Windows SharePoint Services Overview

Modern businesses need to share information efficiently with both their own employees and staff from partner companies. Windows SharePoint Services provides a flexible, powerful, and convenient Web-based platform for sharing information; it is particularly suitable for sharing project information because it makes the creation of new sites straightforward. Windows SharePoint Services runs on Windows Server 2003 and can be used with Microsoft Office 2003 applications such as InfoPath 2003.

What Is Windows SharePoint Services?

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), officially labelled by Microsoft as version 2, is the successor to SharePoint Team Services. It is a flexible and powerful team Web site development tool. WSS is a free add-on to Windows Server 2003. It uses SQL Server 2000 or MSDE behind the scenes to store data that is used to specify and dynamically display pages on WSS Web sites that are particularly suitable for sharing information.

WSS sites are highly customizable, both in terms of visual appearance and functionality. In addition, each site can have its own access control list if desired. A WSS site can be hosted on a single server or on a server farm, and it provides useful information exchange for teams ranging from a few individuals up to many hundreds of participants . In principle, WSS can support thousands of users; but large sites might need the additional functionality available in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 for some sites that can be comfortably hosted as WSS sites.

INFOPATH DOESN'T WORK WITH SHAREPOINT TEAM SERVICES

InfoPath 2003 works only with Windows SharePoint Services, and not SharePoint Team Services.

A WSS site can consist of Web pages created by end users without knowledge of HTML/XHTML. Other WSS features include document libraries, lists, discussion boards , and surveys, all of which can be created using a friendly visual interface. Of greatest interest to most InfoPath users is the capability to create and submit data to a new WSS form library.

WEB PARTS

Windows SharePoint Services Web pages are made up of Web parts . A Web part is a software component that can be used to add functionality to a WSS Web page. The default installation of WSS includes Web parts to create discussion boards and surveys. You can create or buy additional Web parts to add componentized functionality to your WSS sites.

WSS Forms Libraries

Windows SharePoint Services includes form library functionality. Form libraries can be created from the WSS user interface or by publishing an InfoPath form template to a WSS site.

A WSS forms library can have several views (not to be confused with InfoPath views) that can be customized to display form data in different ways. The forms library also allows data to be filtered so that only selected forms that satisfy user-specified criteria are displayed.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003

SharePoint Portal Server 2003, sometimes also referred to as SharePoint Portal Server 2, is a more powerful enterprise extension of Windows SharePoint Services. SharePoint Portal Server adds enterprise capabilities to WSS and is sold as a separately licensed product.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is built on top of WSS, so the use of InfoPath with WSS described in this chapter will also apply to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 form libraries. InfoPath 2003 does not work with SharePoint Portal Server 2001.