Getting Started with Sharepoint Services

Lets Gets Started with Sharepoint Service 3.0 and MOSS 2007 with easy step by step lessons.

Understanding Sharepoint - Source of Information

What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services — a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 — provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, and it serves as a platform for application development.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide additional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.


What is Sharepoint Service from User prospective?
From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessable over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name "Share-Point". Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint's Search facility. Even documents not "in" SharePoint can be included in the search engine's index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it's a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.


What is Sharepoint Service from Administration prospective?

Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organinsing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either throuhg the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like "edit profile". Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access priveliges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a perticular item. Readers can see the item (ie document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security priveliges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only! Good eh?

What is Sharepoint Service from Technical prospective?

Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft's .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessable directory tree called the Web Storage System. SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web's medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of!

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but everytime they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quicky and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

How Sharepoint is useful?

• •User Authentication
• •Personalization
• •Application Integration and Aggregation
• •Search
• •Collaboration
• •Web Content Management
• •Workflow Management
• •Analytics & Reporting

Advantages of Sharepoint
• A lot of functionality for a low price
• Familiar Microsoft look and feel (Office 2003)
• Little end user training required
• Extensible using .Net technologies
• Simple cross site branding is simple and fast
• Simple document management out of the box
• Fantastic search engine
• Ease of installation and Rapid deployment
• Deploy & manage multiple sites and portals
• Reuse of common functionality
• Support wide range of technologies and systems
• Leverage of existing investments
• Incorporate information from existing ERP applications
• Messaging systems


Disadvantages of Sharepoint
• Previous version Web Parts will not work with the new version
• Set up via a browser interface makes large site production slow
• Navigation paradigm built in so custom navigation is difficult
• Approximately 1000 built in templates means full brand customisation is time consuming and expensive.

How do I install Sharepoint on my computer?
For Installing sharepoint you need to install following software, but before installation check the hardware requirement for sharepoint installation

• Windows Server 2003 with SP1 Operating System
• Create "Active Directory" with DcPromo command on Command Prompt.
• .Net Framework 3.0
• Windows Server Sharepoint 2003 (WSS 3.0) or
  
• Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) [Preferred]
  

Download Links

• Download .Net Framework 3.0
• Download Windows Server Sharepoint 2003
• Download Office Sharepoint Server 2007

Download Related Software

• Download Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007
• Download Visual Studio 2005 Extension for Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0