What is SharePoint?

 

What is SharePoint?

 

SharePoint is an enterprise information portal, from Microsoft, that can be configured to run Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites.  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows people, teams and expertise to connect and collaborate.  A SharePoint enterprise portal is composed of both SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Services, with SharePoint being built upon WSS.  WSS is typically used by small teams, projects and companies.  SharePoint Server is designed for individuals, teams and projects within a medium to large company wide enterprise portal.

 

Some SharePoint facts:

• SharePoint is the fastest-growing product in the history of Microsoft
• Over 100 million licenses of SharePoint have been sold worldwide
• SharePoint has been adopted by over 17,000 companies worldwide
• SharePoint is listed, by Forrester, as the number 1 portal product
• SharePoint is positioned as a leader within the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals products
• In 2008 sales of SharePoint surpassed 1 billion US dollars

Why should you use SharePoint?

• As companies grow so does the amount of their files. It soon becomes difficult to keep track of the multiplying documents and their locations.  SharePoint overcomes this by allowing you to store and share your files in a central site.

• Sharing work files through email is a cumbersome process.  SharePoint eliminates this by allowing files to be stored in one location, allowing easy access to all team members.

• Business Intelligence has traditionally remained in the hands of a few key decision makers within organizations.  For years, it has been the goal of BI providers to “democratize business intelligence” by making it available to all levels of workers throughout companies.  With the addition of PerformancePoint to the SharePoint Enterprise version of SharePoint, this vision is realized, finally taking business intelligence out of the hands of the few and into the hands of many.

• Today’s work occurs over multiple locations, whether it is in different countries, office locations, separate departments or at your home office. SharePoint enables teams and individuals to connect and collaborate together regardless of where they are located.

• Surveys have shown that employees can spend up to 20 – 30 % of their day searching for data and information.  SharePoint eliminates this drag on productivity by providing the robust search functionality needed to find the information and expertise buried in the thousands, or hundreds of thousands of files a company generates in the course of business.

• It’s difficult and time consuming to create and maintain sites.  SharePoint allows anyone to create sites for use within their company’s Intranet, as they are needed, whether they are departmental sites, document libraries, meetings sites, survey sites, or discussion boards

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a collaborative enterprise portal that is built upon WSS 3.0.  MOSS 2007 allows people, teams and expertise to connect and collaborate.  Unlike WSS, SharePoint Server is not free and requires an additional license.  MOSS 2007 comes in two versions – Standard and Enterprise.

The main components of SharePoint 2007 are collaboration, portals, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.  Previous versions of SharePoint Server included SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and before that SharePoint Portal Server 2001.   To preview SharePoint’s new features visit the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 demo.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is the platform on which all SharePoint Products and Technologies are built.  WSS 3.0 is for is suitable for small teams, projects and organizations.

WSS’s project collaboration, document workspace, meeting sub-site, and discussion board features allow individuals and small teams to collaborate and share information online.  Past versions of Windows SharePoint Services included Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Team Services.  New features in WSS 3.0 include integrated workflows, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and ASP-style Web parts.  To preview more of WSS 3.0’s new features visit the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 demo.

SharePoint Designer 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 is the next generation of Microsoft FrontPage that enables both the design and customization of SharePoint 2007 sites.  SharePoint Designer 2007 allows organizations to automate common business processes through simple or complex custom workflows.  Corporations can apply their corporate branding to their SharePoint portal providing a unified look and feel to all their end users.  Companies can also create customized SharePoint sites based upon the unique needs of your company’s end users, teams, or departments without having to turn to outside consultants.  In 2008, Microsoft made SharePoint Designer 2007 available for free.  To download your free copy of SharePoint Designer visit Microsoft at the SharePoint Designer 2007 home page.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Top 10 Benefits

Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. This tight integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ services themselves and facilitates product adoption.

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.

Top 10 Benefits of Windows SharePoint Services

Improve team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools

Connect people with the information and resources they need. Users can create team workspaces, coordinate calendars, organize documents, and receive important notifications and updates through communication features including announcements and alerts, as well as the new templates for creating blogs and wikis. While mobile, users can take advantage of convenient offline synchronization capabilities.

Easily manage documents and help ensure integrity of content

With enhanced document management capabilities including the option to activate required document checkout before editing, the ability to view revisions to documents and restore to previous versions, and the control to set document- and item-level security, Windows SharePoint Services can help ensure the integrity of documents stored on team sites.

Get users up to speed quickly

User interface improvements in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include enhanced views and menus that simplify navigation within and among SharePoint sites. Integration with familiar productivity tools, including programs in the Microsoft Office system, makes it easy for users to get up to speed quickly. For example, users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office system files and programs.

Deploy solutions tailored to your business processes

While standard workspaces in Windows SharePoint Services are easy to implement, organizations seeking a more customized deployment can get started quickly with application templates for addressing specific business processes or sets of tasks.

Build a collaboration environment quickly and easily

Easy to manage and easy to scale, Windows SharePoint Services enables IT departments to deploy a collaborative environment with minimal administrative time and effort, from simple, single-server configurations to more robust enterprise configurations. Because deployment settings can be flexibly changed, less pre-planning time is required and companies can get started even faster.

Reduce the complexity of securing business information

Windows SharePoint Services provides IT with advanced administrative controls for increasing the security of information resources, while decreasing cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, site management, and support. Take advantage of better controls for site life-cycle management, site memberships and permissions, and storage limits.

Provide sophisticated controls for securing company resources

IT departments can now set permissions as deep down as the document or item level, and site managers, teams, and other work groups can initiate self-service collaborative workspaces and tasks within these preset parameters. New features enable IT to set top-down policies for better content recovery and users, groups, and team workspace site administration.

Take file sharing to a new level with robust storage capabilities

Windows SharePoint Services supplies workspaces with document storage and retrieval features, including check-in/check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata, and customizable views. New features in Windows SharePoint Services include enhanced recycle bin functionality for easier recovery of content and improved backup and restoration.

Easily scale your collaboration solution to meet business needs

Quickly and easily manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services using a Web browser or command-line utilities. Manage server farms, servers, and sites using the Microsoft .NET Framework, which enables a variety of custom and third-party administration solution offerings.

Provide a cost-effective foundation for building Web-based applications

Windows SharePoint Services exposes a common framework for document management and collaboration from which flexible and scalable Web applications and Internet sites, specific to the needs of the organization, can be built. Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 expands these capabilities further to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more.

Some Important interview Questions

>>>Difference between data encapsulation vs abstraction

Encapsulation is nothing but hiding information also called datahiding.
while abstraction denotes the essential characteristics of an object which differentiates from other kinds of object.

 

Abstraction is achieved through encapsulation. Abstraction solves the problem in the design side while encapsulations the implementation

 

Abstraction is virtual class design.

Before actually defining class developer will think about what all properties methods and event will be there in my class.

Whereas encapsulation is data hiding.

At the time of class definitions developer will think about which should display to end user and which should not.

In Short Abstraction is Collection of data and Encapsulation is Exposure (or grouping) of data in appropriate access specifier.

Abstraction means data hiding. That means we use the object without knowing the source code of the class.

Encapsulation is a mechanism by which we design our class such a way that if we change our class in feature we don’t need to change the classes which are depending on our classes.

 

Abstraction is used for hiding the unwanted information and giving relevant information.

Eg: Three set of customers are going to buy a bike First one wants information about the style. Second one wants about the mileage. Third one wants the cost and brand of the bike. So the salesperson explains about the product which customer needs what. So he hiding some information and giving the relevant information.

Encapsulation is combines one or more information into a component.

Eg: Capsule is mixed with one or more medicine and packed into the tube. so its related and acting in two moducles.

————————————————

Encapsulation and abstraction both solve same problem: Complexity; but in different dimensions.

Abstraction: Hides the implementation details of your methods. Provides a base to variations in the application which can grow over a period of time.

Encapsulation: Hides the private data elements of the class and exposes only the required things to the clients.

Both are powerful; but using abstraction require more skills than encapsulation and bigger applications/products can not survive with out abstraction.

It is wrong to call Encapsulation as only data hiding. Though this definition is usually taught in school but now according to latest OOPs principles its considered incomplete.

According to the book Design Patterns Explained

At conceptual level:

Encapsulation means any type of hiding. It can be either data behavior implementation or derived classes or any other thing.

Abstraction means to generalize or conceptualize: to step back from the more concrete to the more conceptual or abstract.

At implementation level:
Encapsulation is achieved by inheritance aggregation or composition.

Abstraction is represented by using abstract classes to represent a generalized version of set of related classes.

>>> Sorting a Array

class SortArray

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

 

string[] names = new string[] { “Rosy”, “Amy”, “Peter”, “Albert” };

Console.WriteLine(“Original Array:”);

foreach (string str in names)

{

Console.WriteLine(str);

}

Console.WriteLine(“Sorted Array:”);

Array.Sort(names);

Array.Reverse(names);

foreach (string str in names)

{

Console.WriteLine(str);

}

 

 

}

}

>>> Connection String in Web.config

<add key=”connStr1″ value=”Data Source=192.168.0.196;Initial Catalog=dbname;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=sa;Password=pass@word1″/>

 

>>> Database.cs class

public class database

{

char DQ = Convert.ToChar(39);

public database()

{

// char DQ = Convert.ToChar(39);

}

public int InsertUpdate(string qry, string connStr)

{

SqlConnection conn = getConnection(connStr);

//  try

//  {

conn.Open();

SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(qry, conn);

int rowsaff = cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

conn.Close();

return rowsaff;

//  }

//catch (Exception ex)

//{

//    throw new Exception(ex.Message);//”Error in Insert/Update”);

 

//}

}

 

public void Alert(string msg)

{

System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(“<script>alert(” + DQ + msg + DQ + “)</script>”);

}

 

public DataSet getDS(string qry, string connStr)

{

DataSet ds = new DataSet();

SqlConnection conn = getConnection(connStr);

try

{

conn.Open();

if (conn.State == ConnectionState.Open)

{

SqlDataAdapter da = new SqlDataAdapter(qry, conn);

da.Fill(ds);

return ds;

}

return ds;

}

catch (Exception ex)

{

throw new Exception(“Error in Getting DataSet” + ex.Message);

}

 

}

public string getOneField(string qry, string connStr)

{

SqlConnection conn = getConnection(connStr);

SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand(qry, conn);

conn.Open();

SqlDataReader dr = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection);

if (dr.HasRows == true)

{

dr.Read();

return Convert.ToString(dr[0]);

}

else

{

return “”;

}

 

 

}

 

//Function to create and return connection based on Connection String

public SqlConnection getConnection(string connStr)

{

SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[connStr]);

return conn;

}