organization to work more effectively and efficiently. They can be listed as

1. Collaboration

   • Team can work efficiently and manage meetings by selecting an appropriate template for the site

   • Definite process to work with documents

   • Synchronizing the Sharepoint calendar with Outlook calendar and track the project status in various views

   • Provides wiki to brainstorm ideas and gather information in more effective manner

   • Provides blog feature which the team members can use to share their ideas

   • Receive updates using RSS

   • Content access through mobile

   • Manage content offline

   • Workflow implementation

   • Conducting surveys

2. Portal

   • Storing information on ‘My Site’

   • Personalize user experience of the site by providing different views

   • Display content for a specific group based on security issues

3. Enterprise Search

   • provides a central location for initiating queries and browsing search results

   • Search for people

   • Search for documents or information

4. Content Management

   • Document Management – Centralized repository for storing documents, tracking mechanism

   • Records Management – Collecting, managing and disposing of corporate records

   • Web content management – Updating site content systematically and manage site navigation easily

5. Business Forms and Integration

   • Using workflows for common business scenarios

   • Information gathering through browser forms to implement forms-based business

6. Business Intelligence

   • Display information from multiple sources

   • Connect to external data source

   • Collect and filter information in a variety of ways

   • Track Key Performance indicators

Difference between MOSS and WSS

Windows SharePoint Services is a component of the Windows Server 2003 information worker infrastructure and provides team services and sites to Microsoft Office System and other desktop programs. It also serves as a platform for application development.

The difference between the two technologies can be summarized as below.

WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Windows SharePoint Services is a component of the Windows Server 2003 information worker infrastructure	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is a separately purchased product
Windows SharePoint Service (WSS) offers all the standard site templates to build team sites, document workspaces, blank sites, blogs, wikis, and meeting workspaces.	MOSS 2007 offers business intelligence features that allow tracking key performance indicators and building BI dashboards into your team site.
It can be used to create people and group lists.	Moss 2007 offers features to create people and groups lists.
Selecting template for sites with minimum options like collaboration and meetings	Selecting template for sites with minimum options like collaboration, meetings, Enterprise, Custom and Publishing
Offers simple search functionality	Provides Searching Enterprise Content Sources, Relevance based Search Result and People Search
Integration with Office components and InfoPath integration	Integrates with Office components, InfoPath, External data source and web based excel services
Document management site templates	Document management site templates, provides control over page layout and versioning

Building a portal in MOSS 2007

For creating a portal in MOSS 2007, follow the steps given below.

• Create a web application

• Create Site collection

Create a web application

1. Go to Start All Programs Microsoft Office ServerSharepoint 3.0 Central Administration.

It opens up the Central Administration page of the Sharepoint server.

2. Select the tab ‘Application Management’.

3. Click on ‘Create or extend Web Application’

4. Click on ‘Create a new web application’. It opens the Web Application creation page. Give values for Description and Port for IIS web site or leave it as default ( as all the values are used for backend governance). You may have to select the Security account as ‘Network Service’ under Application pool. Click on OK.

Create Site Collection

1. In the Application Management section of the central administration page, Click on ‘Create Site Collection’ link present under the section ‘Sharepoint site management’.

2. Select the web application. Enter the Title and Description of the site and URL. Select the template. You have to give the owners of the site also. Click on OK.

3. After a while, the site collection gets created and displays a page with the URL of the Site as shown below.