Windows Sharepoint Services 3.

Why Sharepoint Services?

Traditionally, most situations that require a group of users to share a frequently updated
document tend to get messy. One way that the situation is often handled is that a user
might make an update and then E-mail the updates to everyone else in the group. Another
common situation is that the document might be placed in a shared folder where it can be
updated as needed. Both of these techniques have problems though. For example, what
happens if two people try to make contradictory updates at the same time? What happens
if a user updates the document incorrectly, ruining the document in the process. These are
issues that business units within corporations have had to deal with for years. Fortunately,
those days might be over thanks to a free add-on to Windows Server 2003 called the
SharePoint Services.

The Windows SharePoint Services are a free ad-on for Windows Server 2003. They allow
users to collaborate on projects while preserving multiple versions of shared documents.

What are Sharepoint Services?

The SharePoint Services are the little brother to Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server.
They are designed to allow users to organize and to more easily share information in a
collaborative environment. For example, let’s go back to the example that I gave earlier
in which a group of users needed to share a common document related to a project.
Rather than trying to maintain the document in the usual way, the team could create a
SharePoint Web site with a document library. The document library would allow users in
the group to check the document in and out, thus guaranteeing that there was no chance
of two users updating the document simultaneously. The document library can also
maintain previous versions of documents so that if the team needed to revert to a previous
version they could easily do so without having to restore a backup. The document library
even offers a manageable set of permissions that control who can read, create, or modify
documents. You can even structure approval routing so that a change to a document will
not be posted to the library until it has been approved by a manager.

If all of this sounds really complicated, it isn’t. The SharePoint Services are designed so
that even someone with no programming experience can create a collaborative Web site
on the fly by using prefabricated Web parts. Microsoft offers an entire library of Web
parts that do all sorts of different things. For example, there is a document library Web
part, a calendar Web part, etc. All the project leader has to do is to tell SharePoint
which Web parts to use, set a few permissions for the team, and they are in business.

What is in a SharePoint site?

By default, your SharePoint site includes a default home page with space for highlighting
the information important to your group, and several predefined pages for storing
documents, ideas, and information so you can start working right away. Your site also
includes navigation elements so you can find your way around.

The home page of your site is your starting point. It contains the Quick Launch bar, views
of the Announcements, Events, and Links lists, and the name and description of your
team Web site.

Quick Launch bar: - The Quick Launch bar contains hyperlinks to specific pages on
your SharePoint site.
Announcements: - The Announcements list is a place to post important information for
your whole team. The five most recent announcements in the Announcements list are
displayed on the home page by default. You can also click the Announcements list
heading to go to the full list of announcements.

When you create your SharePoint site, a built-in announcement is displayed

automatically. You can edit or delete this announcement, as desired, and add your own
announcements from either the home page or the Announcements page.

Events: - The Events list is intended to help you communicate about your team's
events — whether those are meetings, key deadlines, or work schedules. When you create
your SharePoint site, this list is empty. You can add your team's events to the list.

Links: - The Links list is intended to include hyperlinks to your team's favorite Web
pages or sites (such as your organization's Internet site). When you create your site, this
list is empty.

The top link bar is displayed on every page in your SharePoint site.

The top link bar contains hyperlinks to special pages in your site that help you navigate
within the site, customize and manage the site, or get Help using the site. The hyperlinks
on the top link bar are:

Home: - The Home hyperlink on the top link bar links to the home page.
Documents and Lists: - This hyperlink on the top link bar links to a page that displays
all the document libraries, picture libraries, lists, discussion boards, and surveys currently
in your site. You can use this page to navigate to the lists and document libraries in your
site. You can also use a link on the page to see any sites, Document Workspace sites, or
Meeting Workspace sites below your site.

Create:- The Create hyperlink on the top link bar links to a page that enables you to
create new pages and components for your site. By using this page, you can create items
such as a list that is like any of the built-in lists, a list based on an existing spreadsheet, a
document library, a discussion board, a survey, or a new page for your site.

Site Settings:- The Site Settings hyperlink on the top link bar links to a page where you
can change your personal information, change the name and description of your
SharePoint site, change site content, and perform site management tasks, such as
changing personal settings or setting up new team members for the SharePoint site.
You must be a member of the Administrator site group to perform site management tasks.

Help: - The Help hyperlink on the top link bar opens a separate browser window
containing the Help system for Windows SharePoint Services. Use the Help window to
find information about Windows SharePoint Services and "how to" steps for using your
SharePoint site.

Up to Site Name: - SharePoint sites can contain other SharePoint sites (called subsites)
in a hierarchy. The Up to Site Name hyperlink (where Site Name is the name of an actual
site) appears only if your site is a subsite of another SharePoint site. This link helps you
navigate up a level to the parent site.

In addition to the Announcements, Events, and Links lists that appear on the home page,
your site may contain any of the following standard list types:

Document Library: - Document libraries provide a central place to store and share your
team's documents. Your site contains a default document library — Shared Documents —
that you can get to from the Quick Launch bar on the home page. You can create
additional document libraries to store documents for a specific project, or you can create
folders inside Shared Documents for different types or categories of documents.
Picture Gallery: - Picture libraries provide a central place to store and share pictures. It
is similar in concept to a document library, but gives you special ways to view the
pictures (such as showing only thumbnails or showing all pictures in a filmstrip).

Contacts: - The Contacts list lets you store and share information about people. For
example, you can use this list to share your team member's home phone numbers, or to
store your customer information.

Tasks: - The Tasks list helps you organize team tasks (work items that your team needs to
complete), and assign them a status and priority as well as a due date.

Issues: - The Issues list helps you manage a set of issues or problems, and assign them a
status and priority as well as a due date.

Discussion Boards: - Discussion boards provide a forum for conversing about topics that
interest your team. For example, you could create a discussion board for team members
to suggest activities.

Surveys: - Surveys provide a way of polling team members.

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Terms Explained:-

Sharepoint Site: - A SharePoint site is a Web site that provides a central storage and
collaboration space for documents, information, and ideas. A SharePoint site is a tool for
collaboration. A SharePoint site helps groups of people (whether work teams or social
groups) share information and work together. For example, a SharePoint site can help
you:

Coordinate projects, calendars, and schedules.

Discuss ideas and review documents or proposals.

Share information and keep in touch with other people.

SharePoint sites are dynamic and interactive — members of the site can contribute their
own ideas and content as well as comment on or contribute to other people. They don't
have to use a complicated Web publishing process before they can post a document or
make an announcement.

Top-Level Website: - The Default, top-level site provided by a web server or a virtual
server. To gain Access to the top-level web site, you supply the URL of the server without
specifying the page name and sub-site. Top-level Web sites can have multiple subsites.

Sub Site: - A complete Website stored in a named subdirectory of the top level web site.
Each subsite can have Administration, Authoring and browsing permissions that are
independent from top level website and other websites. Subsites can also have multiple
subsites, down as many levels as your users need.

Site Collection: - The entire structure of a top-level Web site and all of its subsites is
called a Web Site collection. Can also be defined as a set of Web sites on a virtual server
that have the same owner and share administration settings. Each site collection contains
a top level website and can contain one or more subsites.
Lists:-Sharepoint provides rich set of built-in lists used for managing various kind of
information.TheBuilt-in lists are as follows:

• Contacts List: - Use a contacts list to communicate with the people with whom
you work. You can enter names and contact information (such as telephone
number, e-mail address, and street address) so that everyone on your team can use
this information.

• Links List: - You can use links lists to post hyperlinks to Web pages of interest to
your team.

• Lists and Spreadsheets: - If you have a list of information in a spreadsheet, you

can define a range of cells to use as a list in your site. Windows SharePoint
Services imports the data from the spreadsheet and displays it the same way it
displays the built-in lists: in columns that team members can filter and sort, with
commands that enable team members to add, edit, and delete items. To import
data from a spreadsheet, you must have a Windows SharePoint Services-
compatible spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Office Excel 2003, and
Internet Explorer 5 or later installed.

• Announcements List: - Use an announcements list to post news, status, and other
short bits of information you want to share with team members. You can set an
expiration date for an announcement.

• Events List: - Use an events list to post information about dates that are
important for your team.

• Task List: - Use the tasks list to assign a task to a member of your team, specify
its due date and priority, and indicate its status and progress. You can easily view
all tasks or a selection of tasks, such as just those tasks assigned to you.

• Custom List: - If no built-in lists meet your information-sharing needs, you can
create a custom list that displays your unique information.
Document Libraries: - Document libraries are collections of files that you share with
team members. For example, you can create a library of documents for a specific project.
You can store any type of file in a document library.

Collaboration: - Your team can take collaboration to a new level with Windows
SharePoint Services. Team members can easily create collaborative workspace sites to
share and manage their team information. Threaded discussions, surveys, shared
calendars, task lists and other collaboration features help keep you and your teammates
connected and productive. Various features provided by WSS for collaboration are:
Announcement List
Event Lists
Task Lists
Discussion Boards.
Surveys.
Document Libraries.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a full-fledged development platform that adds a
tremendous amount of value on top of ASP.NET. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
scalability is achieved using an architecture designed with a Web form environment in
mind. This architecture is based on stateless front-end Web servers that rely on Microsoft
SQL Server in the back end for storing content and other site-related data.

Features and changes of WSS 3.0

• The way in which Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 integrates with ASP.NET has
been completely redesigned. First of all, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built
upon ASP.NET 2.0, which provides significant enhancements over ASP.NET 1.1.
Furthermore, the integration between Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and
ASP.NET 2.0 was changed to route incoming requests through the ASP.NET
runtime before Windows SharePoint Services. The Windows SharePoint Services
team achieved these improvements to the routing infrastructure by removing the
ISAPI filter and adding an HttpModule and an HttpHandler that are registered
with ASP.NET using standard Web.config entries. This means incoming HTTP
requests always enter the ASP.NET run-time environment and are fully initialized
with ASP.NET context before they are forwarded to the code written by the
Windows SharePoint Services team to carry out Windows SharePoint Services–
specific processing.
• The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 team has created their own virtual path
provider named SPVirtualPathProvider, The SPVirtualPathProvider is able to
retrieve .aspx pages from SQL Server and then hand them off to the .aspx page
parser supplied by ASP.NET 2.0.
• Another change to be aware of is that Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 has been
renamed in its new release as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was designed from the ground up to embrace
the master page infrastructure of ASP.NET 2.0. Every Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 site is provisioned with a special catalog known as the Master Page
Gallery containing a master page named default. Master. This master page defines
 a common layout for every site’s home page (Default.aspx) as well as all the
standard Windows SharePoint Services form pages associated with lists and
document libraries (for example, AllItems.aspx, NewItem.aspx). The master page
layout includes standard Windows SharePoint Services menus and navigation
controls. The definition of default. Master includes several different named
placeholders such as Place-HolderPageTitle, PlaceHolderMain, and
PlaceHolderLeftNavigation.
• There are now two different styles of Web Parts. The older WSS-style Web Parts
depend on Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and must inherit from the WebPart base
class defined by the Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 teams in the
Microsoft.SharePoint.Web- PartPages namespace. The newer ASP-style Web
Parts depend on System.Web.dll and must inherit from a different base class also
named WebPart defined by the ASP.NET 2.0 team in the
System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts namespace.
• The Web Part infrastructure of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built on a
control named SPWebPartManager that is derived from the ASP.NET 2.0
WebPartManager control. The SPWebPartManager control overrides the
standard behavior of the WebPartManager control to persist Web Part data inside
the Windows SharePoint Services content database instead of the ASP.NET
services database. In most cases, you don’t have to worry about dealing directly
with the SPWebPartManager control because the one and only required instance is
already defined in the standard default.master page. When you create a content
page that inherits from default.master, the SPWebPartManager control is already
there.
• One criticism that developers have had with Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 is
that several valuable features supported with document libraries do not extend to
lists.
• For example, document libraries support versioning and events, but lists do not.
To address this criticism, the Windows SharePoint Services teams worked hard to
extend the functionality of lists and bring them up to par with document libraries.
With Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, lists support many of the same features as
 document libraries including versioning, events, and folders. There are also some
new features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 supported by both lists and
document libraries such as exposing data through automatic RSS feeds.
• Another nice innovation added to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is custom site
columns. A site column is a reusable definition that can be used across multiple
lists. A site column defines the name for a column, its underlying field type, and
other characteristics such as its default value, formatting, and validation. Once
you have defined a site column, you can then use it as you define the structure of
your user-defined lists. An obvious advantage is that you can update the site
column in a single place and have that update affect all the lists where the site
column has been used. A site column is defined within the scope of a single site,
yet it is visible to all child sites below the site in which it has been defined.
Therefore, you can create a site column that is usable across an entire site
collection by defining it in the top-level site.
• Another innovation in WSS 3.0 is the use of Content Types. A content type is a
flexible and reusable Windows SharePoint Services type that defines the shape
and behavior for an item in a list or a document in a document library.

Content Types in WSS 3.0

Content types, a core concept used throughout the functionality and services offered in
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, are designed to help users organize their
SharePoint content in a more meaningful way. A content type is a reusable collection of
settings you want to apply to a certain category of content. Content types enable you to
manage the metadata and behaviors of a document or item type in a centralized,
reusable way.

For example, consider the following two types of documents: software specifications and
legal contracts. It is reasonable that you might want to store documents of those two types
in the same document library. However, the metadata you would want to gather and store
about each of these document types would be very different. In addition, you would most
likely want to assign very different workflows to the two types of documents.
Content types enable you to store multiple different types of content in the same
document library or list.
Because content types can be defined independently of any specific list or document
library, you can make a given content type available for the lists on multiple SharePoint
sites. This enables you to centrally define and manage the types of content you store in
your site collection.

Event Handlers in WSS 3.0

Many developers use the event handlers in Windows SharePoint Services to execute
custom managed code behind document libraries or form libraries. The goal of Microsoft
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is to provide developers with an even richer platform
for developing custom integration points and building new types of applications on top of
the infrastructure.

For this purpose, the event handlers in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are
extended in scope and depth in many ways. The most important new extensions to the
event handlers are the following:

• The scope of events is enlarged and now covers not only document and form
libraries but also lists and some limited Web site and site collection events.
• Events that are triggered by lists allow you to hook up code when list items are
added, changed, or removed, which means you can create customized behavior
through Microsoft .NET managed code.

The depth and the richness of the events is also a major new enhancement, and there are
now two major types of events:

• Events that fire before an action occurs allow you to perform custom validation,
checking, or processing of data that is about to be deleted, modified, or added to a
list. These types of events are consistently suffixed with 'ing' to identify them as
 before events. Note that the code reacting on these events is executed in a
synchronous manner.
• Events that fire after a certain action occurs probably are familiar to most
developers working with Windows SharePoint Services 2003. These events are
suffixed with 'ed', and the code handling them is executed asynchronously.

Event handlers are registered differently than in Windows SharePoint Services 2003, in
which it was possible to attach only one assembly per document or form library. In
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you have more flexibility in handling and
registering your events.

With Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you can communicate responses back
to the user interface. Take, for example, a scenario in which a user tries to add a new
item, and an event handler invalidates that entry because of some business rule. In this
case, you can create an error message that is communicated back to the user.

Workflows in WSS 3.0

Workflow can be seen as a set of activities stored as a model that describes a real-world
process. Work passes through the model from start to finish, and activities might be
executed by people or by system functions. Workflow provides a way of describing the
order of execution and dependent relationships between pieces of short-running or
long-running work.

There are two ways to think of workflows. Both types are supported by WF, and you can
create either type for Windows SharePoint Services.

• Sequential workflows are modeled as flowcharts and are well suited for system-
oriented workflows. A sequential workflow represents a sequence of steps that
occur in order until the last step is completed. However, sequential workflows can
 be affected by external events and include parallel logical paths, so the precise
order in which activities are executed can vary.
• State machine workflows are modeled as state diagrams and are best suited for
human based workflows. A state machine workflow represents a set of states,
transitions, and actions. One state is denoted the start state, and based on an event,
a transition is made to another state. The state machine can have a final state that
determines the end of the workflow. State machine workflows are effective at
capturing processes that can be changed as they run. For example, a bank
manager might override and approve a loan application for a customer with a bad
credit history on the basis of specific circumstances that are not modeled in the
original workflow.

The two main concepts in WF are the workflow and the activity. A workflow represents
a coordinated, event-driven set of activities and is compiled into a .NET assembly. An
activity is a.NET class written in managed code that exposes methods and properties and
fires events. A workflow runs by conditionally executing the methods in the activities.

Examples of workflows include moderation, approval, issue tracking, collecting

feedback, and collecting signatures. Some of the built-in activities include task
management activities such as creating a task, completing a task, or deleting a task; and
item activities such as updating an item or changing an item’s status.