Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server is a enterprise information portal which belongs to the Microsoft Office family. In the next release (version 3.0) the current name drops the word 'Portal' and will be called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It is a collaborative portal application based on the Windows SharePoint Services platform, a free component of Windows Server 2003. Windows SharePoint Services offers online publishing of standard file formats. It also has version control, document approval and a basic search facility. SharePoint Portal Server adds search of external content sources, a flexible hierarchy of content areas, enhanced navigation, Single Sign On service and additional personalization features. SharePoint Portal Server's main strength is enabling an organization’s information to be organized and aggregated in one central, web-based application.

The application has a Microsoft SQL Server back-end for storing data. The front-end consists of ASP.NET pages served via Internet Information Services (IIS) 6 on Windows Server 2003. It uses an ISAPI filter to map its web-based path to the database records.

It can be configured to return separate content for Intranet, Extranet and Internet locations. It uses a similar permissions model to Microsoft Windows, via groups of users. Active Directory groups can be added to SharePoint groups to easily tie in permissions.

The primary reason for using SharePoint is to provide a taxonomy for corporate data. SharePoint provides a structure to otherwise disparate data.

Versions

 * 2001 - SharePoint Portal Server 2001
 * 2003 - Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
 * 2007 - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007  (v.12)
 * 2010 - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010  (v.14)
 * 2013 - Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 (v.15)

Sharepoint Portal Server 2001 included basic workflow options, including parallel and serial approval routing. Additionally, Sharepoint document versioning supported major and minor versions, with approval required for major revisions. Enforced security prevented publishing of minor revisions of a document without approval.

Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 eliminated support for minor versions, and removed much of the workflow functionality available in Sharepoint Portal Server 2001. Subsequently, a number of other software vendors have developed products to restore and enhance this lost functionality.

Sharepoint Portal Server 2003 uses Microsoft SQL Server storage for data storage. Documents, document metadata, lists, and ASPX web pages are stored as database records. Sharepoint Portal Server 2001 utilized Web Storage System files, a variant of a Microsoft Exchange datastore, for all document storage.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will support Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005 for data storage and is built with ASP.NET 2.0