SharePoint is nothing new. Heck, it’s been around since 2001. As fast as technology changes, SharePoint should be ancient history by now. Quite to the contrary, SharePoint has finally found its legs after all these years. ShareWhat, you say? SharePoint is the server-side connective tissue that binds the slippery client-side outputs of office workers into a manageable, searchable, and accessible information environment. Gone are the days when workers just organized their files in electronic folders and had to call the help desk every time something was deleted accidentally. SharePoint provides a self service environment where office workers can take control of information — how it’s organized, who gets access to it, and how it’s displayed. 

Don’t feel bad if you don’t know SharePoint from Shinola. You aren’t alone. Many obstacles are along the path to a successful SharePoint implementation. This blog uses plain English to get you started on your SharePoint journey so that nothing trips you up along the way.

Since SharePoint was first released in 2001, Microsoft has made steady progress on the product’s features. The first few releases of SharePoint consisted primarily of the ability to dynamically generate team Web sites. These sites hosted document libraries, tasks lists, and calendars to enable a small team of users to manage documents and collaborate on a project. The initial product was called SharePoint Team Services but was changed in 2003 to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

The building blocks — lists, libraries, and user-customizable Web pages — used by WSS to create team sites turned out to be very versatile and could be used for more than just team collaboration. Many companies started creating SharePoint sites to solve all kinds of business problems, such as managing help desk tickets and automating expense check requests. Microsoft created a more expensive add-on product, SharePoint Portal Server, that added the ability to create portals and search across team sites. The portal allowed companies to provide centralized access to all their team sites.

Despite SharePoint’s usefulness, the product’s adoption was nichey and sporadic. Also, there was (and still is) significant confusion in the marketplace about what SharePoint is and what it does. When Microsoft sat down to consider the product’s future after the 2003 release, they saw an opportunity to more tightly integrate the product with the Office clients that virtually all office workers already have on their desktops. Increased integration with Office 2007 catapulted SharePoint onto center stage.Microsoft used a host of existing and newly created products to develop the 2007 release of SharePoint. Like pieces of a puzzle, the following product opportunities came together to create a better SharePoint:

• ASP.NET 2.0: The release of ASP.NET 2.0 provided the foundational layer that was missing in previous versions of SharePoint. By using ASP.NET 2.0, Microsoft was able to focus on building a better SharePoint without spending so much time on low-level services. Some of the ASP.NET 2.0 features used or extended by SharePoint include the Web Parts framework, personalization, pluggable authentication, and master pages. WSS 3.0 is truly a testimony to what you can build with ASP.NET 2.0!
• Content Management Server 2002: Like chocolate and peanut butter, many companies, including Microsoft, realized that Content Management Server could be used to support SharePoint. Instead of having a separate server, Microsoft decided to roll Web content management into SharePoint.
• Office 2007: Microsoft realized that companies need a compelling reason to upgrade to Office 2007. Adding more features to Word and Excel doesn’t cut it any more. In addition to completely redesigning the look and feel of most Office clients for the Office 2007 release, Microsoft added many new features that are available only via a server infrastructure. SharePoint is a major player in providing the Office 2007 server infrastructure.
• Search: In 2006, Google went after the desktop, and Microsoft went after search. Microsoft introduced a family of search products that target the Web, desktop, and enterprise with the expressly stated intent of taking Google head-on. SharePoint is the key element that delivers enterprise search.
• Windows Workflow Foundation (WF): The release of WF with version 3.0 of the .NET Framework brings a workflow engine to SharePoint, Office 2007, and all applications that run on Windows. Workflows make it possible to step through a process, such as submitting a document for approval. Building a separate workflow engine decouples workflow capabilities from specific server products. Instead of having only a few products with workflow, all products can have workflow. SharePoint extends WF and provides several out-of-the-box workflow implementations that businesses can use to automate business processes without writing custom code.

By taking advantage of these products along with the new goals of winning search while keeping its talons securely fastened to the business desktop, Microsoft completely re-architected SharePoint into a layer of technologies that consists of these two primary products:

• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) version 3.0 is the foundational product that provides a set of building blocks for creating SharePoint applications. The two primary usage scenarios for WSS are still document management and collaboration. The third usage scenario is a platform for creating applications with SharePoint.
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  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the server-side infrastructure that turns Office 2007 clients into generators and consumers of content for SharePoint applications. MOSS 2007 is the successor to SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Although MOSS supports the creation of portals, Microsoft has expanded it to include many enterprise-level services, such as business intelligence and business process integration. MOSS 2007 is an example of an application created using WSS as a platform.

At this point, I could give you the obligatory laundry list of SharePoint’s features. Even if I did that, you still wouldn’t understand how to use SharePoint. Instead, this blog focuses on using SharePoint’s out-of-the box application building blocks to get up and running solving problems relevant to your business.