Technology Review

The system of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is specified in Table 1.

Table 1: SharePoint System

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Data storage

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server stores its data in the Windows Internal Database, registry, and SQL Server 2000. The organization does not have to buy SQL Server; SharePoint Portal Server comes with SQL Server Desktop Edition which allows the company to have a database up to 2 GB for 10 concurrent connections. The SQL Server Desktop Edition will be enough for many organizations. Although the users can be stored in the database, the default users’ storage is the Active Directory of Windows Server Operating system. When the organisation adds users through the SharePoint interface it is automatically added to the Active Directory.

Programming languages

Windows SharePoint Services are built from the ground up using .Net Framework technologies. It has been developed with C# using ASP.Net. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is built on top of the Windows SharePoint Services. As a result, SharePoint Portal Server provides all the facilities SharePoint Services providing.

SharePoint Portal Server is built with the consideration of providing extensibility. For extensibility, they are some special types of web user controls, called Web Parts. Web Parts enable the developers to assemble a view of information from many sources. Developers can integrate the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, file shares, Web sites, Web Services in the Web Parts. Web Parts can be developed in any .Net language. With web parts, the end users will get drag and drop design features, connection features ready.

Operating Systems

Windows SharePoint Services requires Windows Server 2003 with the latest service packs installed. As a web server, it requires IIS 6.0 with .Net Framework 1.1 components installed. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server requires Windows SharePoint Services installed on the system. Active Directory Service of Windows 2003 should be installed for the user database and the computers within the organisation should be in the same domain.

Web Generation

In SharePoint Portal Server 5^th Generation Web is used. JavaScript is heavily used for giving the user a good user interface (like drag and drop features). It provides many web services for accessing the internal data of SharePoint. Although modifying data directly from SQL Server is also possible, it is not an easy task to do because they are many dependencies in the database. With SharePoint Web Services many tasks, that can be done using menus in the portal, can be done programmatically like adding users or modifying a list.

Improvements

Better Support for Teamwork

Microsoft SharePoint Portal provides some basic mail alerts for the sites changes. The alert system should be optimized, make more configurable. There should be alarms for the inactive sites in the system, so that the administrator could delete the sites and increase the system performance. This would affect the users to open only the active sites. There might be some specific alarms for particular events in the lists or in the sites. The alert system should not be only through mail, it might have some in-site alerts recommending the user what to do.

SharePoint Portal Server can track the changes to the documents, but it is only limited to Microsoft Office documents. Many organisations use different type of software and documents, it should be give support to different type of documents. Also, SharePoint Portal does not include a form tracking facility. There are some third party solutions for providing that facility, but it would be better to support the form tracking inside the SharePoint Portal.

The folder system of the directories is sometimes not enough for classifying the documents. A tagging system should be implemented inside the SharePoint Portal Server. Then the users can set different keywords for a document.

Better Support for Individual Work

Workflow is a need for collaborative systems and it is not supported on SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Workflow should be implemented in a document library, in the designer or in the web services that SharePoint provides. Workflow should be easily implemented using the web interface of the portal or should be programmatically accessed to workflow libraries, as a result it would be possible to develop Web Parts that follows the workflow.

SharePoint does not have an internal backup solution. A backup can be done using SQL Server backup solutions; it should have a web based scheduled backup and restore system for different types of data specified by the users.

The System Link into any other university systems

The system should link into other university systems if there is a need for collaboration with the university. This can easily be done by developing web parts or web services talking to the university server.

Another functionality/tools

In SharePoint Portal Server, it is impossible to track change within the portals because everything is stored in Microsoft SQL Server database. Sometimes it is needed to track for the activities going on the portal in terms of security. This information can be queried using the IIS logs or SQL Server transaction logs; however they will display all the going operations in the servers. It is rather difficult to analyse those data. SharePoint Portal Server should have a separate activity tracking mechanism to analyse and report.

Other points

SharePoint Portal Server is a good collaborative system; on the other hand it depends on many technologies. It should be separated from other components like SharePoint Services, SQL Server to enable the upgrade easy. It should be loosely coupled to the other systems.

Conclusion

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server is enterprise level collaboration software providing services for the organisation and customers. Although, there are some problems with SharePoint Portal Server in terms of compatibility with other systems, SharePoint Portal Server is a unique solution in collaboration environments. It is Windows based, but is accessible from any other platform using a high-end web browser. The installation and administration of the system is very easy and works without any extra configuration. As a result, the users will get high security options, great collaborative environment for sharing documents, easy to manage system, and great team integration.

SharePoint Portal Server is also great development environment for programmers. It can be personalised within the organisation based on needs. It can be integrated with any other application without affecting the system’s security. Many software vendors were also providing web parts for SharePoint Portal Server which makes the integration very easy with their product.

Workflow is a definite need for a collaborative environment. That issue will be solved internally with a new framework in the coming version of SharePoint which is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2007.

Abstract

Microsoft SharePoint Products are Web Based Collaborative System that facilitates the collaboration within the organisation and customers. There are two types of SharePoint products, SharePoint Portal Services and SharePoint Portal Server. SharePoint Portal Server is built on top of SharePoint Portal Services.

Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, users can create, manage and build collaborative Web sites. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is built on top of Microsoft SharePoint Services. Although SharePoint Portal Services are free, SharePoint Portal Server provides more facilities to work collaboratively. This paper will focus on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server rather than Microsoft SharePoint Services

Web Evolution

Usability

    SharePoint Portal Server is scalable, secure, and enterprise level portal server. Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003, users can add, manage, and organize news and topics, sites with different views, and information. They are also able to search across files shares, Web servers. They can make notification alerts based on the changes of the information, documents or applications. There is no need for administrators to create a site. It can be used for the team workspace, contact list, meetings, tasks, document sharing and collaboration. Moreover, it can be used for customized shared and collaborated solutions within the organisation and customers.

Many organizations use shared folders among the network and e-mail for collaboration. A user creates a file in the shared folder, and then e-mails the link to the reviewers of the document. Windows SharePoint provides a Document Workspace site for shared documents. It stores the document and tracks the changes if needed. Users are also able to see the different versions of the document.

Accessibility

    SharePoint Portal Server is accessible through the network or through the internet using the most recent web browsers. The workers or teams in an organisation can access it through the Intranet. Some companies provide some portals to their customers, in that case they might open some or all part of SharePoint Portal Server to the Internet.

    SharePoint Portal Server is also accessible through web services for third party programs or for developers. They are many web services that the users can query the system for different lists, documents.

SharePoint Portal Server has a Meeting Workspace for managing meetings. It can be accessed from Outlook 2003 for scheduling a meeting. This way, the users can request a meeting from their mail program.

Security

    The authentication is provided by IIS (Internet Information Services) using the Kerberos authentication to NTLM authentication. The organisation can also add SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate to the SharePoint virtual directory to make the portal encrypted.

    The authorization is done internally. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides user based and role based security to access the content. Users can be the users of the active directory or can be created using SharePoint Portal Server. There are five types of roles administrator, web designer, contributor, reader and guess. Administrator can assign rights to different lists, web parts, documents for the users or the roles. The user and role data is stored on the database encrypted. SharePoint Portal Server also provides single sign-on.

Pro’s of the system

The architecture of SharePoint Portal Server is very extensible and secure. A developer can link web services to the SharePoint Portal Server as list of objects or can develop web parts easily Single sign-on provides great security for the system. Single Sign-On Service provides sign on to multiple enterprise applications (like SAP, Siebel) using a single set of credentials even if they use different types of authentication methods. Each Web Part in the site can use the credentials that the user provided once to access different resources in the system without prompting the user. Having a web part talking to external systems has been greatly done.

Windows SharePoint Portal is integrated with Microsoft Office Products. Users can use the menu commands from the Office family to add or modify different parts of the system. Beside that, the user interface of adding web parts to the site and organizing them using drag and drop is a good thing in a web interface without needing the administrator.

The search engine provided by Windows SharePoint Portal server can query most of the objects of the system like lists, documents, meetings, contacts, surveys. Sites are also indexed in the SQL Server in an indexed table which makes the text queries to perform fast. The track versions of the documents are also stored in the database, the users can easily rollback a document to previous version or update the current document. It helps managing the document creation and editing.

Con’s of the system

The users can build their own sites without administrator help; however this might result to inactive sites after the project has finished or the users decide to change the site. The sites take space on the server and it can decrease the overall performance of the system or it might result in an unmanaged portal unless the administrator continuously checks the active sites.

SharePoint Portal Server is platform and application dependent. If the organisation is not using Microsoft Office and Servers it will not be the best solution for them. Beside that, SharePoint Portal server is not a future proof product. Migration or upgrade will not be easy, because it depends on other products like Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. When the company want to upgrade SharePoint, Microsoft might force them to upgrade the other servers as well.

The SharePoint Portal Server lacks the workflow support for the operations. Workflows can be done by using some other components, like BizTalk Server, again the company need to pay for that. Although BizTalk Server and SharePoint Portal Server offer a powerful and integrated platform, without workflow support it might not be considered as a true collaborative suite.

 Installation of Microsoft Sharepoint Services or Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server requires a Windows Server computer. However it is possible to develop in Windows XP’s. For deployment you definitely need windows server. Since Sharepoint 2003 is based on asp.net 1.1 you can’t use Visual Studio 2005 for developing, you need to have Visual Studio .Net 2003.

One of the sharepoint extensibility features are web parts. You can develop your web parts, connect them and install them to portal server. For developing web parts Microsoft provides Web Part Templates for Visual Studio .NET. However this template is not enough itself, you need to have Microsoft.sharepoint.DLL file in order to develop web parts. Don’t try to find the file on  Sharepoint SDK 1,  because there is no DLLs included. Although the file size is more than 60MB, the SDK only includes the documentation and nothing more. You can find Microsoft.sharepoint.DLL in Microsoft Sharepoint installed Windows Servers’ Assembly Cache.

Just copy the file from the assembly cache to a location that you remember later, and install web part templates for Visual Studio .Net. During the installation it will ask for Microsoft.sharepoint.DLL file, you just need to reference it. Whenever it completes your system will be ready to  develop Web Parts for Sharepoint 2003.

Link to Download details: SharePoint Products and Technologies Templates: Web Part Templates for Visual Studio .NET

I found a new  and interesting book in my mailbox prepared for Teched 2006. I quickly looked through the book, it looks quite interesting.  Basically it is a book for helping the developers for creating collaborative applications and tasks with Sharepoint Services 2007 and Office 2007 System. A good reference for Sharepoint Services 2007 development and some new developments for office 2007.

 7 Development Projects with the 2007 Microsoft Office System and Windows SharePoint Services 2007