Introduction

It's been more than half a decade back when Microsoft launch first version of SharePoint Server , named SharePoint Portal Server 2001 , followed by  SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and latest  we have SharePoint Server 2007 (see figure 1.0).Through all this time SharePoint Products and Technologies land scope got wider  and spectrum of functionality and features become considerably large. In this article we take a closer look  of what are the basic building blocks of SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS here after) in order to better understand the vision of the product. The subsequent articles will drill deep inside each one of these areas as each one of them deserves special attention.

Figure 1.0

One of the important thing when getting started with MOSS is your current job background and competencies .Generally it will be  easy for IT professionals with administration and operational management background to quickly adopt administration and management features of MOSS , on the other hand professionals with development  background will find it easy to grasp development , customization and branding in MOSS.  Future articles will cover topics/areas that are more or less applicable to both IT Professionals (IT pro) and Developers, said so there are certain topics/areas in MOSS that are more inclined towards one of them. In order to provide high readability each article will show an indicator (see figure 1.1) at the start of the article, this will let you gain a quick thought regarding the content in the article and audience it seeks.  Figure 1.1 shows an indicator for this article, as both bars are equal you can conclude that the article is applicable to both IT Pro and Developers in the same capacity.

 

You will find more than often than MOSS projects mostly involve many other Microsoft Products and Technologies, though they are not mandatory but mostly these are used together as part of whole Infrastructure and Solution Architecture. These include, but not limited to Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft ISA Server, Microsoft Groove, Microsoft MOM, Microsoft Office Communication Server, Microsoft Commerce Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server.

MOSS Big Picture

The first two versions of SharePoint Portal Server (2001 & 2003) cover three major areas namely Collaboration, Portal and Search. As the time passes and technologies become more interlinked and users become more demanding the MOSS adds Enterprise Content Management, Business Process, and Business Intelligence to enhance its solution offering. Take a look at figure 2.0

Now before we take a look into each of them, couple of things to note, almost each area in itself a comprehensive discipline and features provide by MOSS for some areas are better and much advanced than others, off course as time progress the new release (v.Next) will in incorporate more features into weak areas to make them comprehensive.

In order to give you an idea, about organizations who are using   MOSS visit Web Sites Running On MOSS , this blog entry contain list of sites running on MOSS. You will notice that these sites are from companies located all around the world including companies from Far East, Middle East, Africa, Europe and US. Please keep in mind that this list is by no means the complete list as many organizations never declare the product/technology on which they are running their web sites.

Collaboration 

Collaboration is of the key areas where MOSS really takes the lead from its predecessors .In pragmatic view the collaboration means to work along with other people (more than often these people are colleagues from your  team)  to share  knowledge and perform tasks in quicker  and intelligent ways. In contrast to today's working place, this means that the employees/information workers should able to gain some concrete and measure able benefits from the system. MOSS carters collaboration very acutely and provides features  like wikis , blogs ,RSS feeds , document sharing , email integration via Outlook 2007 , contacts , project tasks , document management , presence(know the status of colleagues/friends) , etc .The best part comes when you are already have Office 2007 products  installed then you can see the collaboration at its best  , information workers don't even need login to or browse to the MOSS portal for getting benefited from this integrated collaboration.

Off course other office suite products like Word 2007, Outlook 2007, and Excel 2007 etc also enjoys collaboration features for example Check out and Check in a document for Word 2007, etc. We will take a closer look how Office Suite products can be integrated and benefited from MOSS in the future articles as space is just too short to do the justice.

In the future releases of MOSS (most likely the very next one) there will be a component called "Knowledge Network" which fall under umbrella of Social Networking. The great thing about Knowledge Networks is you can quickly find about different peers and how far they are from you in your social network, you can easily search for them and if you  have proper privilege's , you can to can send them email ,with just a click. As most of us are mainly communicate through emails the Knowledge Network takes emails into account. It hard to comment on the inner workings of Knowledge Network but its most likely that to and CC fields in emails play the major role while the knowledge network is build.

Just to clarify the situation , It seems like Knowledge Network was initially planned to be released as a separate download  than  current release of MOSS , but never actually got publicly released .However In late 2006 Microsoft do made Knowledge Network available but only as a Technical Preview , to selected users through there Microsoft Connect site . The exact release dates for Knowledge Network, are not publically available. However if you are feeling excited about this new feature there is a good overview video with demo of Knowledge Network at Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Office-SharePoint-Server-2007-Knowledge-Network/ 

What's next

In the next part , we will take a look at Content Management features in MOSS. This includes web content management and record management. Moreover we will also glance over fate of MCMS 2002, which was content management server offering from Microsoft since MOSS current release.

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