Microsoft SharePoint & Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)

SharePoint is a web-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. It can be used to host web sites which can be used to access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications such as wikis, blogs and many other forms of applications, from within a browser. SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list, or discussion pane. These web parts are composed into web pages, which are then hosted in the SharePoint portal. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), is part of SharePoint, and runs on top of WSS, and builds on it by adding both core features as well as end user web parts to it. Its main strength is enabling an organization s information to be organized and aggregated in one central, web based application and provide a taxonomy for corporate data. MOSS integrates closely with applications in the Microsoft Office suite and adds various features such as hierarchical organization of content areas, enhanced navigation, Single Sign On, personalization features, indexed search, the Business Data Catalog,

and in browser rendering and, in certain cases, editing of Microsoft Office documents. It can also be used to create specialized document specific libraries, such as Microsoft PowerPoint slide libraries, which can be used to share not only specific slides from a presentation but their design as well The latest version, MOSS 2007, improves over its predecessor, SPS 2003, in integrating with Microsoft Office applications, enterprise content management (with the integration of Microsoft Content Management Server into MOSS), Enterprise Search, web content management, more specialized document management, records management, Web 2.0 collaboration functionality like blogs and wikis, delivery of information stored in SharePoint via RSS, and the ability to take content and lists offline with Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Access. A MOSS application can abstract multiple WSS sites under the covers.

MOSS 2007 also comes with two other specific installations:

SharePoint Server for Search, which exposes only the indexed search Enterprise search capabilities.
Microsoft Office Forms Server, which is a stand alone installation of the Infopath Forms Services feature.

Architecture
The architecture is composed of Web Server front ends running the WSS application with MOSS plugging in functionality where required, generally a search service which crawls the data store creating an index, a number of other services, and the database back end, a standard enterprise architecture.

As such it can be built out by load balancing more web servers on the front end and building larger clusters of SQL Server on the back end. Though recommended to be installed on physical machines, virtualization has been used with MOSS and the previous marks to create this architecture, though not officially supported at the time of writing.

SharePoint allows administrators to create Web Applications each on its own port. A separate web application on a separate port can contain site collections, each having its own database in SQL Server. Site collections can have sites which can contain subsites. A web server can contain hundreds of site collections.

One of the weaknesses of the tool is its own ease of use. Administrators may be tempted to start one port 80 and build a single site collection with sub sites underneath, exposed to the company as a home page and sub pages. Though this makes logical sense for a large organization or one with bespoke portals using custom Web Parts or Forms Server, it can cause problems. All the sites in a site collection will be stored in the same database, which can become too large to effectively back up. Moreover, bespoke development using the same Web Application and Application pool can bring a company wide internet down.

MOSS 2007 also allows content types and document libraries to have information management policies, which allows the triggering of workflow or deletion of information after a certain fixed event or time period, helping to reduce many of the size growth problems of earlier versions.

Features

Office 2007 integration
MOSS integrates closely with Microsoft Office applications. It can render Microsoft Office documents in web pages. In addition, with the proper server side infrastructure, it can allow the documents to be edited from within the browser as well. For other document types in a document library, Microsoft Office applications can directly edit the document in the document library. This feature is available for Microsoft Excel and Microsoft InfoPath. Using Excel Services, MOSS can allow Excel 2007 workbooks to be loaded, edited, and displayed in a SharePoint page. All calculations happen on the MOSS server. MOSS can also host and render Microsoft InfoPath forms using the Infopath Forms Services to have it viewed and filled out using a browser.

Microsoft Office Outlook can also be used for accessing and synchronizing SharePoint document libraries On connecting a document library with Outlook, the library will be listed in the navigation pane, and the files in it will be listed along with certain metadata such as author. Compatible Microsoft Office documents will be previewed in the preview pane and Microsoft Office Outlook search bars can be used to search the libraries as well. The search entered using the Outlook bar will be federated to the SharePoint server, and the results will be displayed in Outlook itself. By synchronizing a document library, Outlook can make the files available offline, which can be opened and edited using other Microsoft Office 2007 applications; the changes will be synchronized back to the SharePoint library by Outlook.

While it is not necessary to use Microsoft Office 2007 to take advantage of the integration with the Microsoft Office suite, it offers the most integration with MOSS 2007. A few examples of the improved integration with Office 2007 include:

2 way synchronization of Outlook Calendar and SharePoint Calendar.
Overlaying a SharePoint Calendar on top of user's Outlook 2007 Calendar.
SharePoint Task Assignment Synchronization into user's Outlook Task List.
Offline Synchronization of SharePoint Documents.
Viewing SharePoint RSS feeds through Microsoft Office Outlook
Display of Meta data values for a given document type in the Office Ribbon as a user is editing a document from a document library.

Enterprise search
MOSS 2007 can be used for enterprise search, to search across the document libraries and user groups. MOSS 2007 fully indexes all the documents stored in its library, in addition, it also indexes data stored in external databases which are exposed via ADO.NET or Web Services with a well defined WSDL schema. Any search from the portal interface or client applications can use the MOSS search capabilities to search over this index. SharePoint servers, Web sites, file shares, Exchange Public Folders, and databases can be set as data sources which it will then index. The indexing system is a tuned version of the one used in Windows Desktop Search. The indexing engine uses specified crawling rules to decide what is to be indexed. The index engine uses continuous propagation, which allows even a partial index to be queried against. It also exposes a UI for visual administration of the search capabilities. MOSS 2007 also includes suggestion capability, which suggests search terms in case of typographical errors.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise also includes a people search functionality, which can search for people, based on their affiliation and expertise, provided the enterprise infrastructure makes the information available. It can search from SharePoint user groups, as well as Active Directory and other LDAP directories provided the information has been imported into MOSS.

Business Data Catalog
The Business Data Catalog (BDC) introduced in MOSS 2007, enables presenting business data from back end server applications such as SAP or Siebel 2007 or databases to be viewed by the web based interface of SharePoint without writing any code. It comprises a metadata repository and an object model. It provides a unified and simple way to invoke operations. It presents a consistent, object oriented interface to the business logic that is embedded in typical business applications. The Business Data Catalog provides homogeneous access to the underlying data sources by using a declarative metadata model that simplifies the client object model. The Business Data Catalog Definition Editor is now included in the MOSS SDK.[5] The task of maintaining the catalog is divided among four roles: business analyst who identifies the data to be presented, metadata author who creates the tags to identify the data to SharePoint, administrator, and developer.

MySite
MySite is an important feature in MOSS 2007 that enables a user to obtain access to a personalized view of the information that's relevant to them. MySite has a Public view and a Private view. Users are able to determine the permissions on various pieces of information that are in a MySite and select whether their colleagues, manager, or everyone in the organization can see each piece of information. The Private view of a user's MySite enables them to see the following types of information: