• Illustration: WSS 3.0 Blogs
• Illustration: WSS 3.0 Improves Administration

Blogs and wikis in Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0, the latest version of Microsoft's free (with Windows Server) and easy-to-use platform for team collaboration sites, could help workers informally exchange ideas and document ad hoc work procedures. Combined with better document management, usability, and administration, these features could encourage new deployments and upgrades. However, organizations should carefully weigh how best to use these features before they are widely deployed, and other changes could frustrate workers.

A Platform for Team Collaboration

WSS 3.0 is the latest release of Microsoft's platform for team collaboration sites. Team sites help groups of workers share information and work together. For example, a product development team might use a team site to gather ideas for product features, collaborate on specifications, track project schedules, and communicate project status.

WSS ships as a component of Windows Server; the latest version is available as a download for customers of Windows Server 2003, and its use is covered by the Windows Server Client Access License (CAL). Once it is installed and configured, workers can create and edit sites without IT involvement.

WSS 3.0 includes the following important components:

• Preconfigured Web site templates (made of ASP.NET 2.0-based Web pages) that support team activities, such as document collaboration and meetings
• About a dozen prebuilt Web Parts (ASP.NET 2.0 Web page controls) that allow workers to view and interact with content on WSS sites; administrators and users with appropriate permissions can customize pages by adding, deleting, configuring, and rearranging Web parts
• Facilities for managing documents and tabular lists of information relevant to site visitors, such as contacts, announcements, and tasks; all documents and items in lists are stored in SQL Server databases
• Tools and utilities for managing settings and configuration of Web sites and applications, and the infrastructure those sites run on
• .NET class libraries and Web services that partners and customers use to extend and customize the product.

Along with its role in building and managing team collaboration sites, WSS 3.0 provides much of the underlying technology for SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft's platform for corporate portal Web sites and applications. For example, all WSS 3.0 Web Parts are also part of SharePoint Server 2007 and the latter product's document management capabilities are built on WSS 3.0 document libraries.

The main services and applications provided by WSS 3.0 and the incremental services provided by SharePoint Server 2007 are outlined in the sidebar "SharePoint Server Builds on WSS 3.0".)

New Lists and Templates

Two new site templates add blog and wiki capabilities and a new list will help teams track simple projects and work lists. In addition, Microsoft offers several new downloadable application templates for WSS 3.0 that could help companies solve common business problems.

Blogs Aid Informal Communication

Blogs are online journals that have become popular with Internet users as a way to record and share thoughts, opinions, and other information. Business users increasingly use blogs to communicate informally with both internal and external audiences. For example, many Microsoft product teams use blogs extensively to describe forthcoming product features and gather feedback on those features.

As does other blog-publishing software, WSS 3.0 blogs list users' posts in reverse chronological order and users can organize posts by subject. In addition, visitors can comment on blog postings and authors can publish their blogs using Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which allows them to notify interested visitors of new posts. Administrators can also configure RSS so that users are notified when SharePoint sites, lists, and libraries change.

For an illustration of a WSS 3.0 blog site, see "WSS 3.0 Blogs".)

Wiki Template

This new site template supports creation of wikis, which provide a simple mechanism for compiling and sharing information, and for collaborative authoring of content. (Wikis were popularized on the Internet by the Wikipedia online encyclopedia project.) Wikis have the following distinguishing characteristics:

• Simple editing tools that allow groups of users to collectively create and update articles, link to other Web pages, and insert graphics without having to know HTML
• The ability to search for articles
• Tracking of article histories and revisions.

This lightweight and simple publishing model could make wikis popular tools for capturing and publishing certain kinds of corporate information. For example, a set of wiki articles could prove useful for describing previously undocumented work procedures and making those descriptions easy for workers to find and update as procedures change or are refined.

List Supports Project Management

A new template called Project Tasks improves on the previous Task List, which gave users a simple way of tracking their work items and deadlines. Project Tasks adds basic project management tools—for example, users can view task status and relationships in Gantt charts.

In addition, information in a Project Tasks list can be imported into Microsoft Project Server, the company's full-featured project management application, which could make those lists useful for creating starting points or baselines for complex projects.

List of Application Templates Grows

In addition to the new blog and wiki site templates included with WSS 3.0, Microsoft has created several new application templates available to customers as free downloads. Application templates are prebuilt WSS 3.0 sites tailored to specific processes and tasks, such as managing requests for proposal, and they can help companies quickly address specific problems and provide partners with a convenient starting point for more advanced or specialized WSS applications.

New application templates offer support for the following processes, among others:

• Managing and budgeting for clinical trials
• Tracking and reporting software bugs
• Organizing and scheduling events that require registration, such as seminars
• Managing and tracking physical assets.

Improved Document Management

Several enhancements to core document management features make WSS 3.0 a more useful repository for corporate documents and will help workers collaborate on document-related projects.

The most important enhancements include the following:

More flexible document libraries. WSS 3.0 document libraries support the storage and organization of documents and other content and are the SharePoint equivalent of Windows file shares. WSS 3.0 document libraries receive several updates, including support for major and minor versioning, which helps document authors indicate when significant changes are made to documents. In addition, WSS 3.0 gives administrators greater control over document security than its predecessor—specifically, administrators can apply security settings at the item level (a folder or individual document in a library, for instance).

Improved content classification. A new feature called content types provides a more flexible mechanism for tagging and classifying documents than previous versions of WSS offered. Content types specify groups of properties and settings (or metadata) used to describe documents and other content of like type. WSS 3.0 ships with a variety of predefined content types and organizations can also define custom content types—for example, "expense report" or "employee performance review"—either from scratch or by extending existing content types. To ensure consistency, organizations can associate document templates with content types and also define permissions on them—this gives organizations a way to specify which users can modify which types of content, for instance.

Workflow support. WSS 3.0 gets support for workflow via the Windows Workflow Foundation, a workflow engine, tools, and programming interface that is part of the .NET Framework 3.0. Developers can use tools such as Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer 2007, the replacement for the FrontPage Web site creation tool, to create workflows that guide workers through prescribed business processes. In addition, workflows can be associated with content types. For example, a developer could associate an approval workflow with a "press releases" content type; the workflow could include steps that coordinate authors, reviewers, and other participants to ensure that releases are properly reviewed and released according to schedule.

Support for offline workers. Using Outlook 2007, workers can maintain replicas of WSS 3.0 document libraries locally, which allows them to work with documents while offline. Offline libraries are stored in a Personal Folders file (.pst) on the user's hard drive and can be synchronized automatically with libraries on the WSS server.

(WSS 3.0's new document management features are covered in more detail in "Document Management with SharePoint Server 2007" on page 12 of the Feb. 2007 Update.)

Usability Enhanced

Several new features address some obvious usability shortcomings in the previous version of WSS.

The Recycle Bin enables users to restore accidentally deleted items. The previous version of WSS did not supply a Recycle Bin nor did its backup tools permit restoration of individual items, such as documents. (Administrators could only recover entire sites from backup tapes.)

A rights-trimmed user interface hides features that users do not have permission to access—for example, users with read-only permissions on a WSS site are never given options to create new document libraries or new sites. In contrast, the previous version of WSS made all menu options visible and informed users that they could not use a particular feature only after they had selected it.

Navigation aids help users understand where they are in WSS sites. New controls in ASP.NET 2.0 automatically display appropriate navigation links on the pages in a Web site. For example, a Bread Crumb control displays navigation information in a condensed format at the top of pages in WSS 3.0 sites. The wiki page containing Directions on Microsoft's editorial procedures, for example, might use bread crumbs that displayed "DOM Team Site > DOM Wiki > Wiki Pages > Editorial Procedures" with each term being a clickable link.

Mobile access. WSS 3.0 can automatically generate text-only versions of site pages, which allows users to view and update information in certain WSS 3.0 lists from some mobile devices. For example, users can update task information or edit blog entries from a mobile device such as a Smartphone or Pocket PC.

Administration Refined

Several enhancements in WSS 3.0's administration tools simplify tasks that frustrated administrators in previous versions, such as configuring and managing sites, content, users, and infrastructure.

Better tool organization. Administrators responsible for configuring WSS 3.0's infrastructure will find a better-organized Central Administration site. Central Administration provides links to an Operations page and an Application Management page. The Operations page supports global functions, such as configuring server topology (i.e., defining which WSS services run on physical servers) and backup and restore. Application Management helps administrators create and manage the actual sites (assigning user permissions and adding or deleting sites, lists, and libraries, for instance). Previously, utilities were scattered over several, often nested, pages, making them harder to find.

(For a graphic of the new Central Administration site, see the illustration "WSS 3.0 Improves Administration".)

Improved farm management. WSS 3.0 is better for large installations that span multiple servers (or farms). Administrators create and configure applications and sites centrally and can push changes to multiple servers rather than having to configure the servers separately, as they did previously. For example, an administrator could use a new scheduling feature in WSS 3.0 to deploy a new site template to a group of servers at a specified time.

Backup and restore gets support for Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which should make it easier for partners to integrate third-party backup applications. However, WSS 3.0's built-in backup utilities are still primitive. For example, they do not provide a scheduler or allow restoring individual items, although WSS 3.0's Recycle Bin feature should mitigate some problems, such as a user accidentally deleting documents.

Considerations

For many customers, WSS 3.0's incremental improvements and relatively straightforward upgrade for generic WSS 2.0 sites will probably make it a no-brainer upgrade. However, some new features warrant careful evaluation before they are widely deployed, and other feature changes could frustrate workers.

Blogs and wikis could waste time. The usefulness of blogs and wikis in a corporate setting is largely unproven, and although they are popular among Internet users, those users spend considerable time creating blog and wiki content of little or no value. Organizations could find that unchecked use of these tools invites similar waste. Furthermore, most organizations already have established procedures for internal communication and documentation and could find that blogs and wikis offer little incremental benefit by comparison. As is true of any new user-oriented technology, organizations should establish guidelines for their acceptable use.

Rights-trimmed user interface could confuse. Hiding unavailable menu options could simplify use of WSS 3.0 for some workers, but others could waste time searching for advertised features that they do not have permission to use. Other Microsoft products take a different tack, graying rather than hiding unavailable options. This latter approach may be more efficient for knowledgeable workers by immediately indicating which features they have permission to use.

Requirements and Resources

WSS 3.0 was released in Nov. 2006 and requires Windows Server 2003 and the .NET Framework 3.0 (which includes the Windows Workflow Foundation and ASP.NET 2.0). In addition, the product requires either SQL Server 2000 SP4 or higher or SQL Server 2005 SP1 or higher. (Microsoft recommends SQL Server 2005.)

WSS 3.0 is available at www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/download.mspx.

The Office 2007 Web site is www.microsoft.com/office/preview.

WSS 3.0 application templates can be downloaded at www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/wssapps/templates/default.mspx.

New document management features in WSS 3.0 are covered in "Document Management with SharePoint Server 2007" on page 12 of the Feb. 2007 Update.

Updates to search capabilities in WSS 3.0 are described in "SharePoint 2007 Improves Enterprise Search" on page 8 of the Mar. 2007 Update.