MOSS 2007: Planning and Architecture

Planning a system based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 involves following steps at a high level.

• SharePoint Sites and Solution Planning




• Plan overall design


• Governance Model


• Web site structure and publishing


• Personalized Content and Sites


• Workflows


• Infopath Forms Services


• Business Intelligence


• Enterprise Search


• Plan Communication


• Document Management


• Records Management


• Site and Content Security


• Site Creation and Maintenance




• Infrastructure Planning




• System Requirements


• Server Farms and Topologies


• Logical Architecture


• Authentication


• Security Hardening


• Performance and Capacity


• Database Storage and Management


• Data Protection and Recovery


• Globally Deploying Multiple Farms





PS: I will be publishing individual tasks involved under each of these activities in the upcoming posts.

Establishing MOSS 2007 Planning Team

A well-planned solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will promote better collaboration, content management, knowledge discovery, and business processes across the organization while being secure, cost-effective, and manageable for your IT department.

To satisfy this broad set of goals, it is important to identify key stakeholders across all relevant disciplines and include them in your planning team.

They include:

• Managers and other organizational leaders who understand the requirements of the business processes that Office SharePoint Server 2007 will be used to implement.
• IT professionals and business unit IT specialists who will be tasked with proposing a solution that implements the desired business processes, and with deploying and maintaining the solution across one or more server farms.
• Site designers to plan the user experience and visual design of the sites and the templates that will comprise the solution.
• Developers to determine the scope and design of required custom features, such as workflows, forms, and Web Parts.
• Testers who will ensure that the site's features are correct and that site deployment and administration function as specified.

References:
Plan Sites and Features, Part 1 from Microsoft

Examples of solutions based on MOSS 2007

Here are examples of typical solutions that can be built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007:

• Online news magazine

A publishing organization uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to build their branded online magazine site. Article submissions come from inside and outside the organization to be reviewed and accepted by staff editors. This Internet site has a strong community presence because users can log on for personalized information, and it has an extensive search component.

The Internet site includes subsites for current news and editorials; blogs; and regular columns about politics, business, health, people, personal finance, and science and technology. The site also enables users to sign in to interact with each other and to comment on articles published on the site.

• Controlled distribution of financial data to clients and business partners

A bank deploys a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 to take advantage of Excel Services. The solution enables bank managers to communicate efficiently with clients by providing controlled access to specified workbooks that can be rendered with view-only permissions in a Web browser. The workbooks are accessible in document libraries on a portal; this enables the bank to restrict the availability of financial data to clients who have authenticated access to the portal.

• Online permit application

A local government agency uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 to provide permit application and approval to contractors over the Internet. Contractors use the Web site to apply for permits using an online service. Data entered into the permit application Web form is submitted to a database in the government's Department of Building Inspections network.

After the application data is submitted, a new permit request (a multi-part Office InfoPath 2007 form) is automatically populated to a workspace. When the form is opened, the requesting contractor's company and permit application data is populated into the form's fields. If the request is approved, an electrical permit (also populated with the requestor's contact data and relevant information) is rendered in HTML and posted to the Department of Building Inspections permit site, where the contractor can view and print the permit for posting at the construction site.

• Departmental portal site

A product development department within a medium-sized company uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to take advantage of its search, content aggregation, business application integration, collaboration, and personalization features. The department develops a portal site that becomes an essential part of the product development process, hosting their knowledge base, product specifications, an organization chart, individual My Sites for team members, and a home page that broadcasts schedule information, product success stories, and other important news. The installation grows from an isolated small server farm into a well-developed medium server farm implementation that uses a combination of intra-farm and inter-farm shared services within a larger deployment across the entire company.

• Equity research

A large investment bank uses Office SharePoint Server 2007 to develop a set of Web sites that facilitate quickly developing, reviewing, and publishing equities research notes, reports, and models in a variety of formats. Using the integrated Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform, the solution designers implement a portal site for authoring and reviewing research notes and models; an Internet site for presenting the content to customers; a staging site to test the Internet site; and a records repository site for retaining models and research notes to meet regulatory requirements. Using custom features, the set of sites (distributed over multiple server farms) supports the rapid and automated flow of content from site to site and from team member to team member as content moves through its stages toward publication.

• Records management

An appliance manufacturer's legal division implements a records management solution using the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Record Repository site template. Based on their file plan, the division implements and configures policies, content types, and document libraries to retain each type of record the division manages. The records managers adjust easily to the record repository site's familiar SharePoint interface while taking advantage of its built-in records management features. These features support properly storing incoming records, retaining each type of record for the legally mandated period, putting records on hold, and approving of their disposition. The records management programmable interface let teams in the organization integrate their document management and e-mail systems with the record repository site using the Web service APIs.

• Corporate Internet presence site

An international automobile manufacturer has headquarters in Germany; a major subsidiary in Michigan serving the North American market; and regional offices throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. The products are sold internationally, and distinct manufacturing operations serve each regional market. The company's Internet presence Web site is built, administered, and authored using Office SharePoint Server 2007. It is the focal point for the corporate marketing efforts, and it includes subsites for each product line along with areas for press releases, investment information, company information, and career opportunities.

Each corporate brand has its own marketing department with individuals responsible for writing that brand's content and updating it on the Web site. The corporate communication department controls the look and feel of the site to make sure the branding and messaging are consistent. The site includes site variations that tailor its content to different languages, cultures, markets, and geographic regions.

Using Office SharePoint Server 2007 Web sites, the writers for each brand author the site's content and route it for review and approval while managing the creation of multilingual content versions. Using scheduled workflows, the approved and localized content is copied to staging sites where it is tested and ultimately deployed to the public site.

References:

Plan Sites and Features, Part 1 from Microsoft

WSS 3.0: Permission To Add Users to SharePoint Groups

General information

• The Group Owner of a SharePoint group has permission to add / remove users from a group.
• The Site Collection Administrator has permission to add / remove users from a group.
• Only one person (or group) can be assigned as the Group Owner.
• SharePoint Groups belong to the Site Collection.

Set an individual as the Group Owner

• Navigate to the Change Group Settings page. One way to do this is:

1. Browse to any site within the site collection.
2. On the Quick Launch Click People and Groups.
3. On the Quick Launch Click on the group you wish to modify.
4. Click Settings – Group Settings

• Change the Group Owner to the desired individual.

Set a group as the Group Owner

• Create a SharePoint Group for all individuals that will have the Group Owner permissions (such as MySite Group Owner).
• Add individuals to this group.
• Follow the steps for setting an individual, but enter the SharePoint group name. HINT: You can use the address lookup to help find (and insure correct spelling) the desired group.

MOSS 2007 - How To: Edit default.aspx for a Site Collection

Imagine that you don't have Frontpage or SharePoint Designer installed in an environment and you have to make changes to web pages that are stored in the content database. This is a very natural scenario in a production environment but we normally don't make changes directly in production. However if this scenario arises there is a really neat and quick way to do this by using Internet Explorer and Notepad (a very handy tool...reminds me of 10 years back my initial days Java coding using Textpad) . So, here goes simple steps to achieve this:

1. Open the site using web folder in Internet Explorer (File->Open...) and check "Open as Web Folder" checkbox.




2. Download the required on the local filesystem.



3. Make the required changes and upload it back to server.

Deciding Between Custom Site Template and Site Definition

SharePoint Development Improves in Visual Studio 2010

The focus of the tooling is to automate tedious tasks, enhance the debugging experience, and provide a GUI surface for visually exploring deployment and feature packaging. These tools will replace the much-derided SharePoint Designer.

VS 2010 Tools for SP Quick info:

Building and Debugging
Visual Studio will be able to building and debug SharePoint projects. "F5 Just Works!"

Server Explorer Integration
SharePoint Connections will be an option in the VS Server Explorer. Standard Sharepoint artifacts will be viewable: ContentTypes, Features, Templates, Lists, Sites, Workflows, Workspaces. Direct manipulation of some artifact attributes will be supported through VS property grid integration.

Windows SharePoint Services Project (WSP) Import
This will automate the manual task of creating Windows SharePoint Services solution package files. Previously, to create a solution package file, a developer had to use the Makecab.exe console application that is included in the Microsoft Cabinet Software Development Kit (SDK). Makecab.exe requires specifying the Diamond Directive File (.ddf) that contains a list of all the files to include in the package. Much of this will be automated.

Visual Web Part Designer
A new WSYWIG designer will exist for authoring Web Parts. The designer will also load a user control as a web part for SharePoint. This seems to be a more tightly integrated version of the widely used SmartPart, which is a Web Part that allows hosting of ASP.NET User Controls in SharePoint.

Event Receiver Wizard
Adding Event Receivers and connecting them to Sources can be done visually through a wizard.

Workflow Integration
A new ASPX Workflow Initiation form for Workflow Project will be added. Workflow initiation forms will have a visual designer.

Packaging Editor
A new Packaging Explorer will exist that supports editing Packaging and structuring the SharePoint Features and WSP file.

SharePoint from a Users Perspective

From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessible over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name "Share-Point". Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, and version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint's Search facility. Even documents not "in" SharePoint can be included in the search engine's index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it's a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.

SharePoint from an Administration Perspective

Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like "edit profile". Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.

SharePoint from a Technical Perspective

Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft's .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System.

SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web's medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few.

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

WSS 3.0 - WorkFlows

A workflow allows you to attach a business process to items in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This process can control almost any aspect of an item in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including the life cycle of that item. For example, you could create a simple workflow that routes a document to a series of users for approval.

Workflows can be as simple or complex as your business processes require. You can create workflows that the user initiates, or workflows that Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 automatically initiate based on some event, such as when an item is created or changed.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 workflows are made available to end-users at the list or document-library level. Workflows can be added to documents or list items. Workflow can also be added to content types. Multiple workflows may be available for a given item. Multiple workflows can run simultaneously on the same item, but only one instance of a specific workflow can run on a specific item at any given time. For example, you might have two workflows, SpecReview and LegalReview, available for a specific content type, Specification. Although both workflows can run simultaneously on a specific item of the Specification content type, you can't have two instances of the LegalReview workflow running on the same item at the same time.

WSS 3.0 & MOSS 2007 - WebParts

Web Parts in Windows SharePoint Services provide developers with a way to create user interface elements that support both customization and personalization. A site owner or a site member with the appropriate permissions can customize Web Part Pages using a browser or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 by adding, reconfiguring, and removing Web Parts.

The term customization implies that changes are seen by all site members. Individual users can further personalize Web Part Pages by adding, reconfiguring, and removing Web Parts. The term personalization implies that these changes will be seen only by the user that made them. Developing custom Web Parts provides an easy and powerful way to extend Windows SharePoint Services sites.

Because the Windows SharePoint Services Web Part infrastructure is now built on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts control set, you can reuse your knowledge of ASP.NET programming to create quick and robust custom Web Parts.

Following are some ways in which you can use custom Web Parts:

• Creating custom properties you can display and modify in the user interface.

• Improving performance and scalability. A compiled custom Web Part runs faster than a script.

• Implementing proprietary code without disclosing the source code.

• Securing and controlling access to content within the Web Part. Built-in Web Parts allow any users with appropriate permissions to change content and alter Web Part functionality. With a custom Web Part, you can determine the content or properties to display to users, regardless of their permissions.

• Making your Web Part connectable, allowing Web Parts to provide or access data from other connectable Web Parts.

• Interacting with the object models that are exposed in Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you can create a custom Web Part to save documents to a Windows SharePoint Services document library.

• Controlling the cache for the Web Part by using built-in cache tools. For example, you can use these tools to specify when to read, write, or invalidate the Web Part cache.

• Benefiting from a rich development environment with debugging features that are provided by tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

• Creating a base class for other Web Parts to extend. For example, to create a collection of Web Parts with similar features and functionality, create a custom base class from which multiple Web Parts can inherit. This reduces the overall cost of developing and testing subsequent Web Parts.

• Controlling the implementation of the Web Part. For example, you can write a custom server-side Web Part that connects to a back-end database, or you can create a Web Part that is compatible with a broader range of Web browsers.
  

WSS 3.0 - Content Types & Site Columns

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides two new tools to help you organize and standardize your data: content types and site columns.

Content Types
Content types—a core concept used throughout the functionality and services offered in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0—are designed to help users organize their SharePoint content in a more meaningful way. A content type is a reusable collection of settings you want to apply to a certain category of content. Content types enable you to manage the metadata and behaviors of a document or item type in a centralized, reusable way.

For example, consider the following two types of documents: software specifications and legal contracts. It is reasonable that you might want to store documents of those two types in the same document library. However, the metadata you would want to gather and store about each of these document types would be very different. In addition, you would most likely want to assign very different workflows to the two types of documents.

Content types enable you to store multiple, different types of content in the same document library or list. In the preceding example, you could define two content types named Specification and Contract. Each content type could include different columns for gathering and storing item metadata, as well as have different workflows assigned to it. Yet items of both content types could be stored in the same document library.

You can further extend content type functionality by using content types to assign additional settings, such as workflows or even custom attributes, to your items.

Because you can define content types independently of any specific list or document library, you can make a given content type available for the lists on multiple SharePoint sites. This enables you to centrally define and manage the types of content you store in your site collection. For example, you could use your Specification content type to ensure that all software specifications track the same metadata, even if those specifications are stored across multiple sites.
Content types are independent of file formats. For document libraries, you can specify a document template; when the user requests a new document of this content type, Windows SharePoint Services creates a document based on the template. However, users can still upload a document based on a different template, or even of a completely different file type.

Site Columns
Site columns provide a central, reusable model for column definition. When you create a site column, each list that uses this column has the same definition, and you do not have to do the tedious work of reproducing the column in each list.

A site column is a reusable column definition, or template, that you can assign to multiple lists across multiple SharePoint sites. Site columns decrease rework and help you ensure consistency of metadata across sites and lists. For example, suppose you define a site column named Customer. Users can add that column to their lists and reference it in their content types. This ensures that the column has the same attributes, at least to start with, wherever it appears.

Additionally, site columns provide you with the simplicity of a single maintenance point. For example, you can create a status site column, which might contain multiple choices of an enterprise's specific statuses, and implement the column in dozens of project master lists across the site collection. If you add a new status, you can modify the site column instead of having to modify each list that contains a status column.

Much like site content types, you define a site column at the site level, independent of any actual list or content type.

When you add a column to a list, Windows SharePoint Services copies the site column locally onto the list as a list column. You can then make changes to the list column; these changes apply to the column only as it behaves on that list.

In certain situations, you may want to modify the column for a specific list. For this reason, you still have the option of one-off customization of columns at the list level. For example, suppose all projects within your company's Information Technology department have an additional status of On Hold—Waiting for Hardware. You could add this status to the column within the IT department's master project list.

You can also create your own list columns, directly on a list. Either way, list columns apply only to the list to which you add them; they cannot be added to multiple lists.

You can reference a site or list column in a content type.