The History of SharePoint

In order to understand how to install and manage SharePoint, you need to know its history. This will help you understand not only where it comes from but also some abbreviations that are used in SharePoint 2007.

Around 2000, Microsoft unveiled an application called a Digital Dashboard. This web-based application used a new concept called web parts, which are rectangular areas on a web page that display some type of information, such as a list of contacts, links, or documents. This was innovative because the user could now arrange the web parts on the web page herself, without any help from an HTML programmer.

In 2001, Microsoft released its first two SharePoint products. One was SharePoint Team Services (STS), and the other was SharePoint Portal Server (SPS). Only a few organizations implemented these products, which was a pity since they offered a number of advanced collaboration features, especially for MS Office users. STS was a free web-based product used for collaboration. You could use it to share contacts, calendar events, and documents within teams and small departments. The information was stored in an MS SQL database. It was a nice application, but it did not have any document-management features, and it was not built for creating intranet solutions for larger organizations.

SPS was a separate product, initially made as an MS Exchange 2000 public folder application (under the beta name Tahoe). However, during the beta phase of Tahoe, Microsoft got a loud and clear message from the customers: "Do not mess with our Exchange system!" So Microsoft finally released the SPS using a built-in MS Exchange 2000 server database (which made more than one SharePoint administrator wonder why on earth the SharePoint server event log contained messages from the Exchange Information Store). This new SPS had built-in document-management features, such as document versioning, checkout/checkin, and document workflow. It also had a good search engine that allowed the user to find information, regardless of where it was stored. One serious problem with SPS 2001 was the quality of its performance and the limited number of documents it could manage. And it did not have some of the nice collaboration features that STS had. In fact, the two products were competing with each other, to some extent, which is not a good way of convincing the customer to invest in SharePoint technology. Also, SPS was not free like STS, but licensed per server and per user.

In October 2003, Microsoft released its second generation of SharePoint. The old STS, now renamed Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), was basically a fancier version of STS (internally, Microsoft referred to it as STS version 2). SPS kept its name, SharePoint Portal Server, but that was about all that was kept from the previous SPS version. No longer did SPS have its own MS Exchange database, and no longer was SPS a separate product! Now it was an add-on to the WSS application. Finally, Microsoft had one integrated SharePoint solution, completely based on the MS SQL Server database.

Still, there were some annoying things about the SharePoint 2003 editions. Although they now looked very similar, they did not behave in a similar way. For example, the permission settings for lists in WSS was different from the same type of lists in SPS, and while SPS was security-trimmed (users only saw what they were allowed to see), WSS was not.

At the end of 2006, Microsoft released the third generation of SharePoint. WSS kept its name, and the version number changed to WSS 3.0. WSS still was a free add-on for Windows 2003 Server and used an MS SQL–based server to store its content. Its bigger brother SPS was now renamed MS Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), but it was still an optional add-on to WSS and was using the same MS SQL database as WSS. The MOSS server was available in different editions and with optional services, such as MOSS 2007 Standard and MOSS 2007 Enterprise, plus Office Forms Server and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search.

The important things you should remember from this section are:

• q STS is the old name for WSS and is still used in SharePoint 2007 in some places, such as the administrative tool tsadm.exe and the folder sts storing the site definition for WSS sites.

• q MOSS has replaced SPS.

• q MOSS comes in Standard and Enterprise editions and has optional servers.

• q MS SQL Server is used by MOSS and WSS 3.0.

Important 

This book describes the features and functionality of both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007, which are also known as SharePoint Products and Technology (SPPT) 2007.