SharePoint Portal Server Architecture

SharePoint Portal Server integrates with and makes use of key Microsoft technologies, including Windows, digital dashboards, Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, the Microsoft Exchange Server Web Storage System, and Microsoft Search Service. Figure 3.2 represents an overview of the SharePoint Portal Server product architecture.

Figure 3.2. SharePoint Portal Server architecture overview

The client components consist of extensions to Office applications and Windows Explorer. These components allow users to perform document management and search tasks within those applications. The dashboard site, viewed through a browser, provides a Web-based view of the document management and search services the product provides. The core server components include document management services, search services, and the Digital Dashboard and Web Part run-time environment.

Client Components

The client components of SharePoint Portal Server consist of functional extensions to Office and Windows Explorer that enable document management functions within those applications. For example, after you modify a Microsoft Word document that you checked out from a SharePoint Portal Server workspace, you can go to the File menu in Word and select the Check In command. Alternatively, you can use Windows Explorer to view and perform document management operations on files contained in a SharePoint Portal Server workspace. The rich search capabilities of SharePoint Portal Server are also available from within Office XP when you connect to the workspace that you want to search through Web folders.

Office XP includes the client components of SharePoint Portal Server. Users of earlier versions of Office must run a simple client setup program that is provided with SharePoint Portal Server to add document management functionality.

In addition to providing an aggregation point for a wide variety of content, the dashboard site also provides access to the document management and search capabilities of SharePoint Portal Server. Users can interact with the dashboard site by using their favorite browser.

These client components communicate with the server components using standard Internet protocols.

Server Components

The server components of SharePoint Portal Server provide the services for document management and search. In addition, the Digital Dashboard and Web Part runtime provide the functionality that allows administrators and users to create their own dashboard sites to aggregate content into a single source.

Document Management Services

The document management services consist of a store (based on Microsoft Web Storage System technology) and the services that facilitate document management functions like check-in, check-out, and document versioning.

Search Services

SharePoint Portal Server makes use of Microsoft Search—the Microsoft world-class search technology for creating indexes, searching, and retrieving content in the local document store, in addition to external content sources.

The Microsoft Search Service has four main components that perform the following functions:

• Crawl the collected content of a set of URLs for inclusion in an index.

  The Gatherer component can find its way to a wide variety of content sources, including SharePoint Portal Server workspaces, Web servers, file servers, Exchange 2000 public folders, and Lotus Notes databases. Customers can extend the reach of SharePoint Portal Server to additional types of content by using the product's software development kit (SDK) to create custom protocol handlers that tell the product how to retrieve data from specific sources.

• Parse or filter the document to extract the relevant metadata and content.

  SharePoint Portal Server includes filters for a variety of document types, including HTML, Office documents, text files, and Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) image files. Developers can learn how to create custom filters, known as IFilters, from the Microsoft Search section of the product's SDK.

• Include the data retrieved by the Gatherer component in an index.

  The Indexer component uses language-specific word breakers and stemmers to extract words from the content. Then "noise" words, (for example, a, the, of) are filtered out, and the content index is generated. SharePoint Portal Server provides specific-language support for English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Thai, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese. SharePoint Portal Server uses a "neutral" word breaker for all other languages.

  You do not need to have a localized version of SharePoint Portal Server to take advantage of this language-specific support for indexes. SharePoint Portal Server supports all the languages listed previously in each language version of the product.

• Perform searches for content. Users can submit search queries from the Search page of the dashboard site or from Office XP applications. In addition, developers can issue searches programmatically in the form of Microsoft ActiveX^® Data Objects (ADO) or WebDAV SQL search queries.

Digital Dashboard and Web Part Runtime

These server components manage all functions related to presenting the SharePoint Portal Server dashboard site through a browser. It displays the user interface and enables dashboard site customization by administrators and coordinators. In addition, this run-time component services requests from Web Parts that are displayed on the dashboard site.