SHAREPOINT

Abstract
The goal of this article is to introduce you to some of the most powerful SharePoint development features. This article walks you through key concepts, developer terms, developer components used to build enterprise solutions, and pointers to resources to help you get started learning about SharePoint development. It also explores tools you can use to create solutions by using SharePoint Products and Technologies exclusively in share point 2007

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1..............................................................................Introduction
SharePoint is a portal-based platform for collaboration, electronic content management, workflow and business intelligence processes and application development. This section offers news, tips and tutorials on SharePoint governance, management and implementation to help IT managers configure, deploy and administer Windows SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Topics include SharePoint security, enterprise search and third-party tools. SharePoint Products and Technologies provide an extensible solution platform for the professional Microsoft .NET developer, and offer a wide array of built-in features and application hosting using well-known .NET development tools and technologies. SharePoint Products and Technologies offer a manageable and scalable server platform that employs the benefits of the 2007 Microsoft Office system client for hosting applications on an internal or Internet Web site.. The versions of the share point are as follows: share point server 2001 SharePoint portal server 2003 SharePoint portal server 2007

SharePoint portal server 2001:

SharePoint portal server 2003: SharePoint Portal Server 2003 extends the capabilities of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 by providing organization and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information captured on their SharePoint sites to the entire organization

SharePoint server 2007: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerates shared business processes, and facilitates information-sharing.

SharePoint Products and Technologies: SharePoint Products and Technologies provide a foundation for collaboration, business intelligence, enterprise content management, people and personalization services, Enterprise Search, integration of LOB data, and processes.

SharePoint Products and Technologies include the following:

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. A set of services for collaboration and a foundation for building Web-based applications on Windows Server. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is included in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows Server 2008 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. A single, integrated application that provides sites (locations) where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow, and

make use of business insight to reach better-informed decisions. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007. A designer and developer tool that enables you to quickly build solutions that include both design and workflow.

SharePoint Products and Technologies

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a technology that includes a set of tools for collaboration. These tools provide easy access to documents, content, people, and information. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 also provides eight capabilities or services that enable developers to create rich and scalable Web-

based applications, thus providing the means for collaboration. Following are the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Administration. The classes and features of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration namespace provide administrators with the tools and means for deploying, migrating, maintaining, and administrating their SharePoint sites and SharePoint-based solutions.

Data management. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides an intuitive, robust environment for data collaboration and storage. It includes a range of ways to manage the content and metadata of your important business documents and data. Integrated property promotion and demotion maintain synchronization between metadata in Windows SharePoint Services and the metadata in the Office documents.

Information services. Information services in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include inbound e-mail, e-mail alert notifications, and search. These features help teams to stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information. Windows SharePoint Services can help users make well-informed decisions and get work done.

Pages and user interface (UI). The page model in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0. This creates dynamic new ways to customize and manage page design. The SharePoint pages viewed in the browser are constructed through the control templates of master pages and .ascx files.

Provisioning. When you create a list or a site, a definition or a template determines how the list or site will be instantiated. Unlike a traditional ASP.NET application, a physical ASPX page does not need to exist for every page on the server. Windows SharePoint Services treats any page that is not customized as a virtual file, which can allow a small number of files to appear in many places.

Security. Security features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, and the underlying ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0, help give you protection

from unauthorized changes to your data, whether deliberate or inadvertent, and help ensure that sensitive information is available only to those authorized to see it. SharePoint Products and Technologies help provide a secure platform by integrating with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and Windows Server to provide authentication and authorization mechanisms.

Web Parts. Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services provide developers with a way to create UI elements that support both customization and personalization. A site owner or a site member with the appropriate permissions can customize Web Part Pages by using a browser or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to add, reconfigure, or remove Web Parts

Workflow. Workflows implement custom business processes that you can attach to SharePoint documents and list items. You can use workflows to control almost any aspect of an item in Windows SharePoint Services, including the life cycle of that item.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007:

Microsoft SharePoint 2007 technologies are rapidly becoming an important part of the enterprise as organizations continue to look for ways to extend the system to meet user demand and requirements. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to define and control page layout and design, master page creation, list or content type design, creation of sample data, Web Part page creation, Web Part hookup, no-code data views or forms, and no-code workflows. Using this tool you can easily create SharePoint applications that contain custom list views, forms, data from external sources, and workflows without writing server-side code.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a server product that builds on the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology. It provides a consistent,

familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration, and site customization. Additionally, Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows you to:

Conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data. Participate in forms-driven business processes. Access and analyze large amounts of business data.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 also allows you to create Web-based solutions and sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, or business intelligence needs. Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in components to help you create rich Web-based solutions. As a result, Office SharePoint Server 2007 can greatly reduce the development time and provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs.

The following figure shows the capabilities of Office share point

server 2007:

Capabilities of Office SharePoint server 2007

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides six capabilities or services that enable developers to customize and extend rich and scalable Web-based applications

Collaboration and social computing : Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides Web Parts that enable functionality for social computing, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, e-mail integration, and task coordination. All of these components use information about your organization, communities, and electronic communications in Public My Site pages to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests.

Portals : Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a world class enterprise portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business. It provides built-in My Site personal sites, content syndication, user profiles and a profile store, audience targeting, mobile device support, portal site templates, document aggregation Web Parts, and more.

Enterprise Search : Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides extensive and extensible content gathering, indexing, and querying ability. This service supports full-text searching by using a Structured Query Language (SQL-based) query syntax, and provides a new keyword syntax to support keyword searches

Enterprise content management : Enterprise content management (ECM) features provide ways to manage the content and metadata of business documents stored in Office SharePoint Server 2007 document libraries. ECM is a key infrastructure component that can help companies manage and organize high volumes of unstructured content such as forms, documents, records, e-mail messages, videos, instant messages (IMs), and Web pages.

Business process and forms : Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in electronic forms and workflow templates. InfoPath Forms Services, included in Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables you to publish InfoPath form templates, designed in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007, to Office SharePoint Server 2007 as ASP.NET Web applications. You can open these

in your browser to provide a similar experience to filling out and editing a form in InfoPath.

. Business intelligence : Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides infrastructure to create dashboards that allows decision-makers to access information. Excel Services server technology, included in Office SharePoint Server 2007, is a shared service that enables you to load, calculate, and display Excel workbooks on Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can use the Excel Services programmability framework to extend Microsoft Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services functionalities to work with Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists, query tables on Excel Services, external workbook references, SQL write-back, and user-defined functions (UDFs). Additionally, the Business Data Catalog functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables you to present LOB data within Office SharePoint Server.

SharePoint Terminology :

Application page. Allows the use of inline custom code. Application pages or "_layout" pages are stored on the SharePoint Web server and made available via a Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) virtual directory. Though application pages behave much like other ASPX pages and allow the use of inline custom code, they differ from content pages in that they cannot be used to host SharePoint features such as dynamic Web Parts and Web Part zones.

Content type. A reusable collection of settings to apply to a certain category of content such as documents and folders. Content types are designed to help users organize their SharePoint content in a more meaningful way.

Custom action. Represents a link, toolbar button, menu item, or any control that can be added to a toolbar or menu that appears in the UI. You define custom actions by using a custom action element within a feature definition file.

Event receiver. Evaluator of an event and definer of the behavior of an application. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 allows you to define event handlers within libraries, lists, and sites. Event receivers can be defined by using a receiver element within a feature definition file

Feature. A package of Windows SharePoint Services elements that can be activated for a specific scope and that helps users accomplish a particular goal or task. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 introduces this inherently portable and modular functionality, which simplifies modification of sites through site definitions.

Master page. Pages that provide a consistent layout and appearance (look and feel) for SharePoint sites. They allow you to factor out layout, structure, and interface elements such as headers, footers, navigation bars, and content placeholders. Master pages in ASP.NET 2.0 and master pages in Windows SharePoint Services work in the same way.

Module. A file or collection of file instances that define the location where the files are installed during site creation. Modules are frequently used to implement a Web Part Page in the site. You can define modules by using a module element within a feature definition file.

SharePoint site: A Web site hosted in a virtual URL. A SharePoint site is a place for collaboration, communication, or content storage. Depending on your business needs, you can create sites such as team sites, blog sites, wiki sites, and others. You can customize a site's appearance, users,

user permissions, galleries, and site administration by using the Site Settings administration pages.

SharePoint site collection: A collection of SharePoint sites that share common administration pages and site settings. Site collections allow you to share content types, site columns, templates, and Web Parts within a group of SharePoint sites.

SharePoint Web farm: A group of Office SharePoint 2007 servers that share the same configuration database. All site content and all configuration data is shared for all front-end Web servers in a server farm.

Site definition. A set of files that includes a master XML configuration file that is stored on all front-end Web servers. A site definition provides the basic blueprint for how sites look, what lists they include, their default navigational structures, and so on.

Site template. A package containing a set of differences and changes from a base site definition that is created through the UI or through implementation of the object model. The site template package is stored as a .cab-based file that can be downloaded or uploaded to site collections by users with the appropriate rights. Site templates offer a measure of portability to SharePoint applications.

The professional NET developer can take advantage of SharePoint Products and Technologies to build components and enterprise solutions. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 uses the ASP.NET 2.0 framework to take advantage of features such as master pages and custom Web Part development