The SPS 2003 Developer Story

Custom and ISV applications can be integrated with SPS 2003 in two ways: SPS Web Parts can use Web services or ADO.NET to link to the applications or their data sources, or applications can call certain specific SPS 2003 services, such as its search functions, using Web services.

Because SPS 2003 now relies on WSS for its underlying architecture, the two products have nearly the same developer story. In particular, since WSS provides the underlying support for Web Parts, ASP.NET, and the SharePoint .NET managed object model; developers can use essentially the same tools and skill sets to develop Web Parts or other applications for both SPS 2003 and WSS. The only differences between WSS and SPS 2003 are that SPS 2003 is required for single sign-on support and it also exposes many functions not provided by WSS.

The COM-based Portal and Knowledge Management Collaborative Data Objects (PKMCDO) API supported by SPS 2001 is no longer supported in SPS 2003, and all programmatic interfaces to SharePoint’s collaboration features, such as access to search, user profiles, single sign-on, categories, alerts, and administrative functions, are now delivered through .NET class libraries. Some functions—search, user profiles (read-only), and categories—have also been exposed as Web services.