History of Sharepoint

Sharepoint 2001

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2001 was the first release of enterprise collaboration services. This portal product was based on ASP technology and focused on creating workspace.

With a workspace  the product provided a document repository as well as a web site where an organization could set up a site structure or taxonomy for organizing its information. The focus here was that documents should be categorized and that users would browse the category terms to locate their documents of interest.

Included in this release was a search service as well as a Web-based component platform supporting web parts. A major difference between this version and the ones that would follow is that SharePoint 2001 did not rely on SQL Server for storage.

Sharepoint 2003

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 gave organizations the ability to create enterprise portals. These portal sites relied on the WSS foundation for their document-repository needs and added new features for the enterprise, including a search that could index not only content stored within its repositories but also other content stores, such as file shares, web sites, and Microsoft Exchange public folders.

SharePoint 2003 folded the workers of the system into the content mix as well. The services of My Sites and user profiles allowed the system to capture information about an organization’s users and provided an application that let users view each other’s profiles from within the system, access documents they shared, and locate users by attributes such as proficiency in a particular language.

In fact, a user could be returned as a search result item along with documents and sites. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 also extended the web-part interface provided by WSS by incorporating a personalization service that allowed for a page to hide or show specific web parts to specific audiences of users.

SharePoint’s single-sign-on service provided an application-development framework for translating security contexts between the logged-in user and that user’s credentials to an external application whose data was used by a web part.

Ultimately, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 completed the touch points a user would have with his organization’s information. Whereas WSS answered the needs for teams of users, SPS provided the services to meet the needs of the overall organization, divisions, and even the individual.

Sharepoint 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) extended the capabilities of SPS 2003 by adding enterprise features to the platform. Built on the success of the 2003 release, this product expanded into new areas. The definition of content management was expanded to include web content and records management.

In fact, the addition of web content management meant that MOSS swallowed whole the product capability of Microsoft Content Management Server.

This was a benefit to customers in that there was no longer a need to support two separate products and platforms for content management. It also eliminated the need to glue the two products together for a complete offering. Moreover, MOSS 2007 integrated electronic forms into its definition of content, solving a key problem for InfoPath in the process.

InfoPath, introduced in Office 2003, was a great product for quickly building forms without code but was limited in that the user filling out the form also had to have the InfoPath client application. MOSS solved this problem by automatically generating a web-based equivalent of the form using its InfoPath Forms Services feature.

MOSS 2007 also expanded to play a pivotal role in business intelligence by allowing users to visualize their data in dashboards. A major part of this functionality was Excel Services which, much like Forms Services, allowed users to publish their spreadsheets to the server. Once the spreadsheets were published, the rich charting and visualization capability of Excel could be utilized through web-based web parts that could still maintain their connection to data sources.

Furthermore, MOSS 2007 became an integration platform with the inclusion of the Business Data Catalog (BDC). This feature enabled the surfacing of line-of-business data from external systems, such as Oracle databases, SAP, or other applications, into a SharePoint environment with the developer only having to describe the external system through XML.