After reading this six part series hopefully you’ll have a clearer understanding of what the SharePoint Platform can offer to you and your organization. It will also provide some direction in using the SharePoint Platform. I have broken the series down as follows:

• Part 1 - What is the SharePoint Platform
• Part 2 - What capabilities to start with
• Part 3 - How to start with the SharePoint Platform
• Part 4 - Levels of leveraging the SharePoint Platform
• Part 5 - Why use SharePoint as a Development Platform
• Part 6 - Lessons learnt from Leveraging the SharePoint Platform

What is the SharePoint Platform?

The SharePoint 2007 Platform has been sending a buzz round the IT industry now since November 2006 when it was launched, I won’t go through the history of SharePoint in this series, but it is beneficial to understand how the platform has evolved since it’s introduction in 2001. Marc Andreessen, of Netscape fame, defines a Platform succinctly:

“A “platform” is a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.”

This definition is very much targeted at cloud based platforms in the consumer market such as Facebook, Amazons’ S3 and Ning. I think it is a very fitting to description of SharePoint…the amount of times I have been asked “can SharePoint do x?” and thought quietly in my head…”well yes…but it depends how far you want to go with it…”. In this series I hope to get people thinking in structured ways of how they can leverage the SharePoint Platform with some experience and advice to point people in the right direction.

The six SharePoint “Pillars” / Capabilities

SharePoint Capabilities

The six core pillars/capabilities of SharePoint are a good basis to start thinking about what the Platform has to offer. The Microsoft SharePoint site describes the platform in these sections and has case studies focused around them. Below I’ve covered them off in less sales speak and in terms that people outside of Microsoft terminology will understand with direct comparisons to commonly know consumer platforms.

Collaboration and Social Computing

Real time presence; Standard Site Templates; Wikis; Blogs; People and Groups; Calendars; Email Integration; Task coordination; Surveys; Document Collaboration; Issue Tracking; Social Networking

With all the buzz around about Web 2.0, since the evolution of the consumer Internet with platforms such as WordPress, Blogger and Wikipedia, it is no surprise that Microsoft have bet on Enterprise 2.0 being the next big thing. Each of the areas of this capability are by no means “best of breed”, but do cover basic functions expected. The issue here is the expectation of the user base exposed to more feature rich consumer platforms and also the take up of these without mature enough governance.

Portals

Mobile Device Support; Office 2007 Suite integration; My Site personal sites; Content syndication; Privacy and security; Site Directory; User Profiles and the Profile Store; Audience Targeting; Site Manager; Portal Site Templates; SharePoint Sites and Document Aggregation Web Parts; Colleagues and Membership Web Parts

As with the social computing aspects of the first capability, consumer Platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and iGoogle are leading the way here. This area focuses on the Personalization and Customization features commonly found in Portal technology products by providing the ability to create personalized spaces for users. These spaces can be driven by roles based rules, as well as user behavior and user preferences.

Enterprise Search

User Interface; Search results; Enterprise content sources; Relevance; Administration and Management; Indexing controls; Security; People search; Business data search

Enterprise Search has been a large talking point for generations of Platforms. The frustrations around the assumptions that Internet Search Engines find information so easily from millions of pages online when Enterprise equivalents fail miserably. The SP1 and Infrastructure Updates extend these capabilities further with faceted searches and a more advanced administrative web control panel. It also leverages core base platforms such as Active Directory with People Search functionalities.

Enterprise Content Management

Business document workflow support; Document management site templates; Integration with Microsoft Information Rights Management; Document Information Panel; Document Action Bar; Retention and auditing policies; Records repository; Email content as a records; Legal Holds; Navigation controls; Content authoring; Content publishing and deployment; Site templates; Page layouts; Site variations; WYSIWYG Web Content Editor; Slide libraries; Policies, auditing and compliance

Enterprise Content Management has been the driver behind a lot of the major players in the Document Management space swallowing up their smaller competitors such as: IBM with Filenet; OpenText with Hummingbird; and EMC with Documentum. This capability covers three main areas: Document Management; Records Management and Web Content Management.

Business Process and Forms

Browser based forms; Centralized forms management and control; Design once development model; Form Import Wizard; Integrated deployment model for “no code” forms; Comparability checker

Business Process and Forms capabilities focus around InfoPath Forms being hosted within the Office Forms Services as web pages. There are some features of InfoPath Forms that mean that they won’t host as web pages, but this is an extremely powerful way to build basic forms fast and integrate them within SharePoint Lists and therefore fully utilize the Platform Services. Remembering the InfoPath Forms store data in an XML format, it allows powerful manipulation of collections of forms and the ability to use this XML data within the List Column data (metadata).

Business Intelligence

Integrate, flexible spreadsheet publishing; share, manage and control spreadsheets; web based business intelligence using Excel Services; Data Connection Libraries; Business Data Catalogue; Business Data Web Parts; Business Data actions; Integrated Business intelligence dashboards; Report Center; Key Performance Indicators; Filter Web Parts

The Business Intelligence capability focuses around the hosting of Excel spreadsheets online. This has been a feature that really hasn’t made too many ‘blog’ headlines as yet, but once the product has matured I’m 100% positive that it will be a highly used capability of the platform. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and integration with SQL Reporting Services allows for Executive Dashboards makes for a compelling platform of choice.

Platform Services

Configuration management; Administration user interface; Delegation; Re-parenting; Provisioning; Usage analytics; Monitoring; Alert Notifications; RSS Feeds; Rights trimmed user interface; Automated bread crumb; Quick launch bar; Top Navigation bar; Accessibility; Recycle bin; Backup/restore support; Document Libraries; Metadata; Content Types; Application templates; Object Model; Web Services; Change Logs; Job Service; Feature Framework; Solution Deployment Model; Single Sign On

The base Platform of which all these capabilities surround has been extended significantly from SharePoint 2003. The core of which surrounds itself around the SharePoint Object Model of Site Collections, Sites and Webs and the security around these objects. The base concepts of the Platform Services area are where most people will find themselves configuring and creating instances of objects for their solutions. I will be focusing a lot of this series around these core concepts.

The three SharePoint Editions

SharePoint Editions

The above diagram illustrates the difference in capabilities at each Edition of SharePoint. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 is available as an installation for Windows Server 2003 for free. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Standard and Enterprise Editions are based on a licensing model (which I will not go into here…best place to start is to talk directly with Microsoft on this one). Microsoft has a more detailed page describing the granular differences between each Edition. To summarize, Enterprise Edition allows Business Intelligence and Business Process and Forms.

Later on in the series I will be referring to these capabilities and when they are typically utilized during the maturity of the implementation of the Platform. One thing to bear in mind is that because WSS 3.0 is free, you do get a significant set of capabilities to leverage that would typically take weeks to build in ASP.NET/SQL traditional development platform. So you don’t necessarily have to jump straight into the large edition to get the functionality you require, that said, to scale your farm out from a one server role to multiple roles requires a MOSS Edition.

SharePoint Architecture

SharePoint Infrastructure

This diagram illustrates the architectural structure of the SharePoint Platform. SharePoint is simply another layer built on top of the .NET Framework and as with any typical dynamic ASP.NET web site, it runs within the Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 and connects to a SQL Server 2005 database. Both of which are hosted on a Windows Server 2003 machine.

This series talks about how you can leverage SharePoint and in doing so leverage ASP.NET 2.0 technologies such as Master Pages, Page Layouts and Web Parts that the Platform implements. It also leverages the Windows Workflow Foundations of the .NET 3.0 Framework with a custom SharePoint persistence database. This allows Microsoft professionals to become familiar with the environment based on experience around these technologies, although there aren’t many of us out there who are well rounded in all of the technologies in this architecture. This series will hopefully give you some understanding of the issues in the marketplace of sourcing SharePoint people and also getting the correct fit for the task at hand.

The SharePoint Object Model

Without going too far into the realms of the Object Model, I just wanted to promote the fact that most of the capabilities mentioned above basically are developed using it’s own Object Model which is made up of SharePoint Sites, SharePoint Webs, SharePoint Lists and SharePoint List Items. Thinking in these four terms you can start to structure your solutions to advantage of the methods and events available out of the box of each and also extend them if necessary. In this series I will be describing solutions and how they fit into these four simple objects - trust me it’s not as complicated as 1st Normal Form Database Design!

SharePoint Object Model

Trying to be everything to everybody

From reading this first part, you will probably realize that the SharePoint Platform is trying to be everything to everybody just like the other juggernauts in this space such as Oracle, SAP, IBM, EMC Documentum, OpenText and open source vendors such as Alfresco. This is a big jump from the previous 2003 version that was simply a Portal/Collaboration application and has now incorporated the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework, as well as amalgamating the Microsoft Content Management Server technologies. SharePoint vNext will surely mature some of the new entries into the WSS 3.0/MOSS 2007 version such as Business Forms, Business Intelligence and Search.

As I have mentioned before in my previous posts around the capabilities some of them are simply no where near the best of breed applications that focus on one core capability. Microsoft Partners will continue to build successful solutions on top of the SharePoint Platform to further extend the capabilities such as K2 for Workflow, Nintex for Reporting, Bamboo Solutions for Portal Web Part enhancements, Colligo for Offline Document Management, NewsGator for RSS Readers and Atlassian for WIkis.

The next part in the series will talk more in detail about the out of the box (OOTB) capabilities and how leverage them.

Until next time,

Jeremy Thake
http://wss.made4the.net/ | http://www.readify.net/