Microsoft uses SharePoint Products and Technologies as an umbrella term to describe its two collaboration offerings—Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS). The two products provide an integrated and extensible technology platform that can meet the collaborative needs of small work teams or large enterprises. However, because the base products simply can't satisfy the needs of every user or business, many third-party add-ons are available that can help you provide the best collaborative environment for your enterprise.
Before you can decide which functional areas you might need or want to extend, you need to understand how WSS and SPS deliver their collaborative services. After I explain the architecture and functionality of WSS and SPS, I look at three common deployment concerns and some add-ons and extensions that can help alleviate these concerns.
WSS—Providing a Framework for Collaboration
WSS runs only on Windows Server 2003. In fact, WSS services are provided as part of the Windows 2003 OS (WSS doesn't ship with Windows 2003 but is available as a free add-on, which you can download from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/techinfo/sharepoint/wss.mspx). WSS also supports many Windows 2003 technologies, including the Windows .NET Framework and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0, and uses ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE) to deliver a site framework that work teams and businesses can leverage for their collaborative needs.
Because WSS Web sites are extensible, they have many uses, but in their most basic form they offer document libraries, flexible lists (e.g., contacts, tasks, announcements), and user-created views. You can use these lists and views to gather and display any type of information you want—from maintaining a list of the top achievers on your sales team to detailing upcoming company events. You can augment these libraries and lists with data from multiple sources and serve them up through Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), Windows Explorer, and Microsoft Office applications.
WSS uses ASP.NET as its Web page rendering technology. Each Web page consists of one or more Web Parts. Web Parts are based on ASP.NET Web Form controls and are typically developed using Visual Studio .NET. Ultimately, a Web Part delivers content that's displayed on a Web page, and it's up to the developer to ensure the page displays the right content. For example, a Web Part might deliver news content from an external source or sales data from an internal database. The creator of a Web Part can also let end users customize a Web Part's content and appearance. Typical out-of-the-box Web Parts contain data from document libraries and lists, but you can use custom Web Parts to retrieve nearly any type of content.
A key part of any WSS deployment is deciding which Web Parts will help you meet the proposed purpose of your various Web sites. For example, a sales team might need a Web site with Web Parts that show information about current prospects, whereas a Web site created to help a team prepare for an upcoming event might have Web Parts that show accommodation and transportation details. Figure 1 shows a default WSS site.
Differentiating WSS and SPS
SPS is an example of a product that harnesses and extends WSS functionality. In fact, WSS is a prerequisite for running SPS, and you have the entire WSS feature set available for your needs. So why would you need to implement SPS if both products facilitate collaboration?
A simple way to differentiate the two products is to understand their primary purpose: WSS enables people and small work teams to create and collaborate on team-related information; SPS makes relevant information available across departments and organizations. And relevant information can come from multiple sources—perhaps a piece of news, the contents of a document, details about a particular person, or output from a business application.
Let's consider the following example. A company has several work teams that use WSS to create Web sites on which they generate and collaborate on information. However, each team's information is in a separate silo; one team can't discover relevant information that another team might be generating. SPS lets these teams discover and share information by using a variety of methods (e.g., linking WSS sites together through navigation, providing a browsable directory of all WSS sites, enabling searches across all WSS-based content, providing publishing areas that store topic-based, navigable subject matter). Figure 2 shows an example of a basic SPS site. For more information about WWS and SPS, see the SharePoint Resources box.
SPS's Major Features
Let's look at some of the major SPS features that let you connect people to information across all levels of an organization. This information will let you determine functional areas that you might want to extend to suit your environment's collaboration needs.
Portal areas. SPS leverages the WSS site framework to create portal areas that support portal content. Each portal area is a WSS-based Web site that can contain document libraries, lists, views, and Web Part pages. You typically use these portal areas to maintain content relevant to a particular subject matter.
Portal content navigation. SPS provides a flexible, content-related hierarchical structure that aids navigation and information discovery within your portal. As you create portal areas, you assign the area a relevant position within the hierarchy. The hierarchy is exposed to end users through various portal site Web Part pages.
Portal listings. A portal listing is a piece of information you make available from your portal by linking it to the portal hierarchy. A list item can be manually entered when you create the list (e.g., an announcement), or it can be a link to another piece of information. Therefore, a listing could point to an Internet Web page, a custom list within a WSS site, or a document in a portal area's document library. The News capability that SPS provides out of the box is an example of portal listings in action.
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