Summary

In this chapter, you learned the following:

• q Be careful with the Internet Explorer Enhanced Security. It can give you trouble if your browser does not recognize WSS as a trusted or local site.

• q SharePoint uses two types of sites: administrative sites and user sites.

• q The administrative site is used only by SharePoint administrators (that is, members of the Local Administrators group of the WSS server or members of the Site Collection Administrators list, defined in the Central Administration tool

• q The user sites are where the users create team sites, meeting workspaces, project sites, and so on.

• q Every WSS site has a home page. This is where the user accesses the lists and libraries.

  • q The home page contains one or more web parts.

  • q A web part is a window inside the home page that displays information. This information may come from a different part of this site, from a different site, or even from an external database.

• q Sites are organized in site trees. On top is the top site; below are its subsites.

  • q The top site, including all its subsites, is referred to as a site collection.

  • q Many features (such as permission inheritance, ownership, templates, and more) are limited to one given site collection.

• q The term workspace means the same thing as the term web site.

• q SharePoint uses local server or domain user accounts and security group accounts to grant permissions.

• q Each permission role is controlled by a Permission Level, such as Read, Contribute, and so on.

  • q You can create your own permission level for a site collection.

  • q If you cannot create groups in the Active Directory, you can create SharePoint groups to be used anywhere in SharePoint.

• q To create a new top site, you can use the SharePoint Central Administration tool.

• q You can also configure WSS to enable self-service site creation, which displays a link to a page where you can create top sites using the user web site instead of the administrator tool.

• q By default, only a user with membership in the <site name> Owner can create subsites.

• q You must configure WSS to communicate with any SMTP server before alerts, errors, and other messages can be sent from WSS.

• q SharePoint can accept e-mail messages into libraries. This requires that the Windows Component SMTP Service be installed locally on the SharePoint server.

• q You can enable anonymous access to all or part of WSS.

• q MS ISA Server is easy to configure to make itself look like a SharePoint server for the users. It will grab whatever information the user requests and send it back to the user.

• q Creating custom site templates makes it easier to create several sites with the exact same look and feel.

  • q You can save content along with the site template, as long as it is less than 500 MB in size.

  • q A site template will only be visible within its own site collection.

  • q Site templates are always built for a given language. You cannot use French templates for a German site, for example, unless you use the STP Language Converter tool.

  • q You can copy site templates to other site collections by saving the template to a file.

  • q You can add site templates to the global template gallery using the STSADM tool.

  • q Custom site templates are not complete templates. They just contain elements that differ from a given site definition.

  • q If you create many sites using a site template and later want to change the template, changing it will not affect existing sites.

• q When a user account is removed from the Active Directory, it will not automatically be removed from SharePoint.

  • q You can remove a user account from a complete site collection, but there is no feature to remove the user from all site collections at once.

  • q You cannot remove a user account from the site collection if it is defined as a site collection administrator.

• q You can use the SharePoint Central Administration tool and its site collection administrators to control and modify the owner for a given site collection.

Now you know how to create sites and do general administration of WSS. In the next chapter, you learn how to install and configure Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, or MOSS 2007.