Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 Why Sharepoint Services? Traditionally, most situations that require a group of users to share a frequently updated document tend to get messy. One way that the situation is often handled is that a user might make an update and then E-mail the updates to everyone else in the group. Another common situation is that the document might be placed in a shared folder where it can be updated as needed. Both of these techniques have problems though. For example, what happens if two people try to make contradictory updates at the same time? What happens if a user updates the document incorrectly, ruining the document in the process. These are issues that business units within corporations have had to deal with for years. Fortunately, those days might be over thanks to a free add-on to Windows Server 2003 called the SharePoint Services. The Windows SharePoint Services are a free ad-on for Windows Server 2003. They allow users to collaborate on projects while preserving multiple versions of shared documents. What are Sharepoint Services? The SharePoint Services are the little brother to Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server. They are designed to allow users to organize and to more easily share information in a collaborative environment. For example, let’s go back to the example that I gave earlier in which a group of users needed to share a common document related to a project. Rather than trying to maintain the document in the usual way, the team could create a SharePoint Web site with a document library. The document library would allow users in the group to check the document in and out, thus guaranteeing that there was no chance of two users updating the document simultaneously. The document library can also maintain previous versions of documents so that if the team needed to revert to a previous version they could easily do so without having to restore a backup. The document library even offers a manageable set of permissions that control who can read, create, or modify
documents. You can even structure approval routing so that a change to a document will not be posted to the library until it has been approved by a manager. If all of this sounds really complicated, it isn’t. The SharePoint Services are designed so that even someone with no programming experience can create a collaborative Web site on the fly by using prefabricated Web parts. Microsoft offers an entire library of Web parts that do all sorts of different things. For example, there is a document library Web part, a calendar Web part, etc. All the project leader has to do is to tell SharePoint which Web parts to use, set a few permissions for the team, and they are in business.
What is in a SharePoint site? By default, your SharePoint site includes a default home page with space for highlighting the information important to your group, and several predefined pages for storing documents, ideas, and information so you can start working right away. Your site also includes navigation elements so you can find your way around. The home page of your site is your starting point. It contains the Quick Launch bar, views of the Announcements, Events, and Links lists, and the name and description of your team Web site. Quick Launch bar: - The Quick Launch bar contains hyperlinks to specific pages on your SharePoint site.
Announcements: - The Announcements list is a place to post important information for your whole team. The five most recent announcements in the Announcements list are displayed on the home page by default. You can also click the Announcements list heading to go to the full list of announcements. When you create your SharePoint site, a built-in announcement is displayed automatically. You can edit or delete this announcement, as desired, and add your own announcements from either the home page or the Announcements page. Events: - The Events list is intended to help you communicate about your team's events — whether those are meetings, key deadlines, or work schedules. When you create your SharePoint site, this list is empty. You can add your team's events to the list. Links: - The Links list is intended to include hyperlinks to your team's favorite Web pages or sites (such as your organization's Internet site). When you create your site, this list is empty. The top link bar is displayed on every page in your SharePoint site.
The top link bar contains hyperlinks to special pages in your site that help you navigate within the site, customize and manage the site, or get Help using the site. The hyperlinks on the top link bar are: Home: - The Home hyperlink on the top link bar links to the home page. Documents and Lists: - This hyperlink on the top link bar links to a page that displays all the document libraries, picture libraries, lists, discussion boards, and surveys currently in your site. You can use this page to navigate to the lists and document libraries in your
site. You can also use a link on the page to see any sites, Document Workspace sites, or Meeting Workspace sites below your site. Create:- The Create hyperlink on the top link bar links to a page that enables you to create new pages and components for your site. By using this page, you can create items such as a list that is like any of the built-in lists, a list based on an existing spreadsheet, a document library, a discussion board, a survey, or a new page for your site. Site Settings:- The Site Settings hyperlink on the top link bar links to a page where you can change your personal information, change the name and description of your SharePoint site, change site content, and perform site management tasks, such as changing personal settings or setting up new team members for the SharePoint site. You must be a member of the Administrator site group to perform site management tasks. Help: - The Help hyperlink on the top link bar opens a separate browser window containing the Help system for Windows SharePoint Services. Use the Help window to find information about Windows SharePoint Services and "how to" steps for using your SharePoint site. Up to Site Name: - SharePoint sites can contain other SharePoint sites (called subsites) in a hierarchy. The Up to Site Name hyperlink (where Site Name is the name of an actual site) appears only if your site is a subsite of another SharePoint site. This link helps you navigate up a level to the parent site. In addition to the Announcements, Events, and Links lists that appear on the home page, your site may contain any of the following standard list types: Document Library: - Document libraries provide a central place to store and share your team's documents. Your site contains a default document library — Shared Documents — that you can get to from the Quick Launch bar on the home page. You can create additional document libraries to store documents for a specific project, or you can create folders inside Shared Documents for different types or categories of documents.
Picture Gallery: - Picture libraries provide a central place to store and share pictures. It is similar in concept to a document library, but gives you special ways to view the pictures (such as showing only thumbnails or showing all pictures in a filmstrip). Contacts: - The Contacts list lets you store and share information about people. For example, you can use this list to share your team member's home phone numbers, or to store your customer information. Tasks: - The Tasks list helps you organize team tasks (work items that your team needs to complete), and assign them a status and priority as well as a due date. Issues: - The Issues list helps you manage a set of issues or problems, and assign them a status and priority as well as a due date. Discussion Boards: - Discussion boards provide a forum for conversing about topics that interest your team. For example, you could create a discussion board for team members to suggest activities. Surveys: - Surveys provide a way of polling team members.
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Terms Explained:Sharepoint Site: - A SharePoint site is a Web site that provides a central storage and collaboration space for documents, information, and ideas. A SharePoint site is a tool for collaboration. A SharePoint site helps groups of people (whether work teams or social groups) share information and work together. For example, a SharePoint site can help you: Coordinate projects, calendars, and schedules. Discuss ideas and review documents or proposals. Share information and keep in touch with other people. SharePoint sites are dynamic and interactive — members of the site can contribute their own ideas and content as well as comment on or contribute to other people. They don't have to use a complicated Web publishing process before they can post a document or make an announcement.
Top-Level Website: - The Default, top-level site provided by a web server or a virtual server. To gain Access to the top-level web site, you supply the URL of the server without specifying the page name and sub-site. Top-level Web sites can have multiple subsites. Sub Site: - A complete Website stored in a named subdirectory of the top level web site. Each subsite can have Administration, Authoring and browsing permissions that are independent from top level website and other websites. Subsites can also have multiple subsites, down as many levels as your users need. Site Collection: - The entire structure of a top-level Web site and all of its subsites is called a Web Site collection. Can also be defined as a set of Web sites on a virtual server that have the same owner and share administration settings. Each site collection contains a top level website and can contain one or more subsites.
Lists:-Sharepoint provides rich set of built-in lists used for managing various kind of information.TheBuilt-in lists are as follows: •
Contacts List: - Use a contacts list to communicate with the people with whom you work. You can enter names and contact information (such as telephone number, e-mail address, and street address) so that everyone on your team can use this information.
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Links List: - You can use links lists to post hyperlinks to Web pages of interest to your team.
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Lists and Spreadsheets: - If you have a list of information in a spreadsheet, you can define a range of cells to use as a list in your site. Windows SharePoint Services imports the data from the spreadsheet and displays it the same way it displays the built-in lists: in columns that team members can filter and sort, with commands that enable team members to add, edit, and delete items. To import data from a spreadsheet, you must have a Windows SharePoint Servicescompatible spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Office Excel 2003, and Internet Explorer 5 or later installed.
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Announcements List: - Use an announcements list to post news, status, and other short bits of information you want to share with team members. You can set an expiration date for an announcement.
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Events List: - Use an events list to post information about dates that are important for your team.
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Task List: - Use the tasks list to assign a task to a member of your team, specify its due date and priority, and indicate its status and progress. You can easily view all tasks or a selection of tasks, such as just those tasks assigned to you.
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Custom List: - If no built-in lists meet your information-sharing needs, you can create a custom list that displays your unique information.
Document Libraries: - Document libraries are collections of files that you share with team members. For example, you can create a library of documents for a specific project. You can store any type of file in a document library.
Collaboration: - Your team can take collaboration to a new level with Windows SharePoint Services. Team members can easily create collaborative workspace sites to share and manage their team information. Threaded discussions, surveys, shared calendars, task lists and other collaboration features help keep you and your teammates connected and productive. Various features provided by WSS for collaboration are: Announcement List Event Lists Task Lists Discussion Boards. Surveys. Document Libraries.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a full-fledged development platform that adds a tremendous amount of value on top of ASP.NET. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 scalability is achieved using an architecture designed with a Web form environment in mind. This architecture is based on stateless front-end Web servers that rely on Microsoft SQL Server in the back end for storing content and other site-related data. Features and changes of WSS 3.0 •
The way in which Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 integrates with ASP.NET has been completely redesigned. First of all, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built upon ASP.NET 2.0, which provides significant enhancements over ASP.NET 1.1. Furthermore, the integration between Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 was changed to route incoming requests through the ASP.NET runtime before Windows SharePoint Services. The Windows SharePoint Services team achieved these improvements to the routing infrastructure by removing the ISAPI filter and adding an HttpModule and an HttpHandler that are registered with ASP.NET using standard Web.config entries. This means incoming HTTP requests always enter the ASP.NET run-time environment and are fully initialized with ASP.NET context before they are forwarded to the code written by the Windows SharePoint Services team to carry out Windows SharePoint Services– specific processing.
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The Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 team has created their own virtual path provider named SPVirtualPathProvider, The SPVirtualPathProvider is able to retrieve .aspx pages from SQL Server and then hand them off to the .aspx page parser supplied by ASP.NET 2.0.
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Another change to be aware of is that Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 has been renamed in its new release as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.
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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was designed from the ground up to embrace the master page infrastructure of ASP.NET 2.0. Every Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site is provisioned with a special catalog known as the Master Page Gallery containing a master page named default. Master. This master page defines
a common layout for every site’s home page (Default.aspx) as well as all the standard Windows SharePoint Services form pages associated with lists and document libraries (for example, AllItems.aspx, NewItem.aspx). The master page layout includes standard Windows SharePoint Services menus and navigation controls. The definition of default. Master includes several different named placeholders such as Place-HolderPageTitle, PlaceHolderMain, and PlaceHolderLeftNavigation. •
There are now two different styles of Web Parts. The older WSS-style Web Parts depend on Microsoft.SharePoint.dll and must inherit from the WebPart base class defined by the Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 teams in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Web- PartPages namespace. The newer ASP-style Web Parts depend on System.Web.dll and must inherit from a different base class also named WebPart defined by the ASP.NET 2.0 team in the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts namespace.
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The Web Part infrastructure of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built on a control named SPWebPartManager that is derived from the ASP.NET 2.0 WebPartManager control. The SPWebPartManager control overrides the standard behavior of the WebPartManager control to persist Web Part data inside the Windows SharePoint Services content database instead of the ASP.NET services database. In most cases, you don’t have to worry about dealing directly with the SPWebPartManager control because the one and only required instance is already defined in the standard default.master page. When you create a content page that inherits from default.master, the SPWebPartManager control is already there.
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One criticism that developers have had with Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 is that several valuable features supported with document libraries do not extend to lists.
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For example, document libraries support versioning and events, but lists do not. To address this criticism, the Windows SharePoint Services teams worked hard to extend the functionality of lists and bring them up to par with document libraries. With Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, lists support many of the same features as
document libraries including versioning, events, and folders. There are also some new features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 supported by both lists and document libraries such as exposing data through automatic RSS feeds. •
Another nice innovation added to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is custom site columns. A site column is a reusable definition that can be used across multiple lists. A site column defines the name for a column, its underlying field type, and other characteristics such as its default value, formatting, and validation. Once you have defined a site column, you can then use it as you define the structure of your user-defined lists. An obvious advantage is that you can update the site column in a single place and have that update affect all the lists where the site column has been used. A site column is defined within the scope of a single site, yet it is visible to all child sites below the site in which it has been defined. Therefore, you can create a site column that is usable across an entire site collection by defining it in the top-level site.
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Another innovation in WSS 3.0 is the use of Content Types. A content type is a flexible and reusable Windows SharePoint Services type that defines the shape and behavior for an item in a list or a document in a document library.
Content Types in WSS 3.0 Content types, a core concept used throughout the functionality and services offered in Microsoft 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. Because content types can be defined 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. Event Handlers in WSS 3.0 Many developers use the event handlers in Windows SharePoint Services to execute custom managed code behind document libraries or form libraries. The goal of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is to provide developers with an even richer platform for developing custom integration points and building new types of applications on top of the infrastructure. For this purpose, the event handlers in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are extended in scope and depth in many ways. The most important new extensions to the event handlers are the following: •
The scope of events is enlarged and now covers not only document and form libraries but also lists and some limited Web site and site collection events.
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Events that are triggered by lists allow you to hook up code when list items are added, changed, or removed, which means you can create customized behavior through Microsoft .NET managed code.
The depth and the richness of the events is also a major new enhancement, and there are now two major types of events: •
Events that fire before an action occurs allow you to perform custom validation, checking, or processing of data that is about to be deleted, modified, or added to a list. These types of events are consistently suffixed with 'ing' to identify them as
before events. Note that the code reacting on these events is executed in a synchronous manner. •
Events that fire after a certain action occurs probably are familiar to most developers working with Windows SharePoint Services 2003. These events are suffixed with 'ed', and the code handling them is executed asynchronously.
Event handlers are registered differently than in Windows SharePoint Services 2003, in which it was possible to attach only one assembly per document or form library. In Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you have more flexibility in handling and registering your events. With Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, you can communicate responses back to the user interface. Take, for example, a scenario in which a user tries to add a new item, and an event handler invalidates that entry because of some business rule. In this case, you can create an error message that is communicated back to the user.
Workflows in WSS 3.0 Workflow can be seen as a set of activities stored as a model that describes a real-world process. Work passes through the model from start to finish, and activities might be executed by people or by system functions. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and dependent relationships between pieces of short-running or long-running work. There are two ways to think of workflows. Both types are supported by WF, and you can create either type for Windows SharePoint Services. •
Sequential workflows are modeled as flowcharts and are well suited for systemoriented workflows. A sequential workflow represents a sequence of steps that occur in order until the last step is completed. However, sequential workflows can
be affected by external events and include parallel logical paths, so the precise order in which activities are executed can vary. •
State machine workflows are modeled as state diagrams and are best suited for human based workflows. A state machine workflow represents a set of states, transitions, and actions. One state is denoted the start state, and based on an event, a transition is made to another state. The state machine can have a final state that determines the end of the workflow. State machine workflows are effective at capturing processes that can be changed as they run. For example, a bank manager might override and approve a loan application for a customer with a bad credit history on the basis of specific circumstances that are not modeled in the original workflow.
The two main concepts in WF are the workflow and the activity. A workflow represents a coordinated, event-driven set of activities and is compiled into a .NET assembly. An activity is a.NET class written in managed code that exposes methods and properties and fires events. A workflow runs by conditionally executing the methods in the activities.
Examples of workflows include moderation, approval, issue tracking, collecting feedback, and collecting signatures. Some of the built-in activities include task management activities such as creating a task, completing a task, or deleting a task; and item activities such as updating an item or changing an item’s status.