Review: Redmond Outgrows Portal

As the name change implies, Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 offers a lot more than just portal capabilities. MOSS, the successor to Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server, is one of the best platforms for developing .Net applications for the Web. Developing in a MOSS environment is all about speed. The MOSS site template library that's available out of the box also provides extra value to customers that are not eager to implement enterprise solutions with new open-source frameworks such as DotNetNuke.

In addition to its template applications, MOSS developers can purchase SharePoint Designer separately to quickly build new applications without having to rely on plain vanilla Microsoft design tools. SharePoint Designer eliminates most, if not all, of the coding when developing SharePoint workflows. Designers and business users can develop complex business rules to generate actions based on conditions that occur in the workflows. From SharePoint Designer, users can tap CSS to design a single site and propagate the changes to multiple sites.

Configuring MOSS to function on a global scale is only a matter of selecting a different set of installation options and database servers. Creating services for a Web farm requires just a few more steps than setting up services on a Web server. Administrators do not need to know what files are being generated during an installation. The only critical configuration file to maintain is the one with the name of all the databases.

MOSS 2007 has also simplified application management. After a developer creates a simple Web site in IIS with extensions for SharePoint, it is automatically treated as a Web application in SharePoint. The next step for a developer is to create site collections for that Web application.

By starting from a root site collection, a developer can create many other sites. First, a developer has to decide on the type of application that's being created and generate a site structure accordingly, or allow users to create their own. In a collaboration site, for instance, users create sites on an ad hoc basis.

Different databases can also be assigned to the different site collections. The combination of multiple databases to multiple site collections allows developers to scale out an application in a matter of minutes.

A site collection can exist from a single URL and can also expand infinitely. Through a setup wizard, developers can generate multiple roots within a site collection, each having a collection of their own. Using the same technique, site collections as well as other roots can span infinitely from each root.

The MOSS site hierarchy solves the problem of scalability by taking advantage of spanning site collections. CRN Test Center engineers found it to be the simplest and best way to expand an enterprise application.

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