SharePoint

SharePoint is a web-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. It can be used to host web sites which can be used to access shared workspaces and documents, as well as specialized applications such as wikis, blogs and many other forms of applications, from within a browser. SharePoint functionality is exposed as web parts, such as a task list, or discussion pane. These web parts are composed into web pages, which are then hosted in the SharePoint portal. SharePoint sites are actually ASP.NET applications, which are served using IIS and use a SQL Server database as data storage backend.

The term Sharepoint is commonly used to refer to one of the following two products:

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
In addition, previous versions of this software used different names (Sharepoint Portal Server for example) but are referred to as "Sharepoint".

The Sharepoint family also includes the Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD)

The SharePoint family

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a free add-on to Windows Server. WSS offers the base collaborative infrastructure, providing editing of documents, as well as document organization, version control capabilities, wikis, and blogs. It also includes end user functionality such as workflows, to-do lists, alerts and discussion boards,[1] which are exposed as web parts to be embedded into SharePoint pages. WSS was previously known as SharePoint Team Services..

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a paid component of the Microsoft Office server suite. MOSS is built on top of WSS and adds more functionality to it, including better document management, enterprise search functionality, navigation features, RSS support, as well as features from Microsoft Content Management Server. It also includes features for business data analysis such as Excel Services and the Business Data Catalog. MOSS also provides integration with Microsoft Office applications, such as project management capabilities with Microsoft Project Server and the ability to expose Microsoft Office InfoPath forms via a browser It can also host specific libraries, such as PowerPoint Template Libraries provided the server components of the specific application are installed. MOSS was previously known as SharePoint Server and SharePoint Portal Server.

Microsoft SharePoint Designer (SPD)
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD) is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, which is primarily aimed at designing SharePoint sites and end-user workflows for WSS sites. It shares its rendering engine with Microsoft Expression Web, its general web designing sibling, and Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

Microsoft SharePoint Designer

Microsoft SharePoint Designer (full name Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer) is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design program from Microsoft, replacing Microsoft Office FrontPage, and part of the SharePoint family of products. It is part of the Microsoft Office 2007 family but not included in any of the Office 2007 suites. The name change, from FrontPage, reflects the emphasis on designing and customizing SharePoint websites. SharePoint Designer shares its HTML rendering engine with Microsoft Expression Web, and does not rely on Internet Explorer's Trident engine which is less standards compliant.

Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, which bears striking similarity to Microsoft SharePoint Designer, is aimed at general web development.

Windows SharePoint Services

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) or Windows SharePoint is the basic part of SharePoint, offering collaboration and document management functionality by means of web portals, by providing a centralized repository for shared documents, as well as browser-based management and administration of them. It allows creation of Document libraries, which are collections of files that can be shared for collaborative editing. SharePoint provides access control and revision control for documents in a library.

It also includes a collection of web parts, which are web widgets that can be embedded into web pages to provide a certain functionality. SharePoint includes web parts such as workspaces and dashboards, navigation tools, lists, alerts (including e-mail alerts), shared calendar, contact lists and discussion boards. It can be configured to return separate content for Intranet, Extranet and Internet locations. It uses a similar permissions model to Microsoft Windows, via groups of users. Active Directory groups can be added to SharePoint groups to easily tie in permissions. Alternatively, other authentication providers can be added through HTML Forms authentication.

A SharePoint page is built by combining the web parts into a web page, to be accessed using a browser. Any web editor supporting ASP.NET can be used for this purpose, even though Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is the preferred editor. The extent of customization of the page depends on its design.

WSS pages are ASP.NET applications, as such SharePoint web parts use the ASP.NET web parts infrastructure, and using the ASP.NET APIs, web parts can be written to extend the functionality of WSS. In terms of programmability, WSS exposes an API and object model to programmatically create and manage portals, workspaces and users. In contrast, the MOSS API is more geared towards automation of tasks and integration with other applications Both WSS and MOSS can use the web parts API to enhance the end user functionality. In addition, WSS document libraries can be exposed over ADO.NET connections to programmatically access the files and revisions in them.

At the web server level, WSS configures IIS to forward all requests, regardless of file and content types, to the ASP.NET session hosting the WSS web application, which either makes a certain revision of a certain file available from the database or takes other actions. Unlike regular ASP.NET applications, the .aspx which contains the WSS (and MOSS) application code, resides in SQL Server databases

instead of the filesystem. As such, the regular ASP.NET runtime cannot process the file. Instead, WSS plugs a custom Virtual Path Provider component into the ASP.NET pipeline, which fetches the .aspx files from the database for processing. With this feature, introduced with WSS 3.0, both the WSS application as well as the data it generates and manages, could be stored in a database.