Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: A Solutions Platform
Windows SharePoint Services provides a platform for quickly creating and manging a web-based infrastructure for Collaborating, Storing and managing content and documents.
This infrastructure can scale from small teams to large corporates with thousands of users and millions of documents.
WSS 3.0 has introduced a number of enhancements over previous versions including the following:
- Versioning has been vastly improved to cover list based items, not just documents. There is also now support for minor (draft) and major (published) versions. Associated with these states you can have security, workflows, policies, or other behaviour.
- Content Types are a huge advancement over previous versions of SharePoint. With Content Types we can now define item structure outside of document libraries and lists. Previous version of SharePoint forced us to define document structure at the list level, and so resulted in lots of lists / documnent libraries to handle different types of document or lots of columns in those lists / libraries to handle multiple document types.
With the inclusion of Content Types, we can now define the document structure, such as Columns, Workflows, information management policies, document templates, and more at the level of the site or, more commonly, the site collection.
Lists and Document Libraries can then be set to manage one or more of these Content Types resulting in a much more organised information management structure.
Office Integregration is retained in WSS 3.0 and provides the framework with connections into end users "Comfort Zones", such as Microsoft Word, Excel and outlook. Users are able to interact with the information management system, provided by SharePoint, directly from their Office Applications.
The highest levels of Office Integration are attained when using the latest version of Microsoft's Office Suite, version 2007, however, integration of some form is available all the way back to Microsoft Office XP.
Templating engine and development framework
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 offers more than just a nice Web Interface to store documents and information. It's main usefullness comes from the advanced code base that it is built upon, offering developers a rich development environment for templating sites and content, extending out-of-the box features and even building brand new features and tightly integrating them with the core product.
WSS 3.0 is built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 framework and complies with many of the best practices put forward by the ASP.NET product team.
Features
Over the years, the SharePoint community has worked hard to establish a simple and reliable development workflow for producting new features, packaging them up and deploying to test, staging and production environments.
WSS 3.0 takes this process a step closer to Utopia with the introduction of the Features and Solutions framework. New code items, be it web parts, workflows, custom field types, content types or one of many other items, can now be wrapped up in a Feature and deployed to numerous environments through the Solutions architecture.
For years, with previous versions of SharePoint, developers would come back to clients with the famous phrase "Yes, we can extend the template and all new sites you create will have those extensions, however currently created sites will not be able to make use of the new features." This phrase has caused so many issues over the years, and at last, it has been disposed of.... hopefully for good!
Web Parts
Windows SharePoint Services has changed the Web Part infrastructure from previous versions of SharePoint. WSS 3.0 now makes use of the Web Part providers made availble in ASP.NET 2.0 with a small layer on top to provide backwards compatability with previous versions of SharePoint.
Event Handlers
Event Handlers are now available on all types of Lists and Document Libraries. Prevous versions of SharePoint only made these availble on Document Libraries and was often seen as a massive restriction. Thankfully, Microsoft has listened to it's users and extended this functionality across the board, including lists, content types and even sites.
Workflow
Windows SharePoint Services now has the ability to host Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF) workflows out of the box. Workflows can be attached to lists, document libraries, content types, etc. Out-of-the box, not a lot of Workflows are made available, the Three State Approval Workflow being the key on, however through the effectiveness of development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 developing new workflows is made relatively simple. and can be plugged in through the Feature framework described above.