Microsoft SharePoint : Introduction

Ok,first I confess that I am the least learned person about Microsoft SharePoint in the world and so this attempt might be a disastrous one.But I have to learn it anyway and here I will put all the stuffs I get day by day.

So,what is Microsoft SharePoint? This would be a very bad idea asking this question me rather googling it. Google wouldn't mind telling you about this though Microsoft is their biggest competitor. Anyway what idea I got is,this is a collection of tools and s/w. This is not a single s/w rather it's a platform. Now what they are aimed to do? This integrated system can provide content management, enterprise search, accelerate shared business processes blah blah blah...But to me, most importantly it provides developers a platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability. Being a Microsoft product it has a very good integration with .NET. So .Net developers might find it interesting to investigate.

Now there are few keywords one must know before going ahead. I will try to list some of them here(be sure that I have copied them all from internet,none of them is written by me :))

wss(windows sharepoint services) : this is a free product from microsoft (comes with windows server). it gives you all the basic functionality of sharepoint including document libraries, lists, even things like email integration.

moss(microsoft office sharepoint server) : this is an add-on to wss which gives some very cool additional features. some examples are excel services, infopath forms server, ecm (enterprise content management) and moss enterprise search. this is not free(Ooops :(:(:(...)

also you can't just install moss... moss is built on top of wss, so wss is a prerequisite.

web application / web app : also known as a virtual server (in sharepoint v2) and an web site / application pool (in iis), web apps allow for logical separation of sharepoint content. each web app runs under a different process on the iis web server.

two examples of different web apps are the central administrator site which runs on an arbitrary port number and then standard sharepoint sites which typically run on port 80. they both run under separate processes in iis.

site collection / top level site / parent site / spsite : a site collection is a web site that can contain sub-sites (aka webs), which all share the same owner and administrators of the top level site collection.

a site collection controls global settings that sub-sites underneath it inherit. settings can include permissions, storage quotas, and themes, etc...

webs / sub-sites / spweb : these are web sites that live underneath a site collection. these are almost the same thing as a site collection but the difference is the global settings that are applied from the site collection.

webs can have their own independent settings separate from its parent site collection, but it makes it a bit easier to manage for the owner of the site, that's the idea here.

lists : a list is a generic term used to define the different places to store content in a sharepoint site. some built in lists are document libraries (upload and share word docs), picture libraries (upload pics), and custom lists where you define what you want to store.

I think this writing has been big enough to be an introduction. This will surely be edited again after learning some more about SharePoint.