SharePoint Technology Stack

A unified Web hosting technology supports Microsoft’s latest team site and corporate portal products.

User Interface. Clients can access WSS team sites and SPS portal sites with Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX computers running Internet Explorer (IE) 5.01 or later (IE 5.2 or later for Macintosh) or Netscape Navigator 6.2. Office applications can also serve as clients to access team content (for example, documents) and administer site data (for example, edit and create lists). Accessing the full set of collaboration capabilities in the products, however, requires Office 2003.

Web Tier. The Web tier includes sites for central administration and end-user interaction (WSS and SPS sites), providing one administrative virtual server for each physical server in a group of WSS or SPS servers and a single end-user virtual server for each domain name in the group (for instance, http://portal). A single SPS portal site resides at the root of the end-user virtual server, while a virtual server can support many top-level WSS team sites (for example, http://portal/sites/team_site_1, http://portal/sites/team_site_2). Top-level team sites can, in turn, support many subsites and workspaces.