Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007. What a mouthful. And what
a handful. First, let's take care of the mouthful—the product is often referred
to as SharePoint Server, just SharePoint, or
MOSS. I'll refer to it as SharePoint Server or
SharePoint Server 2007. As for the handful,
SharePoint Server addresses an exceptionally broad range of business scenarios
by delivering capabilities in six categories:
Portal, Enterprise Search, Collaboration,
Business Intelligence, Business Process,
and Content Management.
Whether you're new to SharePoint
Server and want to learn what business
value it offers your organization, or you've
experienced earlier versions of SharePoint
Server and want to see what 2007 brings,
I'd like to guide you on a journey into
SharePoint Server 2007 through seven
"experiences":
- Obtain and install SharePoint
Server 2007.
- Configure the top-level site.
- Create a departmental site.
- Create a document library.
- Subscribe to changes in the library
by using RSS.
- Take the library offline through
Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
integration.
- Generate a repository for standard
Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
slides.
However, before we dive in, let's get a
quick overview of SharePoint technology.
What Is SharePoint Server 2007?
SharePoint Server 2007 is a server
product that's part of Microsoft Office
System 2007. It sits on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, which I examined last month in "Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 Out of the Box," InstantDoc
ID 94240. SharePoint Server leverages Windows SharePoint Services 3.0's
plumbing and adds its own significant
functionality. Figure 1 shows some of
SharePoint Server's Web application features. Some of these features—such as
forms services, Excel Services, and the
Business Data Catalog—are exclusive to
the Enterprise version. The rest are included in the Standard version.
As you approach SharePoint Server,
you might find, as I did, that its full capabilities are somewhat mind-blowing. I had
to work with SharePoint Server piece by
piece, getting acquainted with its features
gradually. That's why I've created these
"experiences"—to help you learn as we
create our SharePoint Server sandbox for
a fictional organization, WINDOMAIN.com.
Experience 1: obtaining and Installing
SharePoint Server 2007
The most important SharePoint Server–
related URL for you to know is http://office.microsoft.com/sharepointserver.
This URL will get you to the SharePoint
Server Web page, from which you can
locate documentation, support, and (as of
this writing), a downloadable trial of both
the Standard and Enterprise editions of
SharePoint Server 2007.
Download the trial version of
SharePoint Server, as well as Microsoft.NET Framework 3.0, which you can
access from the .NET Framework page at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/netframework. I recommend using a
"clean" server for your sandbox, to eliminate any idiosyncrasies that might otherwise cause problems. Log on to your
soon-to-be SharePoint Server system with
a user account that's not the Administrator
account but that is a member of the
Administrators group. The account you
use to install SharePoint Server becomes
the default "owner" of the site collection
and its sites.
Install .NET Framework 3.0, then install
SharePoint Server. There's no rocket science to either of the installations. The
only choice you need to make is the type
of SharePoint Server installation. For our
purposes, choose Basic installation. This
installation takes care of the configuration
of the server farm, the server, the applications, and the shared services. However,
for a production installation, you'll more
likely choose the Advanced installation
so that you can manually configure the
components and set up your single server
in anticipation of eventually increasing to
a farm of multiple servers. With the Basic
installation, the standalone server can't
later become part of a multiserver farm.
When installation has completed,
you'll be prompted to run the SharePoint
Products and Technologies Configuration
Wizard. If you don't run it now, you can
launch the wizard from the Administrative
Tools folder on the SharePoint server. The
wizard performs a series of tasks depending on the type of installation you've
performed. When the wizard finishes, it
informs you of your next step.
In the Administrative Tools folder of
your SharePoint Server system, open the SharePoint Central Administration
application. The SharePoint Central
Administration Web page will appear. This is where you'll perform most of the administration of SharePoint Server.
Make a note of the URL for the site—it
will be your server name with a randomly
assigned port number, such as http://wss01.windomain.com:22222. Now you
can open the same site from any machine
on the network by using the full URL that
includes the port. If you're prompted to
authenticate, use the account you used
when installing SharePoint Server, in the
form DOMAIN\username. You'll need to
add the Central Administration Web site to
your Trusted Sites zone to ensure proper
functionality. Feel free to poke around and
see what has been configured, but don't
change anything just yet—the Basic installation already configured what was needed
at this point.
Experience 2: Configuring the
Top-Level Site
Open the SharePoint Server site by using
the URL http://servername (e.g., http://
wss01). The default home page appears,
which you can see in Figure 2.
The Basic installation you performed created a site collection. A site collection contains one or more sites, each of which can
inherit security policies, settings, templates,
and user and group definitions. In many
production implementations of SharePoint
Server, one site collection will suffice. You'll
typically have a top-level intranet portal with-in which you'll create sites for departments,
functions, teams, or projects.
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