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chapter 4: 'SharePoint Architecture Fundamentals'
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from the book 'Essential SharePoint 2007', ISBN 0321421744, Copyright 2007. Written permission from
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Chapter Excerpt:
Windows SharePoint Services
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 builds on the operating system and database services to add additional features, such as team sites and collaboration features. Specifically, WSS 3.0 provides the following platform capabilities:
- Storage. Through content databases, which are literally SQL databases managed by SharePoint to accommodate the pages, data, and documents stored in the various portals, team sites, and workspaces
- Management. Administration pages with deep configuration options
- Deployment. Web farms, physical servers, and roles
- Site Model. Web application, site collection, and sites
- Extensibility. Features, Web parts, and templates
WSS provides more than just these core technology services. Microsoft decided to make WSS a powerful application out-of-the-box and thus provides the core collaboration features for MOSS:
- Document collaboration—check-in/out and versions
- Wikis and blogs
- RSS support
- Project task management (lightweight functionality, which should not be confused with Office Project Server 2007, also built on WSS 3.0)
- Contacts, calendars, and tasks
- E-mail integration
- Integration with Office client applications
Office SharePoint Server 2007: Applications and Services
Architecturally, Office SharePoint Server 2007 consists of a common set of shared services that support five server application components:
- Portal. Templates, people, audience targeting
- Search. Search center, cross-site search
- Content management. Authoring, publishing, records management
- Business process. Forms server, line of business (LOB) integration
- Business intelligence. Excel services, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) lists, Report Center (not to be confused with Business Scorecard Manager and Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, which both provide additional BI capabilities)
Each of these is built on the platform services and collaboration components of Windows SharePoint Services and the shared services components of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Shared Services
Shared services provide the features that are used by multiple applications in MOSS 2007. What does that mean? Let's use an example—user profiles. You might want to use the user profile feature, which provides an out-ofthe- box employee directory, including basic information (name and phone number, for example), along with some custom properties and a photograph. You might also want to create several different portals within your organization—for example, an Internet presence, an employee intranet site, and a collaboration portal for self-service team site use. You wouldn't want to create and manage three separate profile databases. In this case, the user profile service can be shared across the various portals—hence a shared service. Specifically, the following features are provided by shared services in MOSS 2007:
- User profile store
- Audiences
- Search services
- Usage reporting
- Excel services
- Business Data Catalog (BDC)
- Notification service for generating alerts
- Single sign-on services
So what exactly do shared services support? They support the fundamental element of SharePoint: sites. Some of a site's services are site-specific, while others are shared and provided by a Shared Services Provider (SSP), which we will discuss shortly. When a site is created, it is based on a template. You can think of a site as the cookie and a template as the cookie cutter. In the next section, we discuss sites, templates, and more about shared services.
Chapter 4: 'SharePoint Architecture Fundamentals'
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This was first published in August 2007