Questionnaire on SharePoint

Question 1 : What you understand by WSS ?

Answer 1 : WSS stand for Windows SharePoint Server and is freely available as a Windows 2003 server component. This is a collaboration tool that help people to stay connected across organization and geographic boundaries.

WSS helps teams stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information they need to make more informed decisions and get the job done.WSS provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business application that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business.

Some of the feature of WSS:

• Provide a single workspace for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions—within the organization and over the internet.
• Simplify the creation and navigation of workspaces with the improved user interface and site creation tools in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that provide easy-to-use templates, professional-looking site themes, and the ability to rearrange site navigation from within the browser.
• Increase the security of business information with enhanced administrative controls that decrease cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, management, support, operations, and backup and restore.
• Manage business documents more easily with enhanced document library support and a common repository for document storage.
• Use the Windows SharePoint Services platform to build rich, flexible, and scalable Web-based applications and Internet sites specific to the needs of your organization.

By: Ravi Pahuja ( 05-June-2007 )

Question 2 : What you understand by MOSS?

Answer 2 : MOSS stands for the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. This is a new program which is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office System and this was designed to upgrade the WSS. Office SharePoint Server offers enhanced and additional feature that are unavailable on a Windows SharePoint Services site.

By: Ravi Pahuja ( 05-June-2007 )

Question 3 : A brief history of SharePoint?

Answer 3 :

Year 2001 :

• SharePoint Team Services (STS) which ran on Windows 2000 Server and was in effect Windows SharePoint Services version 1.
• SharePoint Portal Server 2001 - a portal based collaboration and document management tool developed on top of the Microsoft Exchange Server database.

Year 2003 :

• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS version 2) - which ran on Windows Server 2003, a free Windows server component that provides collaboration and intranet services. WSS v2 is based on the .Net 1.1 Framework. Support for the .Net 2.0 Framework was added in Service Pack 2.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS) - a portal based collaboration and document management that extends Windows SharePoint Services v2.

Year 2006/7 :

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) is freely available as a Windows 2003 server component. WSS 3.0 was based on the ASP.NET 2.0 and required .NET Framework 3.0.
• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) - The next iteration of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS). Includes the functionality previously included in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003) and Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 (MCMS 2002) plus new components like Infopath Form Services and Excel Calculation Server. MOSS is based on WSS 3.0.
  
  By: Ravi Pahuja ( 05-June-2007 )
  

Question 4 : What we can achieve using SharePoint?

Answer 4 : Three major task which we can achieve using SharePoint is listed below:

1. Collaborate on Projects
2. Share and Manage Information
3. Personal Customization

1.) Collaborate on Projects: We can use this as a collaborate tool for any kind of project. Site users share a common place made up of document libraries, lists and web parts on one or more tasks, projects or documents. Team member can work together on all these items. Windows® SharePoint™ Services lets you create a central location where coworkers, partners, and customers can share issues, contacts, announcements, Web links, and calendars. Team members can easily create workspaces for meeting discussions, surveys, documents, task lists, and other collaboration needs that increase their productivity.

• Document Workspaces : Using Web parts, lists, and document libraries, a Document Workspace creates an environment centered on one or more tasks, projects, or documents. Team members can work together on a document (either the Document Workspace copy or their own copy) and periodically update copies that have been saved to the Document Workspace site.
• Meeting Workspace : A Meeting Workspace site is the most productive approach to workgroup collaboration. Similar to a Document Workspace site, it allows team members to manage meetings and documents by using Web parts, lists, and document libraries.
  Using Microsoft Outlook 2003, you can send meeting notices and invitations to team members. This will automatically create a Meeting Workspace, or you can create a Meeting Workspace in your SharePoint site by using a browser. You can include a hyperlink to the Workspace site where invitees can obtain additional information. You can also create a Meeting Workspace site for recurring meetings so team members can track the progress of ongoing tasks or projects.
• Create Sites and Workspaces : Your team members can create a site or workspace for collaboration on Web pages, lists, and document libraries, or they can create a site to manage a new team or project, collaborate on documents, or prepare for meetings.
  Enabling "Self-Service Site Creation" allows users to create their own top-level site, which eliminates the need for administrators to create one on demand. Users can click a link on the home page and enter information on the signup screen. Windows SharePoint Services will then create the new site with the user as the owner and administrator. For example, sales and marketing managers can create a site to manage all their sales- and marketing-related activities.
• Discussion Boards : Discussion boards provide a forum for topics that interest your team. For example, you can create a discussion board that allows team members to propose and discuss activities. Each discussion board has icons for starting, sorting, filtering, switching views, or changing designs. Another feature (Web Discussion) allows users to attach comments to a specific SharePoint page or document.
• Team Surveys : Surveys allow you to poll team members and obtain feedback from anyone with access to the site. You can configure a survey so that users can respond to items such as meetings, vendor service, or product releases, and you can also display the results graphically.
• Automatic Notifications and Alerts : SharePoint uses e-mail alerts to notify users of important events and changes to lists, items, libraries, and other parts of the site. For example, users can choose to receive an e-mail alert when a document published in a specific library is modified or deleted, or they can elect to receive immediate, daily, or weekly alerts for content included in the portal site index.

2. )Share and Manage Information: Windows® SharePoint™ Services lets you create a central location where coworkers, partners, and customers can share issues, contacts, announcements, Web links, and calendars. Team members can easily create workspaces for meeting discussions, surveys, documents, task lists, and other collaboration needs that increase their productivity.

• Lists and Spreadsheets : SharePoint sites include built-in lists for sharing information, tasks, contacts, and announcements. Users can also create custom lists for unique information. With the help of a compatible Windows program (such as Microsoft Office Professional 2003), Windows SharePoint Services will import in columnar form spreadsheet data that team members can directly edit, sort, filter, add to, or delete. To import data from a spreadsheet, you must have a compatible spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Office Excel 2003 or Internet Explorer 5
• Document and Forms Libraries: Users can browse a library to share documents with team members. Document libraries support features such as sub-folders, file versioning, and check-in/check-out. Using a compatible XML editor (such as Microsoft Office InfoPath), you can create a form library for your XML-based business reports or purchase orders.
• Task, Event, Contact, and Announcement Lists : Using an event list, you can post information about important dates or copy/link events to a compatible calendar program such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2003.You can use an announcement list to post news, status, and other information, and you can set an expiration date for the announcement.You can use a task list to assign a task to a team member, specify its priority and due date, and indicate its status and progress. Users can view individual tasks assigned to them or tasks assigned to other team members.With a contact list, you can allow team members to have access to a telephone number, e-mail address, or street address of clients, partners, and vendors. You can copy contact information in the address book to or from a contact list. This requires a compatible address book program such as Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0.
• Picture Libraries : You can store photos and graphics in picture libraries that allow users to view images as thumbnails, filmstrips, or standard files. A picture library allows you to create a repository of corporate and product logos and images in order to standardize corporate images and simplify the daily operations of team members.

3.)Personal View Customization : A SharePoint Page (for example, a site's home page) consists of Web Parts and can appear in either shared or personal view. In shared view edited by an administrator or users with specific permission rights, all users see the same page and same changes.
In personal view, only the user making changes to Web Parts can view them; for example, if a user changes the height and width of one Web Part, closes another, adds a third, and deletes a fourth, the changes apply only to their view of the page.