Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, commonly abbreviated to MOSS, is the successor to Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It is a major upgrade, with a large range of new features.
A licensed, potentially quite expensive, enterprise extension to version 3.0 of the no-cost Windows SharePoint Services platform - a component available for Windows Server 2003. Its main strength is enabling an organization’s information to be organized and aggregated in one central, web-based application. It can be configured to return separate content for Intranet, Extranet and Internet locations.
The application uses a Microsoft SQL Server back-end for storing data. The front-end consists of ASP.NET pages served via Internet Information Services (IIS) on Windows Server 2003.
MOSS 2007 requires .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 (Windows Workflow Foundation only) to be installed.
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[edit] Logical Architecture Overview
MOSS 2007 features an enhanced UI, whis is supported in the backend by a logical architecture very much like the SPS 2003. MOSS 2007 can be installed to run on a single Windows 2003 Server requiring the installation of .NET 3.0 WF, turning on IIS, which is turned off by default, and the installation of either SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft's free version, SQL Express.
The architecture is composed of Web Server front ends, generally a search service which crawls the data store creating an index, a number of other services, and the database backend, a standard enterprise architecture.
As such it can be built out by load balancing more web servers on the front end and building larger clusters of SQL Server on the back-end. Though recommended to be installed on physical machines, virtualization has been used with MOSS and the previous marks to create this architecture, though not officially supported at the time of writing.
SharePoint allows administrators to create Web Applications each on its own port. A separate web application on a separate port can contain site collections, each having its own database in SQL Server. Site collections can have sites which can contain subsites. A web server can contain hundreds of site collections.
It is highly recommended in critical solutions to have separate functions in separate Web Applications with their own Application pools in IIS, this reduces the risks that a failure in one portal will impact others.
One of the weaknesses of the tool is its own ease of use. Administrators may be tempted to start one port 80 and build a single site collection with subsites underneath, exposed to the company as a home page and sub-pages. Though this makes logical sense for a large organization or one with bespoke portals using custom Web Parts or Former Server, it can cause problems. All the sites in a site collection will be stored in the same database, which can become too large to effectively back-up or DR, and bespoke development using the same Web Application and Application pool can bring a company wide internet down.
When designing a large implementation it makes sense to break distinct areas of the organization in to their own portal with their own Web Applications.
MOSS 2007 also allows content types and document libraries to have information management policies, which allows the triggering of workflow or deletion after a certain fixed event or time period, helping to reduce many of the size growth problems of earlier versions.
[edit] MOSS 2007 and Office 2007
An organisation does not need to upgrade to Office 2007 to use MOSS 2007, though the later office has better integration. Office 2003 is minimal to allow two way commication via HTTP and HTTPS.
[edit] MOSS 2007 Wiki vs. MediaWiki
The MOSS 2007 wiki is rather simplistic. It lacks many of the conventions of MediaWiki, but it allows RSS export of content and is fairly simple to use. As with MediaWiki it produces hyperlinks with a double square bracket.
[edit] Previous SharePoint Server versions
Version naming now emphasizes the closer integration with Microsoft Office applications and has dropped the word "Portal".
- 2001 - SharePoint Portal Server 2001
- 2003 - Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
- 2007 - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Each of these versions has differed significantly from each other both in functionality and underlying architecture. Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds workflow functionality, ASP.NET 2.0 compatibility, extensive integration to Microsoft Office products and support for the easy creation of blogs and wikis amongst many other new features and enhancements[1].
