Download a PDF of the description of Custom Windows SharePoint Services v3 Solutions
Scope - Design, build, and deploy a custom line of business application that uses the features of Windows SharePoint Services v3.
Benefits - Windows SharePoint Services v3 (WSS) is a built-in component of Windows Server 2003. WSS serves as the backbone for a number of Microsoft Products and Technologies – including Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Project Server 2007. It provides the core platform and services required for everything from enterprise applications to building an ad-hoc team site for a short term project. WSS focuses on some key areas. The primary business problem that the software addresses is to enhance team productivity and help increase the efficiency of business processes. Recognizing the way that business has changed over the last couple of years, it’s a product to help organizations collaborate better – connecting people across organizational and geographical boundaries. To improve on adoption and acceptance of WSS in organizations, it provides a web-based interface but it is also tightly integrated with Microsoft Office system. Users of SharePoint create workspaces – workspaces allow a team of people to work together and provide an area to manage team related information including documents and discussions.
We classify the types of sites that you can create in WSS into three primary categories. The first is an Organizational Workspace, the second is Team Workspaces, and the third is Application Workspaces.
- Organizational Workspaces live for the lifetime of the organization or business unit within the organization.
- Team Workspaces allow organizations and teams to collaborate on projects to get work done.
- Application Workspaces are applications that are built on top of Windows SharePoint Services. For all workspaces, you can access the workspace through Office products or through a browser.
For Organization and Team workspaces, you can use standard templates to create the initial site. Like Windows SharePoint Services v2, Windows SharePoint Services v3 includes some standard site templates to get you up and running quickly. These include a Team site, Document workspaces, and some new types like a Blog site and a Wiki site. The built-in blog site allows you to post you and your team's thoughts in articles, solicit input by allowing users to post comments, and allow RSS readers to connect to the blog. Wikis make it easy for groups of people to work together on the same page in an easy to edit format. You have full support for understanding who make what changes. This is an efficient way to work on content together and brainstorm ideas. Common tools used in Organizational and Team workspaces are announcements, contacts, events, tasks, issues, discussions, and other SharePoint web parts that would help the organization or team accomplish its goals.
For application workspaces, as with WSS v2, Microsoft plans to package up some application templates for you to download off their website. They include everything from core Human Resources applications like Absence Request and Vacation Schedule Management to more vertical related applications like a template for Professional Services Site for Engagement Team Resourcing.
Key Potential Activities
Designing , Building, and Testing Application workspaces (lists, document libraries, content types, site columns, and other site content)
Definition and Benefits - We can help clients by designing and building sophisticated collaborative applications using some of the built-in features of SharePoint. You have quite a number of options for managing structured and unstructured information in your workspaces. Document libraries have been the foundation for unstructured information, whereas lists have been the foundation for structured information. You have a number of features built into SharePoint 2007 lists including
- support for tens of thousands of items per list,
- major and minor versioning per item,
- new built-in field types,
- support for hundreds of columns (256, to be exact) so you can build long surveys,
- advanced techniques for increasing performance for your lists including the ability to specify column indexes,
- and you can also create cross site queries, views, and lookup fields.
Lists and document libraries automatically support RSS feeds and you can even take an editable version offline with a compatible WSS e-mail program, like Outlook 2007.
Developing Custom Web Parts
Definition and Benefits - Web Parts are vital to SharePoint. Developers and business users can use pre-built web parts to quickly build applications. We can create web parts to provide functionality that may not be provided by the standard web parts. A web part is a server control written in .NET that enables end users to modify the content, appearance, and behavior of Web pages directly from a browser. Each one of the web parts gives the user a set of elements on the web page. These elements can be as simple as some static text or images, or something very dynamic that pulls information from other data source locations. Web parts support many features that you can easily use on your own web page. This support is provided using two key concepts called Customization and Personalization. To customize the web part, just modify the properties displayed through the SharePoint user interface. You can change many elements that will be seen by all members of the site. Some examples of these customizations include the look and feel of the site or title information for each web part. Personalization can be used when you want to make a change that only you can see. This prevents the changes you make from being seen by all other members that visit the site. Web parts make SharePoint easy to extend by giving developers the ability to create full featured application logic in an encapsulated bit of functionality. As we will see later, SharePoint 2007 has made it even easier for site administrators to add web parts to their sites.
Developing Custom Workflows
Definition and Benefits - The addition of Windows Workflow to SharePoint 2007 creates a more full featured application environment. We can use Windows Workflow to create custom business processes and attach them to documents or list items for a full featured Workflow experience. The custom business processes are represented as Workflows. A Workflow is a natural way to organize and run a set of work units, or activities, to form an executable representation of a work process. SharePoint 2007 and Windows Workflow give developers a way to integrate into SharePoint control points in the lifecycle of a document as it progresses through a Workflow. The Workflow engine that is built into SharePoint 2007 provides a powerful and flexible engine that enables a developer to create effective Workflows. SharePoint Workflows provide the flexibility needed to allow for Workflows to continue or end based on human interaction. Depending on what your business requirements are, we can create simple or complex Workflows and as those workflow requirements get more complex we will use more sophisticated tools for authoring these Workflows, like Visual Studio 2005.
Defining data storage using Custom Site Columns and Content Types
Definition and Benefits - Content Types and Site Columns are two powerful concepts that we use when building solutions on a Windows SharePoint Services site. Content Types are the foundation for content management in WSS v3 – they are used to organize data in Windows SharePoint Services sites. They are a reusable definition for list schema and define constraints and requirements for an item type. By reusable, they can be used across multiple document libraries and custom lists. Like Content Types, you can use Site Columns for consistency for data across your Windows SharePoint Services sites. Also like Content Types, Site Columns share many of the object oriented qualities of Content Types. You can define them at the top level site and they would be available to all the sites in the site collection. When designing a solution on Windows SharePoint Services v3, we can use Site Columns and Content Types to create a solution that is well defined and flexible for your application storage needs.
Customizing look and feel with Master Pages and Page Templates
Definition and Benefits - With the use of ASP.NET 2.0 Master Pages, SharePoint 2007 gives you a way to have the same look and feel on all site pages. And these changes do not apply to any administrative pages. Master Pages will help with customizing and branding your SharePoint sites – it basically gives you a way to define a template so that you can apply a consistent look and feel across your SharePoint sites. Each web page in a SharePoint site references an ASP.NET version 2.0 master page. Each site has a master page gallery that the site owner can use to customize the look of all of the pages on the site.
Designing Site Definitions and Custom Templates
Definition and Benefits - A site definition is the blueprint for how sites look and what information is included on them. When a new website is created in SharePoint, a user selects the site definition. The files that make up the site definition or custom template define exactly what will be on the web site once it is instantiated. Site definitions and templates determine which lists, files and web parts will be on the page. The site definition can be made up of features and files. Custom templates on the other hand are created through the SharePoint user interface or the object model and are stored in the SharePoint database. This is an easy way for end users to create the look and feel of their site with web parts and other functionality. When you install SharePoint 2007, multiple site definitions are provided for you. Although most of these sites will not have the exact look and feel you may want for site there are many ways to modify them and update them as desired.
Developing Custom Event Handlers
Definition and Benefits - SharePoint 2007 has created an extensive set of events that we can use to perform custom logic based on an event in SharePoint. This allows for a fully integrated set of Workflows, content management, and document management. These events are written as event handlers, which we can use to execute code once they occur. This code can be written with manage code to access objects when the events occur. By providing more events, this has created a more rich development environment that can perform tasks at multiple times.
Deploying by using Packaging Features and Solutions
Definition and Benefits - We can use Features and Solutions for various types of deployment scenarios. In SharePoint 2003, every time a new site definition was created all of the functionality had to be copied to that site definition. This caused a lot of duplicate code and required administrators to maintain many files on the front end web servers. Another problem that administrators ran into was the problem of versioning. With SharePoint 2007 using the feature framework each feature has a central location and can be used by many site definitions to provide the additional functionality.
Designing and Implementing Security
Definition and Benefits - WSS v3 provides a built in role based security model. Item-level security is certain to be a popular new feature in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services v3. List and document libraries now feature the ability to set roles on each item, rather than simply at the lists level. We can help design the required security for applications based on your requirements.
Developing custom applications that use SharePoint Object Model or SharePoint Web Services
Definition and Benefits - We can use SharePoint object model to enhance the functionality of SharePoint with managed code. Connecting multiple applications together can be a challenge, but with the object model and other tools in SharePoint, you can connect to systems and create direct integration to other critical applications. The ability to centrally manage sites through an administrative namespace makes SharePoint very powerful. There have been major changes to the administrative namespace to create a single namespace to manage the SharePoint administrative objects. To access the object model from clients you can use the SharePoint Web Services interface to make calls to the object model. This remote access to the object model provides developers with a way to perform management tasks in a programmatic way but not rely on having a connection to be on the server. You can perform many actions including the ability to manage users and permissions. Access to the SharePoint sites and lists is provided on each site through the use of Web Services. The communication used by the web services is done with standard markup languages as well as well known communications channels such as HTTP. ThreeWill can create custom applications that use either the SharePoint Object Model or the SharePoint Web Services interfaces.
Developing Mobile Views of Application Workspace
Definition and Benefits - To easily access your list data, SharePoint allows site creators to easily set up and configure lists to have mobile views. SharePoint uses the mobile controls available from ASP.NET 2.0. We can create custom views of data that is exposed through a mobile view to expand the reach of applications that are built on Windows SharePoint Services v3.
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