Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server is an enterprise portal which belongs to the Microsoft Office family. In the 2007 release (version 3.0) the word 'Portal' is dropped and the product is called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).
It is a collaborative portal application based on the Windows SharePoint Services platform. Unlike Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server is not a free component of Windows Server 2003. It requires an additional server and client license. Windows SharePoint Services offers online publishing of standard file formats. It also has version control, document approval and a basic search facility. It includes newer collaboration features such as Wikis and Blogs as well as task lists, contacts lists and discussions.
SharePoint Server adds search of external content sources, a flexible hierarchy of content areas, enhanced navigation, Single Sign On service and additional personalization features. SharePoint Server's main strength is enabling an organization’s information to be organized and aggregated in one central, web-based application.
The application has a Microsoft SQL Server back-end for storing data. The front-end consists of ASP.NET pages served via Internet Information Services (IIS) 6 on Windows Server 2003. As of MOSS 2007, it no longer uses an ISAPI filter as in previous versions to map its web-based path to the database records.
It can be configured to return separate content for Intranet, Extranet and Internet locations. It uses a similar permissions model to Microsoft Windows, via groups of users. Active Directory groups can be added to SharePoint groups to easily tie in permissions. Alternatively, other authentication providers can be added through HTML Forms authentication.
The primary reason for using SharePoint is to provide a taxonomy for corporate data. SharePoint provides a structure to otherwise disparate data.
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[edit] Versions
- 2001 - SharePoint Portal Server 2001
- 2003 - Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
- 2007 - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
SharePoint Portal Server 2001 included basic workflow options, including parallel and serial approval routing. Additionally, SharePoint document versioning supported major and minor versions, with approval required for major revisions. Enforced security prevented publishing of minor revisions of a document without approval.
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 eliminated support for minor versions, and removed much of the workflow functionality available in SharePoint Portal Server 2001. Subsequently, a number of other software vendors have developed products to restore and enhance this lost functionality that has been brought back in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses Microsoft SQL Server storage for data storage, documents, document metadata, lists, and ASPX web pages are stored as database records. SharePoint Portal Server 2001 utilized Web Storage System files, a variant of a Microsoft Exchange datastore, for all document storage.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 added additional "workloads" such as:
- Collaboration
- Portal
- Enterprise Search
- Enterprise Content Management (Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 (MCMS 2002) was merged into MOSS 2007).
- Business Forms & Workflow (using InfoPath Forms Services)
- Business Intelligence (key feature is Microsoft Excel Calculation Server)
- Line of Business (LOB) Data Aggregation
