SharePoint Services

SharePoint Services are the foundation for all solutions built with SharePoint products and technologies and are considered part of the Windows Server 2003 Information Worker Infrastructure. SharePoint Services are the next version of what was called Team Services under SharePoint 2001. The purpose of SharePoint Services is to provide collaborative services and web sites that support Microsoft Office 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server (SPS). Figure 2-1 shows a conceptual drawing of the relationship between SharePoint Services, SPS, and Microsoft Office 2003.

Figure 2-1: Visualizing SharePoint Services

SharePoint Services is an obvious outgrowth of the same thinking that went into creating the Information Worker Infrastructure of Windows Server 2003. Because SharePoint collaboration often revolves around documents, Microsoft has built in a strong document repository as a central feature. The document repository in SharePoint Services is now SQL-based as opposed to the Web Storage System (WSS) repositories used in the previous version, but it still supports check-in, check-out , and version control.

Document repositories are nearly always associated with a web site. SharePoint Services utilizes web sites as ad-hoc virtual conference rooms. If knowledge workers want to collaborate over a document, SharePoint Services will create a web site they can use to exchange information, review the document, and track follow-up actions. All this capability is accessible through either Microsoft Office or SPS.

Web sites created with SharePoint Services contain more than just documents from the repository. Within these sites, SharePoint Services also supports the concept of lists . Lists associate the basics of team management with a site. They provide support for inviting members to participate in a meeting, creating task lists, scheduling events, and other fundamentals of collaborative meetings. Figure 2-2 shows a typical SharePoint Services site.

Figure 2-2: A SharePoint Services site

SharePoint Services are designed from the beginning to be extensible. Site creation, lists, and the document repository are all built on a foundation of web services . Web services provide the ability for programmers to write extensions to SharePoint Services or whole new applications based on SharePoint Services. Additionally, SharePoint Services supports a built-in framework for extensibility through web parts . Web parts are small applets of functionality that may be placed directly into a SharePoint Services site by an end user . Both web services and web parts may be incorporated into solutions by developers using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003.

SharePoint Services have the ability to create and maintain thousands of sites within an organization. Large organizations have the option of creating server farms to support large numbers of sites. Additionally, the SQL-based repository can be clustered to ensure support for business-critical solutions.