What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is an enterprise information portal, from Microsoft, that can be configured to run Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites, built using Microsoft ASP.NET technology. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows people, teams and expertise to connect and collaborate. A SharePoint enterprise portal is composed of both SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Services, with SharePoint being built upon WSS. WSS is typically used by small teams, projects and companies. SharePoint Server is designed for individuals, teams and projects within a medium to large company wide enterprise portal.

WSS and MOSS

While WSS is included as a part of the Windows Server 2003 and does not have its own licensing model, Moss is a separate product that runs on WSS. MOSS is a value-added set of components and services that has been built on top of WSS platform. The installation of WSS creates automatically a Web application called Central Administration, which provides the possibility to create your first Web Application, through a web based GUI. Programming against WSS can be done using the SharePoint Object Model (adding a reference to Microsoft.Sharepoint.dll), or calling the WSS web services. WSS also ships a command line utility called STSADM.EXE, allowing you to run interactive commands from the Windows command line (cmd.exe). It's a good idea to add a reference to c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\ web server extensions\12\bin in your server environment variables. STSADM.EXE commands are useful for accomplishing various tasks like adding/removing SharePoint features, creating/removing/backing up site collections. For a complete list of Stsadm operations and properties, see Index for Stsadm operations and properties (Office SharePoint Server).

Web Applications, Site Collections and Sites

When you decide to create a new Web Application using the WSS. 3.0 Central Administration, you define your site collection container, that will handle all your sub sites. WSS, creates for each Web Application a new content database in your SQL Server instance and a new web application in ISS, generating all necessary files and folders and associate an new or an existing application pool. Once you have created you site container, you want to run a site in it, and here comes the Site Collection. Each Site Collection is composed by a top-level Site (root) and can contain a hierarchy of child Sites. Once a user is assigned as an administrator to a particular Site Collection, he grants full administrative permissions to all sub sites and future sites created in that Site Collection, allowing an IT department to hand off all those noise administrative tasks.

Sharepoint Lists

SharePoint lists represents the place where you need to store your data. You can think to a lists as an excel paper, where you can define your custom columns. SharePoint gives you the ability to create lists based on templates, or edit some of them as you prefer. Adding and removing columns let you organize your lists to handle many different situations and different types of data. A list, is a really powerful tool for IT developers, because it helps you to store your data and to handle particular situations attaching event handlers on it. You should call correctly those columns, fields and each single record in this list, item. In this guide you will learn how to programmatically work with lists, items and event receivers.

SharePoint lists represents the place where you need to store your data. You can think to a Lists as a excel paper, where you can defines your custom columns. SharePoint gives you the ability to create lists based on templates, or edit some of them as you prefer. Adding and removing columns let you organize your lists to handle many differente situations and different types of data. A list, is a really powerful tool for IT developers, because it helps you to store your data and to handle particular situations attaching event handlers on it. You should call correctly those columns fields and each single record in this list, item. In this guide you will learn how to programmatically work with lists, items and event receivers.