SharePoint Portal Server

SharePoint Portal Server (SPS), introduced by Microsoft in Spring 2001, is designed for managing information. It provides a customizable portal using the Digital Dashboard framework and enterprise search capabilities. SPS is also a document management server that is integrated with the clients that almost everyone uses, including browsers, Office, and Windows. Finally, SPS provides a departmental version of the Exchange development platform, specifically the Web Storage System, which is called the document store in SharePoint. You can deploy collaborative applications without the infrastructure requirements of Exchange. SPS does not require Active Directory, and it can work in a Windows NT 4.0 environment. We'll discuss the differences between SPS and Exchange in the additional chapter found on this book's Web site.