By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Apr. 2, 2007

The following an excerpt of a Research Report published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

Microsoft offers two, related products for creating and managing team, corporate, and personal portal Web sites. Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 supports team collaboration sites, which aim to help groups of workers share information and collaborate. SharePoint Server 2007 is Microsoft's strategic platform for corporate portals, Web sites that give workers an entry point to corporate information and applications. It also ships several new applications, such as records management and reporting. SharePoint Server 2007 is built on WSS 3.0 and thus inherits all of that product's features.

What Does WSS 3.0 Provide?

WSS 3.0 provides tools and services for creating and managing team collaboration sites. It is also the foundation technology on which SharePoint Server 2007 is built. The following features of WSS 3.0 are the most important:

Lists and document libraries. WSS 3.0 provides facilities for creating, editing, and storing tabular lists of information relevant to site visitors. Lists are SharePoint's most ubiquitous form of content, and WSS provides a wide variety of prebuilt list types, such as lists for contacts, announcements, and task tracking; customers and partners can also create custom list types. A special list type called the document library supplies the base features for storing and managing documents. All items in lists and document libraries are stored in SQL Server databases.

Security. WSS supplies a role-based security model that maps groups of users to preconfigured sets of permissions that specify and limit the actions users can take on sites and site content. WSS 3.0 administrators can apply security settings at the item level (an individual document in a library, for instance).

Site templates for team collaboration. WSS 3.0 supplies a variety of Web site and page templates geared toward team collaboration. A WSS team site consists of a set of ASP.NET pages for site administration (such as creating sites and assigning permissions to users and groups) and a set of team pages that allow workers to view and manipulate the actual team data.

Prebuilt Web Parts. WSS 3.0 ships with a collection of prebuilt ASP.NET 2.0 Web page controls (Web Parts) that provide capabilities ranging from simple image display to document library management. Web Parts are one of SharePoint's most powerful features; without writing any code, ordinary users can quickly build custom, interactive Web pages by dropping Web Parts on pages and arranging and configuring them.

Management utilities. WSS 3.0 provides a set of tools and utilities for managing settings and configuration of Web sites and applications, and the infrastructure those sites run on.

Programming model. WSS 3.0 provides .NET class libraries and Web services that partners and customers use to extend and customize the product. For example, partners can build Web-based applications, such as self-service portals for business applications and custom site templates for market verticals.

What Does SharePoint Server 2007 Add?

Since SharePoint Server 2007 is built on WSS 3.0, it inherits all WSS 3.0 services, site templates, Web Parts, and tools. In addition, SharePoint Server 2007 layers a more advanced set of services, tools, and applications on top of those provided by WSS, including the following:

Portal site templates. SharePoint Server 2007 includes a template called the Collaboration Portal, which provides the structure for an organization's top-level portal site, and the new Publishing Portal site template for building Internet-facing corporate portals.

Content management applications. SharePoint Server 2007 contains several applications and prebuilt site templates for managing corporate content. A site template called the Document Center supports general document management processes, while the Records Center helps companies automate records-management file plans. In addition, SharePoint Server 2007 subsumes the Web content management features of Content Management Server (CMS) 2002, which helps organizations manage content publication and maintenance of large, complex Web sites.

Prebuilt workflows. Several prebuilt workflows (based on the Windows Workflow Foundation) support common document-related work processes, including document review, approval, translation into other languages, and digital signature collection.

Business intelligence (BI) applications. A new SharePoint Server 2007 site template called the Report Center houses the product's new BI features. It includes the tools and libraries for building, storing, and managing key performance indicators, reports, and dashboards.

Forms management. Available as a stand-alone product or as a feature of SharePoint Server 2007, Forms Services supports server-side processing of forms designed with InfoPath 2007. Forms Services enables data from completed forms to be synchronized with enterprise resource planning and other back-end systems that expose Web services.

Shared services. SharePoint Server 2007 includes a set of midtier services (called shared services) that provide a variety of common functions that can be shared by multiple SharePoint Server sites. Among SharePoint Server's shared services are its search engine, the Excel Services server-based spreadsheet calculation and rendering engine (an important component of SharePoint Server's BI capabilities), and the Business Data Catalog, which allows SharePoint sites to access data stored in business applications, such as the mySAP ERP application.

Single sign-on (SSO). A separate SSO service can map the identity of a SharePoint user to their corresponding security credentials in another application, such as a customer relationship management application, allowing the user (and applications running under the user's account) to access the other application without having to log on and supply credentials. (Microsoft's BizTalk Server and Host Integration Server also provide SSO capabilities.)

Advanced Web Parts. SharePoint Server 2007 includes about 50 prebuilt Web Parts in addition to the dozen or so Web Parts that are included with WSS 3.0. Many of these Web Parts support SharePoint Server 2007's advanced features—for example, one Web Part works with Excel Services to allow users to view and interact with spreadsheets in a browser; another shows the details of key performance indicators.

Advanced management utilities. SharePoint Server 2007 supplies a broader set of management utilities for controlling large site infrastructures and the additional features and services provided by the product.