SharePoint

The recent adoption of the web and web-related technologies makes portal technologies an obvious choice. Because portal technologies are web-based, decision makers can access important information via the Internet regardless of where they are located. Portals differ from regular websites in that they are customized specifically around a business process. A portal may actually consist of numerous websites, with information stored either directly on those sites or in other systems, such as file shares, business applications, or a regular Internet website. Because making informed business decisions is key to becoming and remaining successful, it's important that the information you place on a portal is secure, up-to-date, and easily accessible.

SharePoint is an extensible and scalable web-based platform on which you can build business applications to help you better store, share, and manage digital information within your organization.

The term "SharePoint" may refer to one of the following two products:

· Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)

· Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)

Many people are unclear about the difference between Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) are free with Windows Server. In contrast, MOSS is not free and it is installed on top of WSS. MOSS provides some additional features beyond what is included with WSS like More Powerful Search Capability, Content Management Capabilities, and Pre-configured Portal Site Templates, Pre-built workflow templates, User Profiles and Profile Store, Site Directory etc.

Why SharePoint (MOSS):

•Portal: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a world class Enterprise Portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business.
•Enterprise Content Management: Built on a well-integrated platform, ECM from Microsoft easily extends content management to every information worker in an organization through integration with familiar tools like the Microsoft Office system. The Microsoft ECM solution provides capabilities to manage the entire lifecycle of unstructured content from creation to expiration on a single unified platform.
•Enterprise Search: to find relevant content in a wide range of repositories and formats.
•Collaboration and Social Computing: It provides a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities and people driven processes.
•Business Process and Forms: It provides built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archiving processes. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can also create, SunArc Technologies maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling you to streamline your collaborative processes. Electronic forms provided through InfoPath Forms Services are an integral part of such workflows.
•Business Intelligence: Microsoft Office Excel-based Business Intelligence and Dashboards and Report Center make it easy for decision-makers to access information anytime, anywhere.

SharePoint in the context of .NET Developers: SharePoint is built on the .NET Framework 3.0 and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and runs in IIS 6.0 or later with SQL Server 2000 and above. The WYSIWYG HTML editor Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD) primarily targets the design of SharePoint sites and end-user workflows.

The modifications to master pages, cascading style sheet (CSS) files, layouts, etc can be done in SPD. For Visual Studio 2005, Some Extensions are available for SharePoint and following are the most popular tasks:

• Customize Authentication
• Customize workflow
• Customize web part
• Use of External web services
• Use of SilverLight
• Customize Sitemap provider and Navigations

Conclusion:

SharePoint may now be used not only for intranets and extranets, but for public websites, including those that support anonymous users (no login). The most popular reason for using SharePoint is for a corporate intranet, where SharePoint provides a user interface to disparate data sources, a launching point for line of business applications and a place to publish or collaborate on documents.