Tuesday, November 6, 2007

SharePoint Server questions and answers

Frequently asked Questions for SharePoint Server

What is the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have identical feature functionality. While the feature functionality is similar, the usage rights are different.
If you are creating an Internet, or Extranet, facing website, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites which does not require the purchase client access licenses. Websites hosted using an "Internet sites" edition can only be used for Internet facing websites and all content, information, and applications must be accessible to non-employees. Websites hosted using an "Internet sites" edition cannot be accessed by employees creating, sharing, or collaborating on content which is solely for internal use only, such as an Intranet Portal scenario. See the previous section on licensing for more information on the usage scenarios.
What suites of the 2007 Microsoft Office system work with Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Office Outlook 2007 provides bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks.
Microsoft Office Groove 2007, included as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, will enable bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.
Features such as the document panel and the ability to publish to Excel Services will only be enabled when using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007or Office Enterprise 2007.
Excel Services will only work with documents saved in the new Office Excel 2007 file format (XLSX).
How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?
SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, who are invited to join via e-mail. In addition, the site administrator can restrict certain members' roles by assigning different permission levels to view post and edit.
Can I post any kind of document?
You can post documents in many formats, including .pdf, .htm and .doc. In addition, if you are using Microsoft Office XP, you can save documents directly to your Windows SharePoint Services site.
Can I download information directly from a SharePoint site to a personal digital assistant (PDA)?
No you cannot. However, you can exchange contact information lists with Microsoft Outlook.
How long does it take to set up the initial team Web site?
It only takes a few minutes to create a complete Web site. Preformatted forms let you and your team members contribute to the site by filling out lists. Standard forms include announcements, events, contacts, tasks, surveys, discussions and links.
Can I create custom templates?
Yes you can. You can have templates for business plans, doctor's office, lawyer's office etc.
How can I make my site public? By default, all sites are created private.
If you want your site to be a public Web site, enable anonymous access for the entire site. Then you can give out your URL to anybody in your business card, e-mail or any other marketing material. The URL for your Web site will be:
http:// yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com
Hence, please take special care to name your site.
These Web sites are ideal for information and knowledge intensive sites and/or sites where you need to have shared Web workspace.
Remember: Under each parent Web site, you can create up to 10 sub-sites each with unique permissions, settings and security rights.
How do the sub sites work?
You can create a sub site for various categories. For example:
* Departments - finance, marketing, IT
* Products - electrical, mechanical, hydraulics
* Projects - Trey Research, Department of Transportation, FDA
* Team - Retention team, BPR team
* Clients - new clients, old clients
* Suppliers - Supplier 1, Supplier 2, Supplier 3
* Customers - Customer A, Customer B, Customer C
* Real estate - property A, property B
The URLs for each will be, for example:
* http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/finance
* http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/marketing

You can keep track of permissions for each team separately so that access is restricted while maintaining global access to the parent site.
How do I make my site non-restricted?
If you want your site to have anonymous access enabled (i.e., you want to treat it like any site on the Internet that does not ask you to provide a user name and password to see the content of the site), follow these simple steps:
# Login as an administrator
# Click on site settings
# Click on Go to Site Administration
# Click on Manage anonymous access
# Choose one of the three conditions on what Anonymous users can access:
** Entire Web site
** Lists and libraries
** Nothing
Default condition is nothing your site has restricted access. The default conditions allow you to create a secure site for your Web site.
Can I get domain name for my Web site?
Unfortunately, no. At this point, we don't offer domain names for SharePoint sites. But very soon we will be making this available for all our SharePoint site customers. Please keep checking this page for further update on this. Meanwhile, we suggest you go ahead and set up your site and create content for it.
What are picture libraries?
Picture libraries allow you to access a photo album and view it as a slide show or thumbnails or a film strip. You can have separate folder for each event, category, etc
What are the advantages of a hosted SharePoint vs. one that is on an in-house server?
* No hardware investment, i.e. lower costs
* No software to download - ready to start from the word go
* No IT resources - Anyone who has used a Web program like Hotmail can use it
* Faster deployment
Can I ask users outside of my organization to participate in my Windows SharePoint Services site?
Yes. You can manage this process using the Administration Site Settings. Simply add users via their e-mail alias and assign permissions such as Reader or Contributor.
Are there any IT requirements or downloads required to set up my SharePoint site?
No. You do not need to download any code or plan for any IT support. Simply complete the on-line signup process and provide us your current and correct email address. Once you have successfully signed up and your site has been provisioned, we will send a confirmation to the email address you provided.
I am located outside of the United States. Are there any restrictions or requirements for accessing the Windows SharePoint Services?
No. There are no system or bandwidth limitations for international trial users. Additionally language packs have been installed which allow users to set up sub-webs in languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.
Are there any browser recommendations?
Yes. Microsoft recommends using the following browsers for viewing and editing Windows SharePoint Services sites: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later.
What security levels are assigned to users?
Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels by default and additional levels can be composed as necessary.
* Reader - Has read-only access to the Web site.
* Contributor - Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
* Web Designer - Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
* Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
How secure are Windows SharePoint Services sites hosted by Microsoft?
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Technical security measures provide firewall protection, intrusion detection, and web-publishing rules. The Microsoft operation center team tests and deploys software updates in order to maintain the highest level of security and software reliability. Software hot-fixes and service packs are tested and deployed based on their priority and level of risk. Security related hot-fixes are rapidly deployed into the environment to address current threats. A comprehensive software validation activity ensures software stability through regression testing prior to deployment.
What is the difference between an Internet and an intranet site?
An internet site is a normal site that anyone on the internet can access (e.g., www.msn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.). You can set up a site for your company that can be accessed by anyone without any user name and password.
An intranet (or internal network), though hosted on the Web, can only be accessed by people who are members of the network. They need to have a login and password that was assigned to them when they were added to the site by the site administrator.
What is a workspace?
A site or workspace is when you want a new place for collaborating on Web pages, lists and document libraries. For example, you might create a site to manage a new team or project, collaborate on a document or prepare for a meeting.
What are the various kinds of roles the users can have?
A user can be assigned one of the following roles
* Reader - Has read-only access to the Web site.
* Contributor - Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
* Web Designer - Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
* Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
Can more than one person use the same login?
If the users sharing that login will have the same permissions and there is no fear of them sharing a password, then yes. Otherwise, this is discouraged.
How customizable is the user-to-user access?
User permissions apply to an entire Web, not to documents themselves. However, you can have additional sub webs that can optionally have their own permissions. Each user can be given any of four default roles. Additional roles can be defined by the administrator.
Can each user have access to their own calendar?
Yes there are two ways to do this,
* by creating a calendar for each user, or
* by creating a calendar with a view for each user
How many files can I upload?
There is no restriction in place except that any storage consumed beyond that provided by the base offering may have an additional monthly charge associated with them.
What types of files can I upload / post to the site?
The only files restricted are those ending with the following extensions: .asa, .asp, .ida, .idc, .idq. Microsoft reserves the right to add additional file types to this listing at any time. Also, no content that violates the terms of service may be uploaded or posted to the site.
Can SharePoint be linked to an external data source?
SharePoint data can be opened with Access and Excel as an external data source. Thus, SharePoint can be referenced as an external data source. SharePoint itself cannot reference an external data source.
Can SharePoint be linked to a SQL database?
This is possible via a custom application, but it not natively supported by SharePoint or SQL Server.
Can I customize my Windows SharePoint Services site?
YES! Windows SharePoint Services makes updating sites and their content from the browser easier than ever.
SharePoint includes tools that let you create custom lists, calendars, page views, etc. You can apply a theme add List, Survey and Document Library Web Parts to a page create personal views change logos connect Web Parts and more.
To fully customize your site, you can use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Specifically, you can use FrontPage themes and shared borders, and also use FrontPage to create photo galleries and top ten lists, utilize standard usage reports, and integrate automatic Web content.
Will Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 run on a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows?
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Forms Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search will support 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.
How Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help you?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help us:
Manage content and streamline processes. Comprehensively manage and control unstructured content like Microsoft Office documents, Web pages, Portable Document Format file (PDF) files, and e-mail messages. Streamline business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity.
Improve business insight. Monitor your business, enable better-informed decisions, and respond proactively to business events.
Find and share information more simply. Find information and expertise wherever they are located. Share knowledge and simplify working with others within and across organizational boundaries.
Empower IT to make a strategic impact. Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms that have to be maintained by supporting all the intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities can help improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides these capabilities in an integrated server offering, so your organization doesn't have to integrate fragmented technology solutions itself.
What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?
The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people within the organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.
What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?
* User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
* Document management enhancements
* The new Workflow engine
* Office 2007 Integration
* New Web Parts
* New Site-type templates
* Enhancements to List technology
* Web Content Management
* Business Data Catalog
* Search enhancements
* Report Center
* Records Management
* Business Intelligence and Excel Server
* Forms Server and InfoPath
* The "Features" feature
* Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication

What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?
The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:
* Document management
* Records management
* Web content management
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.
Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?
Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you find documents and information fast.
Write the features of the search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007?
The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. New features provide:
* A consistent and familiar search experience.
* Increased relevance of search results.
* New functions to search for people and expertise.
* Ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications and
* Improved manageability and extensibility.
What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

* Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
* Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
* Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
* Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
* Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
* Connect people with information and expertise.
* Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
* Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
* Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
* Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?
The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.
What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?
If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides error handling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled security exceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where the Web Part appears.
How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?
Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option.
Option Pros Cons
Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server. For more information, see "Setting the trust level for a virtual server" Easy to implement.
In a development environment, increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure.
This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server.
There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server.
Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see "How do I create a custom policy file?" Recommended approach.
This option is most secure.
An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirements for the assembly.
By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your Web Parts.
Requires the most configuration of all three options.
Install your assemblies in the GAC
Easy to implement.
This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed in the BIN directory.
This option is less secure.
Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as it potentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope than necessary
In a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies.
Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.
Does SharePoint work with NFS?
Yes and no. It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the SharePoint database or logs cannot be stored there.
How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?
Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which
provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them on dashboards (pages). SS doesn't have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference would be SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.
What would you like to see in the next version of SharePoint?
A few suggestions:
# SPS and STS on same machine
# Tree view of Categories and Folders
# General Discussion Web Part
# Personalization of Dashboards
# Role Customization
# Email to say WHY a document has been rejected for Approval
# More ways to customize the interface
# Backup and restore an individual Workspaces
# Filter for Visio
# Better way to track activity on SPS
Why SharePoint is not a viable solution for enterprise wide deployments?
Document management does not scale beyond a single server, but scales great within a single server. For example, a quad Xeon machine with 4GB of RAM works great for a document management server that has about 900,000 - 1,000,000 document, but if you need to store 50,000,000 document and want to have them all in one single workspace then it does not scale at all. If you need a scenario like this, you need to plan your deployment right and it should scale for you, it just does not right out of the box.
If you are using your server as a portal and search server most for the most part it scales great. You can have many different servers crawl content sources and have separate servers searching and serving the content.
If you have < 750,000 documents per server and fewer than 4 content sources and fewer than 50,000 users, SPS should scale just fine for your needs with the proper planning.
What are the actual advantages of SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) over SharePoint Team Services (STS)?
SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has MUCH better document management. It has check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, publishing, subscriptions, categories, etc. STS does not have these features, or they are very scaled back. SharePoint team Services (SPS) has a better search engine, and can crawl multiple content sources. STS cannot. STS is easier to manage and much better for a team environment where there is not much Document Management going on. SPS is better for an organization, or where Document Management is crucial.
How Does SharePoint work?
The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

SharePoint Server Overview

SharePoint Portal Server: What is it?

The Microsoft Office System provides information workers with the tools they need to get their jobs done – not just desktop applications but servers, services, and solutions as well. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 addresses servers.

SharePoint Portal Server is an application built on top of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Before we can look at SharePoint Portal Server, you need to understand Windows SharePoint Services.

Windows SharePoint Services is a technology you get in Windows Server 2003. It is an engine for serving up in a very scalable, very available, very self-serviced and extensible way, tens of thousands of Web sites to hundreds of thousands of users. The sites come to you without you doing anything extra out-of-the-box with document collaboration, information sharing, and team productivity tools. Using SharePoint sites for sharing-type applications or collaboration activities, instead of file shares, is sensible and effective.

From the point of view of a developer, SharePoint sites are not just collaboration sites. Windows SharePoint Services can deliver several different types of sites including the out-of-the-box Document Workspace sites for document editing and management, and Meeting Workspace sites for meeting management. You can use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform to build additional sites on, and on which to create collaboration applications and information-sharing applications. Microsoft Office Project Web Access is a great example of an application built on top of Windows SharePoint Services.

Whereas Windows SharePoint Services is designed mainly for document and other collaboration, SharePoint Portal Server helps collect, organizes, and provides easy access to enterprise information. With SharePoint Portal Server, sites are personalized, and more accessible, discoverable, and searchable. It provides a single point of access for people, teams, knowledge and applications.

SharePoint Server 2007:

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds upon the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 infrastructure to provide a true enterprise portal platform. This article describes the technologies that Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers on the six major enterprise-focused themes for the 2007 Microsoft Office system: Individual Impact, Enterprise Content Lifecycle, Collaboration, Knowledge Discovery and Insight, Information Worker Solutions, and Fundamentals.

The Office SharePoint Server 2007 feature enhancements and new additions provide the components needed to build a fully integrated enterprise portal.

SharePoint Server Features:

Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduces new technologies, including the following:

Business Data Catalog
Enables integration between enterprise portal and line-of-business (LOB) applications.
Document Management
Provides control, organization, publishing, offline capabilities, draft item security, rights management, and records management.
Web Content Management
Enables site branding, creation of custom converters, building of multilingual sites, and building of content deployment solutions.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services
Enables interaction with your spreadsheets (view, calculate, create snapshots, extract values) through a Web browser or programmatically through a Web service.
Office InfoPath Forms Services Capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enables interaction with form templates designed with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 through a Web browser.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 also brings enhancements to existing technologies, including the following:

Search Provides enhanced capabilities in portal sites, team sites, content management sites, and custom headless search applications.
User Profiles and Audience Targeting
Provides improvements for property management, imports, privacy and security, and My Page, plus the addition of memberships, shared context, and colleague's quick links.
Single Sign-on
Provides enhancements to include a pluggable mechanism to allow alternate single sign-on providers.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 benefits

	Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. This tight integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ services themselves and facilitates product adoption.

	Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities. Take advantage of out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. You can complete these activities without any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers provide you with a simple, consistent experience. Modifying and extending these out-of-the-box workflow processes is made easy through tools like Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next release of Microsoft Office FrontPage).

	Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content. By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively. And you can reduce litigation risk for your organization. Tight integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with familiar desktop applications means that policy settings are rendered onto client applications in the Microsoft Office system, making it simpler for employees to be aware of and comply with regulatory requirements.

	Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value. Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual content is simplified through new document library templates that are specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.

	Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems. Give your users access to business data found in common line-of-business systems like SAP and Siebel through Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organizations store and organize business documents in one central location.

	Connect people with information and expertise. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 incorporates business data along with information about documents, people, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the relevance of the results, so you can easily find what you need.

	Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries. Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.

	Share business data without divulging sensitive information. Give your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents (such as financial models).

	Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location. Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.

	Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on an open, scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The server has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.

Friday, November 2, 2007

Framework 3.0

Framework 3.0

What is the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0?

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (formerly WinFX), is the new managed code programming model for Windows. It combines the power of the .NET Framework 2.0 with four new technologies:

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and
Windows CardSpace (WCS, formerly "InfoCard").

Use the .NET Framework 3.0 today to build applications that have visually compelling user experiences, seamless communication across technology boundaries, the ability to support a wide range of business processes, and an easier way to manage your personal information online. This is the same great WinFX technology you know and love, now with a new name that identifies it for exactly what it is – the next version of Microsoft's development framework.

Framework 3.0 Architecture:

Windows Workflow Foundation (WPF):

What is Workflow?

In the business world, workflow is how an item is moved from one person to another through a process. That process is the business process, and it defines the steps necessary to complete a piece of work. Steps in the process can be required or optional. For example, a business process for a vacation request might be that the employee must provide some information, such as the dates requested, to his or her supervisor. Then, the employee's supervisor must determine if the employee has vacation time to use, and if the date or dates requested are available for vacation.

The supervisor must provide the date information to the human resources department. Finally, the human resources department verifies that all policies have been followed, and provides the information to accounting at the appropriate time so payroll adjustments can be made. Notice that I didn't mention technology in my explanation of the business process. Business processes should be defined absent of technology. However, you can see there's a flow to the work. Also, notice that at several points in the flow, decisions need to be made. For example, the supervisor must make sure the employee has vacation time to use, and the company might have specific requirements about the number of employees that can be on vacation at the same time within a department. Because the flow can't move from one step to the next without some criteria being met, this is a state-based workflow. A state-based workflow means that each step of the flow has criteria that must be met before the flow can continue to the next step.

A state-based workflow waits on external entities to perform some action before moving to the next step. This example of workflow has a large amount of potential branching. Within a workflow, branching is when a decision needs to be made, such as when the supervisor must determine if the employee has enough vacation time to use, and if company policies related to staff size within a department will be met. In this case, two decisions need to be made: first, if the employee has vacation time to use, and second, if policies have been met. For each branch in a workflow, there must be at least two alternatives. You can't have a workflow just stop at a decision point.

Another type of workflow is sequential. Sequential workflow is a workflow whose steps are performed one right after the other, but might include branching. In this case, sequential refers more to continuous operation, instead of the order in which actions are performed. The traditional concept of sequential in programming is without branching, but when related to workflow, sequential means continuous, instead of without branching. Steps in a Sequential workflow don't wait for an external entity to perform the next step. You can think of the Sequential workflow as close to continuous. There might be some external entity's action required to begin the flow, but once the flow is started, little if any external action is needed. Technology must be applied to a business process. For example, you might have a process that automatically updates a sales order as complete, and sends an e-mail notice to the customer and the sales person when a sales order is shipped. An external entity must start the process by saying that the sales order has shipped, but then some system would mark the sales order as complete, determine the customer's e-mail address, determine the sales person's e-mail address, and then send the e-mail. Once an external entity initiates the flow, the flow continues until an exception is encountered or the flow is completed.

Introducing Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF):

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a technology that Microsoft has packaged with the .NET Framework for Microsoft Vista. WF is part of the programming model for Microsoft Vista, the next release of the Windows operating system. The new name for that programming model is WinFX, and it's a significant expansion of the Microsoft .NET Framework that was first released several years ago. Although WF is part of the WinFX programming model for Windows Vista, it can be run on clients that have Windows Server 2003 SP1, Windows XP SP2, Windows XP Home Edition, or Windows XP Media Center Edition. To develop workflow applications, you must be using Visual Studio 2005—any version except express. You can build workflow applications using VS2005 by adding the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation.

Architecture of Windows Workflow Foundation:

WF itself is a programming model, along with an engine and a set of tools for building workflow enabled applications. The programming model is made up of exposed APIs that other

Programming languages can use to interact with the workflow engine. These APIs are encapsulated within a namespace called System.Workflow. That namespace will be part of the WinFX programming model, but can also be installed as an add-on to the existing .NET Framework 2.0.

The easiest way to interact with the new APIs and namespace is through the Workflow

Designers, which you can add onto VS2005. You must download and install WF (more on this

In the next section) unless you're using Windows Vista as your operating system. When you download and install the foundation, WF gets bolted onto the .NET Framework 2.0 and VS2005. Within VS2005, you'll have new project types and will be able to import and use the System.Workflow namespace. The new Workflow Designer projects allow you to design workflow visually using the same drag-and-drop methods you use for creating Windows or Web-based applications. Within the designers, you build workflow much like you'd create a flowchart with a tool such as Microsoft Visio. WF also allows you to package the designers for reuse.

For example, you could build a Windows application that allows business people to create their own workflow libraries. The design tools that become part of VS2005 make up the first component of the overall WF. The next component is the actual workflow. Workflow is made up of a group of activities. These activities facilitate a business process or part of a business process. Activities are a central idea within the concept of workflow and the WF. A single workflow within WF is made up of one or more activities. In the context of the WF, activities are the actual work units necessary to perform a workflow. A number of out-of-the-box activities are provided as part of the WF. These out-of-the-box activities are part of the WF base activity library. You aren't restricted only to these activities; you can create custom activities and create your own library. You create the custom activities using the VS2005 Workflow Designers.

The next component of the WF is the WF runtime engine. The WF runtime engine executes workflow, made up of activities, and created with the VS2005 Workflow Designers. The runtime engine also includes services such as scheduling, state management, and rules. The scheduling service schedules the execution of activities within a given workflow. The state management service allows the state of a workflow to be persisted, instead of storing that state in another mechanism, such as a database. The rules service executes Policy activities.

Policy activities in the section entitled "Out-of-the-Box Activities". For now, realize that you can create workflows that are based on business rules and that perform some action when those rules are satisfied. The rules service handles all this.

The last component of WF is a host process. WF itself doesn't have an executable environment. Instead, another process must host the runtime engine and workflows. This host process may be a Windows application or an ASP.NET application. During development, this host process is VS2005. The soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 12 can also be a host for a workflow created with WF.

Windows Communication Foundation(WCF) :

One of the biggest IT topics today has to be the concept of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).Service-Oriented Architecture isn't new. You'd think that with the coverage it has received over the past few years that developers and "techy" individuals would understand it better, yet it ranks fairly high on the misunderstood-o-meter because its interpretation, implementation, and use is pretty loose due to the fairly vague definition. When you want to understand the meaning of something, you usually go to a place that defines it, such as a dictionary. In this case, we turn to the W3C to understand the definition of SOA. The

W3C defines Service-Oriented Architecture as "A set of components which can be invoked and

Whose interface descriptions can be discovered and published" As you sit and ponder this definition, it becomes quite apparent that this definition is fairly broad. It also becomes apparent why the Service-Oriented Architecture picture is somewhat fuzzy, because the definition leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

With this in mind, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to better explain what SOA is and the need for it; and second, to introduce Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and the following content:

❑ The need for SOA

❑ How Windows Communication Foundation addresses the SOA needs

Service-Oriented Architecture Principles:

Streams of information have been flowing from Microsoft in the forms of articles and white papers

Regarding its commitment to SOA and in this entire information one of the big areas constantly stressed are the principles behind service orientation:

❑ Explicit boundaries

❑ Autonomous services

❑ Policy-based compatibility

❑ Shared schemas and contracts

Explicit Boundaries

As you will learn in the next section, SOA is all about messaging—sending messages from point A to point B. These messages must be able to cross explicit and formal boundaries regardless of what is behind those boundaries. This allows developers to keep the flexibility of how services are implemented and deployed. Explicit boundaries mean that a service can be deployed anywhere and be easily and freely accessed by other services, regardless of the environment or development language of the other service.

The thing to keep in mind is that there is a cost associated with crossing boundaries. These costs come in a number of forms, such as communication, performance, and processing overhead costs. Services should be called quickly and efficiently.

Autonomous Services:

Services are built and deployed independently of other services. Systems, especially distributed systems, must evolve over time and should be built to handle change easily. This SOA principle states that each service must be managed and versioned differently so as to not affect other services in the process. In the book publisher example, the Order Process service and Order Fulfillment service are completely independent of each other; each is versioned and managed completely independent of the other. In this way, when one changes it should not affect the other. It has been said that services should be built not to fail. In following this concept, if a service is unavailable for whatever reason or should a service depend on another service that is not available, every precaution should be taken to allow for such services to survive, such as redundancy or failover.

Policy-Based Compatibility:

When services call each other, it isn't like two friends meeting in the street, exchanging pleasantries, and then talking. Services need to know a little more about each other. Each service may or may not have certain requirements before it will start communicating and handing out information. Each service has its own compatibility level and knows how it will interact with other services. These two friends in fact aren't friends at all. They are complete and total strangers. When these two strangers meet in the street, an interrogation takes place, with each person providing the other with a policy. This policy is an information sheet containing explicit information about the person. Each stranger scours the policy of the other looking for similar interests. If the two services were to talk again, it would be as if they had never met before in their life. The whole interrogation process would start over.

This is how services interact. Services look at each others' policy, looking for similarities so that they can start communicating. If two services can't satisfy each others' policy requirements, all bets are off. These policies exist in the form of machine-readable expressions. Policies also allow you to move a service from one environment to another without changing the behavior of the service.

Shared Schemas and Contracts:

Think "schemas = data" and "contracts = behavior." The contract contains information regarding the structure of the message. Services do not pass classes and types; they pass schemas and contracts. This allows for a loosely coupled system where the service does not care what type of environment the other service is executing on. The information being passed is 100 percent platform independent. As described previously, a service describes it capabilities.

Why Windows Communication Foundation:

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a platform, a framework if you will, for creating and distributing connected applications. It is a fusion of current distributed system technologies designed and developed from day one with the goal of achieving SOA nirvana, or coming as close to it as possible. WCF is a programming model that enables developers to build service solutions that are reliable and secure, and even transacted. It simplifies development of connected applications and offers something to developers that they have not seen in quite a while—a unified, simplified, and manageable distributed system development approach.

Built on top of the 2.0 .NET Framework CLR (Common Language Runtime), the Windows

Communication Foundation is a set of classes that allow developers to build service-oriented applications in their favorite .NET environment (VB.NET or C#). This section begins by taking a detailed look at the architecture of WCF and the components that make WCF what it is.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF):

Introduction:

When .NET first appeared, it introduced a small avalanche of new technologies. There was a whole new way to write web applications (ASP.NET), a whole new way to connect to databases (ADO.NET), new typesafe languages (C# and VB .NET), and a managed runtime (the

CLR). Not least among these new technologies is Windows Forms, a library of classes for building Windows applications. Although Windows Forms is a mature and full-featured toolkit, it's hardwired to essential bits of Windows plumbing that haven't changed much in the past ten years. Most significantly, Windows Forms relies on the Windows API to create the visual appearance of standard user interface elements such as buttons, text boxes, check boxes, and so on. As a result, these ingredients are essentially uncustomizable. For example, if you want to create a stylish glow button you need to create a custom control and paint every aspect of the button (in all its different states) using a lower-level drawing model. And don't even think about introducing animated effects such as spinning text, shimmering buttons, shrinking windows, or live previews because you'll have to paint every detail by hand!

The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) changes all this by introducing a new model with entirely different plumbing. Although WPF includes the standard controls you're familiar with, it draws every text, border, and background fill itself. As a result, WPF can provide much more powerful features that let you alter the way any piece of screen content is rendered. Using these features, you can restyle common controls such as buttons, often without writing any code. Similarly, you can use transformation objects to rotate, stretch, scale, and skew anything in your user interface, and you can even use WPF's baked-in animation system to do it right before the user's eyes.

Underlying the new features in WPF is a powerful new infrastructure based on DirectX,

The hardware-accelerated graphics API that's commonly used in cutting-edge computer

Games. This means that you can use rich graphical effects without incurring the performance

Overhead that you'd suffer with Windows Forms. In fact, you even get advanced features such

As support for video files and 3-D content. Using these features (and a good design tool), it's

Possible to create eye-popping user interfaces and visual effects that would have been all but

Impossible with Windows Forms.

Understanding Windows Graphics:

It's hard to appreciate how dramatic WPF is without realizing that Windows developers have been using essentially the same display technology for more than ten years. A modern Windows application built with C# indirectly relies on two parts of the Windows operating system to create its user interface:

• User32 provides the familiar Windows look and feel for elements such as windows, buttons, text boxes, and so on.

• GDI/GDI+ provides drawing support for rendering shapes, text, and images at the cost of additional complexity (and often lackluster performance).

DirectX: The New Graphics Engine:

Microsoft created one way around the limitations of the User32 and GDI/GDI+ libraries:

DirectX. DirectX began as a cobbled-together, error-prone toolkit for creating games on the

Windows platform. Its design mandate was speed, and so Microsoft worked closely with video card vendors to give DirectX the hardware acceleration needed for complex textures, special effects such as partial transparency, and three-dimensional graphics.

Over the years since it was first introduced (shortly after Windows 95), DirectX has matured. It's now an integral part of Windows, with support for all modern video cards. However, the programming API for DirectX still reflects its roots as a game developer's toolkit. Because of its raw complexity, DirectX is almost never used in traditional types of Windows applications (such as business software).

WPF changes all this. In WPF, the underlying graphics technology isn't GDI/GDI+. Instead, it's DirectX. Remarkably, WPF applications use DirectX no matter what type of user interface you create. That means that whether you're designing complex three-dimensional graphics (DirectX's forté) or just drawing buttons and plain text, all the drawing work travels through the DirectX pipeline. As a result, even the most mundane business applications can use rich effects such as transparency and antialiasing. You also benefit from hardware acceleration, which simply means DirectX hands off as much work as possible to the GPU (graphics processing unit), which is the dedicated processor on the video card.

Hardware Acceleration and WPF:

You're probably aware that video cards differ in their support for specialized rendering features and optimizations. When programming with DirectX, that's a significant headache. With WPF, it's a much smaller concern, because WPF has the ability to perform everything it does using software calculations rather than relying on built-in support from the video card.

Silverlight:

Like the .NET Framework itself, WPF is a Windows-centric technology. That means that

WPF applications can only be used on computers running the Windows operating system (specifically, Windows XP or Windows Vista). Browser-based WPF applications are similarly limited—they can only run on Windows computers, and they can only be hosted inside Internet

Explorer. There are some workarounds to support other browsers, but they're limited.

These restrictions won't change—after all, part of Microsoft's goal with WPF is to take advantage of the rich capabilities of Windows computers and its investment in technologies such as DirectX. However, there is a new emerging project named Silverlight that's designed to take a subset of the WPF platform, host it in any modern browser using a plug-in (including

Firefox and Safari), and open it up to other operating systems (such as Linux and Mac OS).

This is an ambitious project, and it's still not clear how much developer interest it will attract and how good its cross-platform support will be. Microsoft has already released early previews of the Silverlight technology, which was originally named WPF/E (WPF Everywhere) because it provides a subset of the features in WPF.

XAML:

XAML (short for Extensible Application Markup Language and pronounced "zammel" is a markup language used to instantiate .NET objects. Although XAML is a technology that can be applied to many different problem domains, its primary role in life is to construct WPF user interfaces. In other words, XAML documents define the arrangement of panels, buttons, and controls that make up the windows in a WPF application.

CARDSPACE :

The Internet continues to be increasingly valuable, and yet also faces significant challenges. Online identity theft, fraud, and privacy concerns are rising. Users must track a growing number of accounts and passwords. This burden results in "password fatigue," and that results in insecure practices, such as reusing the same account names and passwords at many sites. Many of these problems are rooted in the lack of a widely adopted identity solution for the Internet.

CardSpace is Microsoft's implementation of an Identity Metasystem that enables users to choose from a portfolio of identities that belong to them and use them in contexts where they are accepted, independent of the underlying identity systems where the identities originate and are used.

For users and businesses alike, the Internet continues to be increasingly valuable. More people are using the Web for everyday tasks, from shopping, banking, and paying bills to consuming media and entertainment. E-commerce is growing, with businesses delivering more services and content across the Internet, communicating and collaborating online, and inventing new ways to connect with each other.

But as the value of what people do online have increased, the Internet itself has become more complex and dangerous. Online identity theft, fraud, and privacy concerns are on the rise. And increasingly sophisticated practices such as "phishing" are invented. In response, a multitude of systems designed to protect identity have been devised. The diversity results in the aforementioned password fatigue and unsafe practices.

The root of these problems is that the Internet was designed without a system of digital identity in mind. In efforts to address this deficiency, numerous digital identity systems have been introduced, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. But no single system meets the requirements of every digital identity scenario. The reality is that many different identity systems are in use today, with still more being invented. The result is an inconsistent patchwork of improvised solutions at every Web site, rendering the system as a whole fragile, and constraining the fuller realization of the promise of e-commerce.

Source : offshoresoftwaredevelopmentindia

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

SharePoint Portal Server

SharePoint Portal Server: What is it?

SharePoint Portal Server is an application built on top of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Before we can look at SharePoint Portal Server, you need to understand Windows SharePoint Services. Windows SharePoint Services is a technology you get in Windows Server 2003. It is an engine for serving up in a very scalable, very available, very self-serviced and extensible way, tens of thousands of Web sites to hundreds of thousands of users. The sites come to you without you doing anything extra out-of-the-box with document collaboration, information sharing, and team productivity tools. Using SharePoint sites for sharing-type applications or collaboration activities, instead of file shares, is sensible and effective.

Whereas Windows SharePoint Services is designed mainly for document and other collaboration, SharePoint Portal Server helps collect, organize, and provide easy access to enterprise information. With SharePoint Portal Server, sites are personalized, and more accessible, discoverable, and searchable. It provides a single point of access for people, teams, knowledge and applications. In addition to the features of Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 adds the following:

News and Information topics
An intranet site directory to help organize your intranet
Personal Sites with personal and public views
Audience Targeting services
Index and search functionality
Alerts that notify you when changes are made to relevant information, documents, or programs
Integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server
Single sign-on functionality for enterprise application integration

SharePoint server 2007:

The Office SharePoint Server 2007 feature enhancements and new additions provide the components needed to build a fully integrated enterprise portal.

In This Section

Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduces new technologies, including the following:

Business Data Catalog
Enables integration between enterprise portal and line-of-business (LOB) applications.
Document Management
Provides control, organization, publishing, offline capabilities, draft item security, rights management, and records management.
Web Content Management
Enables site branding, creation of custom converters, building of multilingual sites, and building of content deployment solutions.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services
Enables interaction with your spreadsheets (view, calculate, create snapshots, extract values) through a Web browser or programmatically through a Web service.
Office InfoPath Forms Services Capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enables interaction with form templates designed with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 through a Web browser.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 also brings enhancements to existing technologies, including the following:

Search Provides enhanced capabilities in portal sites, team sites, content management sites, and custom headless search applications.
User Profiles and Audience Targeting
Provides improvements for property management, imports, privacy and security, and My Page, plus the addition of memberships, shared context, and colleague's quick links.
Single Sign-on
Provides enhancements to include a pluggable mechanism to allow alternate single sign-on providers.

Briefly Description:

Business Data Catalog
:

The Business Data Catalog feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an easy way to integrate business data from back-end server applications, such as SAP or Siebel, with your corporate portal to provide rich solutions for end users without writing any code. You register business data exposed in databases or through Web services in the Business Data Catalog by creating metadata that describes the database or Web service. The Business Data Catalog then uses this metadata to make the right calls into the data source to retrieve the relevant data.
After you register a data source in the Business Data Catalog, the business data entities are available for use by any of the following business data features:

Business Data Web Parts Generic Web Parts that display any entity from the Business Data Catalog, without deploying new code. The Web Parts provide customization, Web Part connections, and the standard Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services look-and-feel capabilities (paging, filtering, and style).

Business Data in Lists New field type that allows you to add any entity defined in the Business Data Catalog to a SharePoint list or document library.

Business Data Actions Business Data Actions bridge the gap between Office SharePoint Server 2007 and a native application user interface by providing a link back to the back-end data source. You can use Business Data Actions to build applications with write-back scenarios, such as a Customer Profile view that allows a user to update profile information directly in a back-end server application, such as SAP or Siebel. Actions are implemented as links, so you can also use actions to perform simple actions such as send an e-mail message or open a customer's home page.

Business Data Search Offers full-text search of the data sources registered in the Business Data Catalog. You can create new search result types based on the specific data entities registered in the Business Data Catalog.

Business Data in User Profiles You can augment Office SharePoint Server 2007 user profiles from any external data source registered in the Business Data Catalog.
Document Management :
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a set of client and server document services to help users manage and work with the growing volumes of content today's business processes generate.
Control
Office SharePoint Server 2007 has several features that provide improved control of access and versioning of documents:
Enforce check in and checkout You can now enforce mandatory check in and check out of Office SharePoint Server 2007 content.

Check out to local This feature lets a user check out a document and open it for editing on their client computer by using one option button.

Minor versioning Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports minor versioning. Based on settings the site administrator specifies, users can also have the option to choose whether to increment the major or minor versioning when they check an edited document back into a document library. Users can also add version-specific comments when checking in the document.

Document Information Panels

Often in document management systems, users are asked—usually at the point when they are saving their documents—to provide metadata (properties) for their documents. In many cases, users do not give the request any serious consideration, perhaps because of the placement or timing of the request. Document information panels are designed to enable users to specify all the properties on a document at once, in one place, at any point when they are working with that document.

A document information panel is a form that is displayed within the client application, and which contains fields for the document metadata. Document information panels enable users to enter important metadata about a file anytime they want, without having to leave the Microsoft Office system client application.

For more information, see Document Information Panel Overview.

Content Reuse and Distribution

Office SharePoint Server 2007 has features to support the distribution and reuse of content.

Important among these is the concept of live copies. A live copy is a document a user has copied to another SharePoint site location, but that retains a pointer to the original document. When the original document is edited, Office SharePoint Server 2007 notifies the user, who has the option of updating the copy with those changes as well.

In addition, Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers rendition support, which enables users to locate the same content that has been saved in a different file format.

Document Converters

You can offer content in a variety of formats through the use of document converters.

A document converter is a custom executable file that takes a document of one file type, and generates a copy of that file in another file type. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes an extensible framework for you to enable your own custom document converters for the document libraries in a given Web application.

For more information, see Document Converters Overview.

Draft Item Security

Draft item security gives a site administrator the ability to review submitted content before making it visible on the site. This feature employs the improved versioning Office SharePoint Server 2007 now offers: Administrators can elect to review content submitted as minor or major versions before making it visible.

Adding Custom Rights-Managed File Formats

The extensible architecture of Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables developers to create their own rights management converters for additional file formats beyond those natively supported by Office SharePoint Server 2007. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports the rights-managed file formats for Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

Using this extensible architecture, developers can create pluggable rights management converters that convert custom file types to rights management formats when the user downloads them, and then convert those files back to non-encrypted file formats when the user uploads them for storage in the document library.

Implementing rights management requires two things:

A file format that has rights management built into it.
An application that understands rights management and can display the file format with the various access levels determined by rights management.

Maintaining Content with Records Management

Records management is concerned with maintaining a company's most important information in the most organized way. Information technology creates an abundance of information, and we need to invent new ways of managing those electronic documents. We must ensure we have everything we need, as well as ensure we get rid of everything we do not need.

Records management addresses the long-term storage and management of items of value to a company. In such a context, a record represents something important to a company, be it a document, list, or other item of information.

Defining Policies for Handling Content

An information management policy is a set of rules for a certain type of important content. Policy enables administrators to control and evaluate who can access the information, how long to retain information, and how effectively people are complying with the policy itself. The most common creators and enforcers of policy are compliance officers, records managers, IT staff, and members of similar professions.

With Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can apply policies that enable you to manage your content according to your business processes. While Office SharePoint Server 2007 contains several policy features you can customize for your needs, it also contains a range of extensibility tools that enable you to create, customize, and deploy your own policies and policy features.

The predefined policy features contained in Office SharePoint Server 2007 include the following:

Retention
Auditing
Document bar codes
Document labels

For more information about the information management policy framework, see Introduction to Information Management Policy.

Document Storage Using the Record Center

Windows SharePoint Services provides an intuitive, robust environment for document collaboration and storage. However, many corporations have records management and regulatory compliance needs that necessitate maintaining separate servers that are used to manage official business records and other highly regulated material. This presents a challenge to records managers: how to easily, and consistently, move documents from the SharePoint collaborative sites to the more strictly controlled environment of a records repository server. Windows SharePoint Services provides functionality designed to enable records managers to automate the process of moving documents into a records repository.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides powerful tools to help records managers move their important documents, and related metadata, into a regulated records center:

Records Center Web Service Records managers can use the Records Center Web service to automate the process of moving documents from SharePoint sites into a records center, be that another, more strictly regulated SharePoint site, or a third-party repository.
Records Center Site Template The Records center site template provides records managers with a records center solution right inside. The site template fully implements the Records Center Web service, and is customized for use as a records center.

Document Processing Using Search and Process

Search and process operations enable you to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to perform a search query, and then perform a specific, custom action upon each list item returned by the query. For example, you might need to identify a certain set of documents, based on specific document metadata, and then move those documents into a records repository.

In addition, you can specify a list of people who are sent an e-mail message with the results of the search and process operation.

For more information, see Search and Process Overview.

Records Management Reporting Tools

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides tools for both audit and policy reporting. Audit reporting enables you to track events that occur on documents within a site. For example, you could track which user deleted a given file. Policy reporting enables you to gather information on how policies are being implemented within a site. Policy reporting examines an entire site and returns information concerning what policies are in use, and the percentages of use for each policy. You can then take this information and compare it against what you thought the policy use would be, or compare to see who is using policies in different percentages from the overall averages.

Web Content Management
:
To use the web content management features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, turn on the Publishing feature on a site. Then brand the site so that it has your organization's look and feel. You can provide users a way to edit the site within the context of the Web, and you can deploy content through a staging server into production. On a site with the Publishing functionality turned on, you can also create a multilingual site by creating a source site and then having that site translated into other languages, which are published as separate sites.
Branding Your Site
You can build a corporate Internet site by using Office SharePoint Server 2007, and customize it to look exactly as you want it to by modifying the basic building blocks of Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web pages: master pages and page layout. First, create a master page that defines the overall look and feel, or chrome, for the site. Master pages contain controls that are shared across an entire site; these controls include navigation, search, and language preferences.
For each type of page on the site, you create a page layout, which is a template to which users can add content to create new pages.
If the page is intended to explain a particular topic in detail—for example, if it contains text, graphics, or other information about a single topic—create a page layout with field controls.
If the page is intended to convey summary information about the content in a site—for example, a Welcome page—you can use the following field controls that are included with Office SharePoint Server 2007:
- Content Query Web Part
- Summary Links field control and Web Part
- Table of Contents Web Part
These Web Parts and field controls have a standard look and feel. You can customize the look and feel of field controls and Web parts to match the design of your Web site.
For more information, see Common Page and Site Customization Tasks.
Creating Custom Converters
Just as the Rich Client Authoring framework enables users to convert Microsoft Office Word 2007 documents into Web pages, you can create your own custom converters to change almost any type of file into a Web page. For example, you can create a converter that changes an XML file into an HTML Web page, given a specific XSL.
For details, see Page Publishing Using Document Converters.
Building Multilingual Sites
Often you must maintain many versions of a Web site, all of which derive from a common master or source site. This scenario is most common when creating multilingual Web sites (MLS). For example, global companies commonly create many different versions, or variations, of their corporate presence Web sites, one for each independent market in which they operate.
The Office SharePoint Server 2007 variation system is designed to help alleviate much of the complexity of managing related Web sites by managing the relationships between items in the source and target sites and using those relationships to create a process to synchronize the content between sites.
The variation system is a one-to-many system. You choose a source site and link it to any number of target sites. Changes you make in the source site then appear in each target site. Each set of target sites has only one source site.
The variation feature is targeted specifically at sites that are designed for publishing authoritative content. To that end, only pages and publishing sites can participate in the variations process. Other types of sites, such as team sites, cannot participate in the propagation process, nor can lists and list items. Only pages from a pages library and documents and images that those pages reference, can be included.
To learn more about variations, see the Variations and Multiple Languages Sites section.
Creating Content Deployment Solutions
IT professional can manage most Office SharePoint Server 2007 content deployment scenarios through a Web browser interface. For unusual cases, such as those in which the source and destination sites are not connected by a network, you may need to create a custom content deployment solution.
Content deployment is built around the idea that a single source site collection deploys content to one or more destination site collections. The destinations contain all the same content that the source site collection contains, with the same structure and organization.
A content deployment path defines the relationship between a source and a destination site collection. The source and destination can be on the same server farm or on different server farms. A site collection can have many outgoing paths. Each path has one or more jobs that define the schedule and scope of individual deployment operations, giving administrators a high degree of flexibility over how to deploy content. By default, deployment jobs operate incrementally, copying only content that has changed since the last successful deployment.
There are a few differences between the source and destination site collections:
- Base URL for the site collection The source and destination may be at different levels of the URL namespace on their respective servers. For example, http://mysite may deploy to http://public/mysite. Office SharePoint Server 2007 automatically corrects links to handle this difference.
- Authentication and user information The source and destination may have different security contexts. For example, the source might be on an intranet and give permissions to users in the entire organization, and the destination may use forms authentication to provide read access to the site.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services:

Excel Services is a new shared service of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Excel Services enables Excel workbooks to be loaded, calculated, and rendered on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Excel Services is designed to be a scalable, robust, enterprise-class server that provides feature and calculation fidelity with Microsoft Office Excel 2007.
Using Excel Services, you can easily reuse and share Excel workbooks on portals and dashboards on Office SharePoint Server 2007. For example, financial analysts, business planners, and engineers can create content in Excel and share it with others by using an Office SharePoint Server 2007 portal and dashboard. They can do this without writing custom code. You can control which data is displayed, and you can maintain a single version of the workbook.
There are two primary interfaces for Excel Services:
- An Excel Web Access Web Part, which enables you to view and interact with a live workbook by using a browser
- Excel Web Services for programmatic access
In addition, you can extend the third component of Excel Services, called Excel Calculation Services, with user-defined functions.
Using Excel Services, you can view live, interactive workbooks with only a browser. This means you can save Excel workbooks and interact with them from within portal sites. You can also interact with workbooks to explore and pivot on data, and you can analyze PivotTable reports and charts by using a browser.
Excel Services supports workbooks that are connected to external data sources. You can embed connection strings to external data sources in the workbook, or you can save them centrally in a Data Connection Library file.
Excel Services also has a Web service. You can use Excel Web Services to load workbooks, set values into cells and ranges, refresh external data connections, calculate worksheets, and extract calculated results such as cell values, the entire calculated workbook, or a snapshot of the workbook.
Office InfoPath Forms Services Capabilities
The InfoPath Forms Services in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a Web browser form-filling experience based on form templates designed in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. Otherwise referred to as a "reach" experience, form templates can be used from computers that may not have Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 installed. This Web experience is built as a feature on top of the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 platform.
Form templates (.xsn files) created in the Office InfoPath 2007 design mode UI are translated into browser-editable forms that run on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Form templates with custom business logic are deployed by an administrator and managed through a global list of form templates in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Central Administration form template management page.

Microsoft Server Technologies & Framework 3.0