Why SharePoint 2007?

It is rare for a technology product to attract as much attention as SharePoint has in recent years. The industry has historically paid little attention to new product suites, particularly those related to web design. SharePoint products and technologies, however, have managed to excite and rejuvenate industry followers, causing them to take notice of the ease of use, scalability, flexibility, and powerful document management capabilities within the product. A number of organizational needs have spurred the adoption of SharePoint technologies. Some of the most commonly mentioned requirements include the following:

A need for better document management than the file system can offer—This includes document versioning, check-out and check-in features, adding metadata to documents, and better control of document access (by using groups and granular security). The high-level need is simply to make it easier for users to find the latest version of the document or documents they need to do their jobs, and ultimately to make them more efficient in those jobs.

Improved collaboration between users with a minimal learning curve— Although virtually everyone has a different definition of what comprises collaboration, a functional definition is a technology solution that allows users to interact efficiently with each other using software products to share documents and information in a user friendly environment. In regard to SharePoint, this typically refers to document and meeting workspaces, site collections, discussion lists, integration of instant messaging and presence information, and integration with the Office suite of applications. Integration with Office applications is a key component: Most organizations do not want to force users to learn a new set of tools to collaborate more effectively because users generally resist such requirements.

A better intranet—Although most companies have an intranet in place, the consensus is that it is too static, that it is not user friendly, and that every change has to go through IT or the “web guy.” This level of request generally comes from a departmental manager, team lead, or project manager frustrated with their inability to publish information to a select group of users and regularly update resources their team needs to do their jobs.

A centralized way to search for information—Rather than using the “word of mouth” search engine (that is, asking coworkers via email for a specific document), there should be an engine in place that allows the user to quickly and efficiently find particular documents. The user can search for documents that contain certain words; documents created or modified during a certain timeframe; documents authored by a specific person; or documents that meet other criteria, such as file type.

Creation of a portal—Many definitions exist for the term portal, but a general definition that a portal is a web-enabled environment that allows Internet and, potentially, external users to access company intellectual resources and software applications. A portal typically extends standard intranet functionality by providing features such as single sign-on, powerful search tools, and access to other core company applications such as help desk, human resources software, educational resources, and other corporate information and applications.

SharePoint is a set of products and technologies with informative and collaborative web-based capabilities that help people create, organize, distribute, and maintain stored knowledge. SharePoint web sites and pages are commonly used to build intranet and extranet portals and team sites, as well as public-facing Internet sites.

SharePoint is a great platform upon which to build applications and provides many key services in the greater story of the Microsoft Application Platform. SharePoint shows great maturity in terms of its user interface, database design, and workflow and communication features. It provides a standard interface with standard navigation, enabling users to focus on tools and information, not on learning how to navigate new menu controls.

SharePoint helps resolve database and business logic issues by providing a powerful complement to structured data - that is, a managed environment to store unstructured data that gets the information and business rules onto the network and out of local Excel files. SharePoint takes advantage of the first workflow platform built into an operating system and makes it easy for developers and power users to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to automate business processes.

Difference between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS3.0) comes free with Windows Server 2003. MOSS is not free and it is installed on top of WSS 3.0.MOSS has both a server cost and a client access license (CAL) cost.

WSS 3.0 offers all the standard site templates to build team sites, document workspaces, blank sites, blogs, wikis, and meeting workspaces. MOSS 2007 offers business intelligence features that allow you to track key performance indicators and build BI dashboards into your team site.

WSS 3.0 can be used to create people and group lists. Moss is used as a super powerful content management system, which aims to provide content management, enterprise content services and enterprise search.
You can integrate WSS 3.0 sites with Access 2007, Excel 2007, Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007. Workflow can also be integrated into MOSS 2007.

It also serves as a platform for application development. Including such IT resources as portals, team workspaces, e-mail, presence awareness, and Web based conferencing, Windows SharePoint Services enables users to locate distributed information quickly and efficiently, as well as connect to and work with others more productively. Moss also offers My Sites, which are individual mini-sites that can be set up to show who in your company you're connected to, what your tasks and skills are, your contact information, and more.MOSS 2007 is the portal system, comparable to SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It brings a wealth of built-in functionality and interoperability to a company's intranet over and above the functions of WSS 3.0.

Create Site Collection: Select template will give minimum options it's like Collaboration and Meetings.Create Site Collection:Select template will give more options it's like Collaboration, Meetings, Enterprise, Custom and Publishing Only WSS 3.0

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Best Practices for SharePoint development

Best Practices for SharePoint Web part Development:

1. Custom Web parts (including resource files) are contained within a SharePoint Feature and are packaged as a SharePoint solution in order to be deployed.
2. The configuration of Web parts that are being deployed gives the administrator the flexibility of deploying to the Web application level or lower.
3. You use the SharePoint Web part infrastructure’s standardized set of connection interfaces for Web parts to exchange information with each other at run time.
4. Source code for third party Web parts solutions, whenever possible, is provided with adequate documentation to ensure good technical support.
5. All custom Web parts utilize the SharePoint architecture to ensure consistent behavior across the application for functionality such as single sign-on, feature deployment, and so on.

Best Practices for General SharePoint Software Development:

1. Assemblies have a strong name. (Dynamically generated ASP.NET Web page assemblies cannot currently have a strong name.)
   
   
2. You use delay signing as a way to protect and restrict the private key that is used in the strong name and signing process.
   
   
3. Assemblies include declarative security attributes (with SecurityAction.RequestMinimum) to specify minimum permission requirements.
   
   
4. Highly privileged assemblies are separated from lower privileged assemblies.
5. If an assembly is to be used in a partial-trust environment (for example, it is called from a partial-trust Web application), then privileged code is in a separate assembly.
   
   
6. You rely on a native configuration file to support the application instead of changing the configuration to the Web.config.
   
   
7. You use .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5.
   
   
8. You use a single .NET Framework version. You do not mix multiple versions.
   
   
9. Your code is 64 bit compatible.
   
   
   
10. Your application does not try to directly access any SharePoint databases. Data stores in SharePoint databases are only updated by using the SharePoint object model.
    
    
11. You avoid hard coding strings and labels. You use resources or language files instead.
    
    
12. When referencing the SPWeb or SPSite objects, you employ a using statement or, alternatively, you use an explicit call of the .Dispose method to ensure proper use and disposing of the memory objects.
    
    
13. You use caching as appropriate to reduce unnecessary round trips. For Web parts, you expose the cache expiration (duration) as a Web part property.
    
    
14. When packaging your solution, you include a Code Access Security policy for the solution and, if necessary, include your assembly in the Safe Controls list though the solution.
15. When logging code, you use the Portal Log class to log the SharePoint Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs.
    
    
16. If you need to update multiple list items by using remote code, you use the Web service to update list items. You only use SPListItem.Update() if you have to update more than one item at a time by using local OM-based code.
    
    
17. When using the Count property of a SPListItemCollection, you only call it once and then store it in a variable that you can refer to when looping. You do not call it inside a loop.
    
    
18. The solution uses the AppSettings object to implement XML mapping. (This can be provided by using the settings persistence framework in .NET 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5.) The solution avoids creating custom XML files and a strongly typed object for XML mapping.
    
    
19. Installation and deployment logging are provided in the event logs to enable appropriate operational troubleshooting during installation and uninstallation.
    

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Share Point ,MOSS 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 top 10 benefits:

Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities. Take advantage of out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. You can complete these activities without any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers provide you with a simple, consistent experience. Modifying and extending these out-of-the-box workflow processes is made easy through tools like Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next release of Microsoft Office FrontPage).

Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content. By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively. And you can reduce litigation risk for your organization. Tight integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with familiar desktop applications means that policy settings are rendered onto client applications in the Microsoft Office system, making it simpler for employees to be aware of and comply with regulatory requirements.

Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value. Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual content is simplified through new document library templates that are specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.

Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems. Give your users access to business data found in common line-of-business systems like SAP and Siebel through Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organizations store and organize business documents in one central location.

Connect people with information and expertise. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 incorporates business data along with information about documents, people, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the relevance of the results, so you can easily find what you need.

Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries. Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.

Share business data without divulging sensitive information. Give your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents (such as financial models).

Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location. Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.

Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on an open, scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The server has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.

My Place Arki

Arki is a small town in Solan district of Himachal Pradesh, in India. It was the capital, of the former BAGHAL State, which later formed part of Himachal. BAGHAL was founded by Raja Ajai Dev in 1660-65 A.D. He was a scion of the family of Bhoj Dev King of Malwa who ruled over the whole of Northern India including Pakistan. Punjab and Sindh in the 10th century. Baghal State was founded by Sabha Chand in 1643. The Fort Palace was built by his son Prithvi Singh between 1695-1700. This Fort was also the Headquaters of the Nepalese General Amar Singh Thapa for 8 Years from 1806-1815, when he wasdriven out by the British General Ochterlony, with the help of Rana Jagat Singh of BAGHAL and Raja Ram Saran Singh of Handur (Nalagarh).
The Arki town was developed in a planned manner by Raja Krishan Singh who ruled the state from 1840 to 1867. He was a patron of arts and learning and a far sighted ruler. He built bridal horse and mule tracks to connect Arki with Shimla and Bilaspur and settled artisans, artists, scholars and buisnessmen from other parts of India in Arki and nearby giving them tax free land free of cost.