The term "SharePoint" can collectively refer to a number of products ranging from the base platform to various services. The platform is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), which is included with Windows Server and available as a free download for those with Windows Server licenses. Services such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) provide additional functionality and features and are licensed accordingly.Microsoft SharePoint, also known as Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies, is a collection of products and software elements that includes, among a growing selection of components, web browser based collaboration functions,process management modules, search modules and a document-management platform. SharePoint applications can be used to host web sites that access shared workspaces, information stores and documents, as well as host defined applications such as wikis and blogs. All users can manipulate proprietary controls called "web parts" or interact with pieces of content such as lists and document libraries.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, a free editor to help administrators develop and customize SharePoint solutions, is also in the SharePoint family.Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is a free WYSIWYG HTML editor and web design program from Microsoft for SharePoint and other websites and is part of the SharePoint family of products. SharePoint Designer shares its codebase, UI and HTML rendering engine with Microsoft Expression Web, and does not rely on Internet Explorer's Trident engine, which is less standards compliant. One of its differences from the general web design application, Expression Web, is that it does include only SharePoint-specific site templates. It retains more FrontPage features than Expression Web such as web components, database, marquee, hit counter, navigation bars, insert maps etc. Its designer-oriented counterpart, Microsoft Expression Web, which bears a striking similarity to Microsoft SharePoint Designer, is aimed at general web development, and is not free.Microsoft Office Live provides a great way to expand your business using SharePoint Designer. This set of Internet-based services are built on Windows SharePoint Services and are designed to help a small business develop a Web presence, attract new customers, and manage their organization more effectively. Office Live has also created a 3rd-party marketplace for Microsoft partners who are offering services and solutions built on the platform.
Microsoft Search Server (MSS), an enterprise search platform from Microsoft, builds on the search capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server MOSS).MSS shares its architectural underpinnings with the Windows Search platform for both the querying engine as well as the indexer. MOSS search provides the ability to search metadata attached to documents.Microsoft has made Microsoft Search Server available as Search Server 2008, released March 2008. The express edition features the same feature set as the commercial edition, including no limitation on the number of files indexed. However, it is limited to a stand-alone installation and cannot be scaled out to a cluster.Various plugins for indexing third party files, for example Adobe's Acrobat (pdf) files, are available.
With the flexibility of powerful prewritten Web Parts, Web Part Pages, custom lists and libraries, browser-based editing, FrontPage-based editing, Data Sources, Data Views, Web Part connections, and connectivity to Microsoft Office applications, it's amazing how much one can do with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services without programming. Inevitably, however, no tool—or set of tools—can do everything. Web Parts integrate smoothly with the rest of your SharePoint site, leveraging its existing appearance, organization, security, and data management. Web Parts are reusable. One can write them once and use them in as many pages as per requirement.
