Chapter 5: Configuring and Managing MOSS 2007

In this chapter, you learn how to configure and manage the MS Office SharePoint Server 2007. You learn about configuring shared services, global searching, how to import user properties from the Active Directory, and how to target information for different groups of users. Even if you do not plan to implement MOSS at this time, this chapter may still interest you because it describes the features that are specific to MOSS, as opposed to the pure WSS environment. This will help you understand the differences, and when using WSS with MOSS is a better choice than using WSS alone.

Basic Configuration

In Chapter 4, you learned how to install MOSS 2007, and to create a site collection containing a collaboration portal site. You may recall that SharePoint's Central Administration tool, right after the installation of MOSS, displayed a list of four administrative tasks that you had to complete in order to set up the basic configuration:

• q READ FIRST: Click this link for deployment instructions: A link to the Quick Guide for administrators.

• q Initial deployment: Add servers to farm: This task will take you to the Operators page and its link: Servers in farm. This page displayed all servers in this farm, both SharePoint front-end servers, and SQL Server 2000/2005 back-end servers.

• q Initial deployment: Assign services to servers: This task will take you to the Operators page and its link: Services on server; here you configure what services will run on what SharePoint server. This is also the page where you start and stop these services.

• q Configure server farm's shared services: This task will open the Shared Services Administration page, where you can create the first shared service provider (SSP), including search, user profile import, audiences, and Excel services.

After completing all four of these tasks, MOSS is ready to be used for creating user web sites. However, there are a lot of new configuration tasks that you may or may not need to complete, in order to activate optional features in MOSS. And this is what you will learn in this chapter. Some of these optional configurations most frequently used in MOSS installations are these:

• q Outgoing e-mail settings: Before MOSS can send e-mail to recipients, you must configure how this SMTP-based communication will take place. For example, MOSS will send e-mail to users that request alert messages when something changes, such as when a new document is added to a document library.

• q Incoming e-mail settings: This will make MOSS work as a receiving SMTP server, accepting mail to configured document libraries, in effect working as mailboxes.

• q Global search: This configures what MOSS will index and what users can search for.

• q Active Directory Import: This configures MOSS to regularly import user properties from the Active Directory into a User Profile database.

• q Audience Targeting: Define groups of users that will be able to view specific content, such as Web Parts, news items, and documents.

• q Excel Trusted Locations: MOSS Enterprise Edition comes with a specific Excel Service that can work as a repository for Excel spreadsheets and graphs, which users can view and work with, using only a web browser. To make this work, the administrator must point out where these Excel files can be stored.

There are actually a lot more settings and configurations available for a MOSS server, which you will see in the next section.