Essential SharePoint | O'Reilly Media

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SharePoint is a component of Windows 2003 that lets you share Microsoft Office documents with others through web pages. Unlike most web sites, SharePoint sites are designed to be highly dynamic. Team members can easily upload documents, add public announcements, send alerts, track work items, and call meetings right from within Office products.

SharePoint solves four problems:

It's difficult to keep track of all the documents in even a small office.
Email isn't a great way to share files.
We work all over the place.
It's hard to create and maintain web sites on your own.

Most offices have addressed these problems using a combination of tools or work procedures. For instance, the boss says, "Route your proposal to me, Ed, and Jane for approval," and you email the file to each of them, asking for comments with change-tracking enabled. You set a deadline, keep copies of each reviewer's response, and reconcile conflicting comments.

That approach works because your boss, Ed, and Jane are great coworkers, check their email often, and communicate well with each other, and because the proposal is well-suited for this approach. It's pretty easy to throw a wrench into that machine, however. Say, for instance, your proposal isn't a Word document, but rather a set of drawings, a spreadsheet of test results, and a list of links to related products. How do you route that? How do you collect comments?

Or say your project has multiple authors and multiple files. Each of these complications increases the vulnerability of the process, and improvised solutions start to break down: zipped files bounce back from mail servers, comments are lost or not archived, out-of-date drawings are included, deadlines are missed.

SharePoint helps solve all these problems using the Office system. Instead of routing the files by email, you set up a workspace for project documents on a SharePoint web site. Email alerts notify reviewers when files are available; reviewers can discuss changes online, read each other's comments, and assign tasks and deadlines—and all changes are recorded in version history.

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SharePoint solves four problems:

It's difficult to keep track of all the documents in even a small office.
Email isn't a great way to share files.
We work all over the place.
It's hard to create and maintain web sites on your own.

Most offices have addressed these problems using a combination of tools or work procedures. For instance, the boss says, "Route your proposal to me, Ed, and Jane for approval," and you email the file to each of them, asking for comments with change-tracking enabled. You set a deadline, keep copies of each reviewer's response, and reconcile conflicting comments.

That approach works because your boss, Ed, and Jane are great coworkers, check their email often, and communicate well with each other, and because the proposal is well-suited for this approach. It's pretty easy to throw a wrench into that machine, however. Say, for instance, your proposal isn't a Word document, but rather a set of drawings, a spreadsheet of test results, and a list of links to related products. How do you route that? How do you collect comments?

Or say your project has multiple authors and multiple files. Each of these complications increases the vulnerability of the process, and improvised solutions start to break down: zipped files bounce back from mail servers, comments are lost or not archived, out-of-date drawings are included, deadlines are missed.

SharePoint helps solve all these problems using the Office system. Instead of routing the files by email, you set up a workspace for project documents on a SharePoint web site. Email alerts notify reviewers when files are available; reviewers can discuss changes online, read each other's comments, and assign tasks and deadlines—and all changes are recorded in version history.

SharePoint is a big improvement over improvised solutions, but the degree of improvement is affected by two conditions:

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Documents store and share information, but there are two aspects that documents sometimes ignore: content modification and change tracking. To see this handled well in a web-based document library, visit the W3C web site, which indicates change using formatting as shown in Figure 1-1.

If you want to find the reason for a change, you can visit a discussion at the link to the HTML working group. You have to be a member of the group to see the discussion, but that restriction is appropriate since reading and participating in discussions are key benefits of joining the W3C.

The W3C put a lot of thought and effort into designing and maintaining their site, which does an excellent job of storing and sharing knowledge about web standards. It's a library of current standards, the history of those standards, discussions, and lists of related work.

SharePoint lets you create the same type of document libraries, histories, discussions, and lists by gathering the work from around your office and making it available from a web page. Figure 1-2 shows the SharePoint workspace I used to create this book.

Figure 1-1: W3C uses diff-marked web pages to share changes

Figure 1-2: Sharing chapter files with my publisher via SharePoint

I didn't put as much thought or effort into my site as the W3C did, but the two sites have a lot in common. They both:

Contain a library of documents.
Record change history for those documents.
Provide a forum for online discussions.
List links to related information.
Permit members different levels of access.

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The main difference between my site and the W3C site is that mine contains mostly Word documents, while their site is mostly HTML files. That means my users must have Word to view the files in Figure 1-2, but it also means that those users can open those files directly from the web site and make changes if they have permission.

In fact, my editors don't even need to open my site to make changes. They can open the Word files listed in Figure 1-2 and save them to their own computers as linked documents; then whenever they open their local copy, it is automatically refreshed with changes from the SharePoint site. Similarly, any changes they make to the files are sent to SharePoint when they close their local copy, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3 illustrates a distributed file system where O'Reilly (my publisher) can share access to the files I am working on, even though I live in Florida, and they are in Massachusetts and California (and sometimes in between).

The files are synchronized over the Internet whenever the file is opened or closed. If Simon (my editor) finds himself somewhere without a good network connection, however, he can cancel the updates but still work on the file—as long as he promises to synchronize it later!

For me, SharePoint replaced zipping files and emailing them as they were completed, reviewed, or changed, because very large zip files sometimes bounced back from the mail server—putting the "dead" in deadline.

Figure 1-3: Local copies can be linked to SharePoint documents

SharePoint provides several types of collaboration tools, as shown in Figure 1-4:

Announcements: Use to keep teammates informed.
Alerts

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SharePoint creates web sites. That means your documents can be made public over the Internet, shared within a private intranet, or both. My site is public, but access to certain areas is restricted so that no one steals my chapters.

I assigned different permissions to different members of my site. As site administrator, I have full control; Simon and John are contributors and can make changes; my technical reviewers can read files; and so on. Once the chapters are complete, I move

Figure 1-4: SharePoint sites provide tools to communicate with team members

selected excerpts to a public area that allows everyone to read them. I maintain these levels of access from a web page within the SharePoint site as shown in Figure 1-5.

Membership is a key aspect of SharePoint. In most organizations, individuals may belong to many different teams. Some teams are organizational (company, division, department, etc.) while other teams span organization lines (project teams, task forces, and so on). SharePoint accommodates both structures well; there's a lot more on this in Chapter 2.

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SharePoint sites are organized into folders, just like any other web site, but there are some terms SharePoint uses that should be explained up front:

Virtual server: The root location for one or more web sites. SharePoint can host multiple virtual servers on a single server. Each virtual server can have its own domain name. For example, www.usingsharepoint.com and www.mstrainingkits.com are hosted on the same SharePoint server.

Figure 1-5: Adding members and setting permissions from a web page in SharePoint
Site collection: A group of top-level sites on one virtual server. Site collections allow separate administration of related sites.
Top-level site: The primary web site for a domain. Each virtual server can host many different top-level web sites, which in turn contain subsites. If SharePoint is set up to allow self-service site creation, other top-level sites may also exist in the //domain/sites/ folder.
Subsite: A site within a top-level web site. Subsites are used to control access and organize the content within a site; members of the top-level site may or may not have access to a specific subsite.
Page: Sites contain web pages that present their content. Most SharePoint pages are web part pages (.aspx), but you can also add HTML pages or other content to SharePoint sites as document libraries.

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Authorized team members can create new sites in SharePoint very easily—in fact, just a few clicks in Word creates a new document workspace site almost instantly. To help impose a unified look, SharePoint includes site templates that influence the type of site created. SharePoint comes with eight different templates, but there are only three types you need to worry about for now, as shown in Table 1-1.

Table 1-1: Main types of SharePoint sites
Template	Use to	Contains these lists
Team site	Create, organize, and share information among team members. This is usually the root site for a department or project team.	Document library, Announcements, Events, Contacts, Quick links
Document workspace	Collaborate on one or more documents. This is the template used when a shared workspace is created in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.	Document library, Tasks, Links
Meeting workspace	Schedule and track an in-person meeting. This is the template used when Outlook creates a meeting workspace.	Objectives, Attendees, Agenda, Document library

Most groups or departments will have a team site as their main top-level site, then use document workspaces and meeting workspaces to organize projects and meetings within the group. Figure 1-7 shows the default sites created by the three main site templates.

SharePoint sites have three key navigation areas, as illustrated in Figure 1-8:

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Each SharePoint site has a home page named default.aspx. Different site templates create different home pages, as shown in Figure 1-7. These pages are made up of web parts—a web part is a type of custom control that contains a title bar, a frame, and content. Figure 1-9 indicates the web parts included in a document workspace.

Figure 1-7: Team, workspace, and meeting sites

Figure 1-8: Navigating between team and workspace sites

Figure 1-9: Web parts on a home page

Web parts appear on a web part page , which is a special type of page that contains zones where you can drag and drop web parts. The home page of each site is a web part page. Web parts often present data from lists within the site. In fact, all of the lists in a site show up as web parts when you create a new web part page, as shown in Figure 1-10.

Figure 1-10: Designing a web part page

I said that lists are tables of related data, but that doesn't really convey the importance of lists within SharePoint. Lists are used to organize and store Office documents, links, members, discussions, images, and all other types of content in SharePoint. For the most common tables, SharePoint includes a set of list templates, which are categorized and described by task in Table 1-2.

Table 1-2: Types of lists
Category

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If you install SharePoint, create a few sites, then search your server's file system, you might be surprised that you can't find the web pages you just created. That's because SharePoint stores content in a SQL Server database, not in conventional files and folders.

Using SQL Server gives SharePoint advantages in performance, security, and indexing (for site searches). Remember what I said about lists being tables? Tables...SQL...does it start to make sense?

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Once SharePoint is installed and your group or department has set up a team site, authorized members of the team can create document workspace sites from their desktops using Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Members create document workspaces when they want to get input from others. Workspaces are intended for works-in-progress rather than for completed documents.

To create workspaces over the Internet from Office, you must first add the SharePoint site address to the Trusted Sites list in Internet Explorer. Choose Tools → Internet Options → Security → Trusted Sites → Sites. Be sure to clear the Require server verification (https:) checkbox before entering the address.

The 2003 versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint all include a Shared Workspace task pane, as shown in Figure 1-11, that you use to create and maintain workspaces. The following example illustrates how to use a workspace to develop a project:

Start Word 2003 and write a draft of the project plan.
Once you are happy with your first draft, save the document on your PC, then choose View → Task Pane → Shared Workspace.
On the Shared Workspace task pane, name the workspace, elect the location of the team site, and choose Create. SharePoint creates a new workspace site, adds the project plan to it, and links your local copy of the document to the copy on the SharePoint server.
Use the Shared Workspace task pane to add the names of the teammates you want input from; then choose Send email to all members to let them know a draft is ready for review.
Reviewers can open the draft from the SharePoint site, make comments or changes in the document, and then save those changes to share them with other members.
As the project moves forward, members can open the project plan document, then add other documents to the workspace using the Shared Workspace task pane as shown in Figure 1-12.

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Similarly, you can create meeting workspaces from within Outlook by following these steps:

In the Outlook Calendar, select a date and time for the meeting and choose Actions → New Meeting Request or Actions → New Recurring Meeting. Outlook displays the Meeting dialog box.
Choose Meeting Workspace. Outlook displays the Meeting Workspace task pane as shown in Figure 1-14.
Choose Create in the task pane and Outlook creates a meeting workspace site in SharePoint.

Figure 1-12: Adding documents to the workspace from Word

Figure 1-13: Performing workspace tasks through the browser

Figure 1-14: Creating meeting workspaces from within Outlook

Meeting workspaces aren't meant to host meetings online, but rather to provide a way to track objectives, agendas, and decisions of meetings held in person. For example, someone might take notes at the meeting, then enter those notes later in the meeting workspace to communicate the results. You could even do so using a laptop during the meeting—if you're good at typing and talking at the same time.

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Because the names are similar, it's easy to confuse document workspaces and document libraries, but they are very different.

A document workspace is a special type of subsite that contains works-in-progress. Workspaces often contain only one document (perhaps a large report or spreadsheet) that a team is working on. Document workspaces have special features that are covered more in Chapter 5.

A document library is used to store multiple documents within a site. Completed documents should be stored in document libraries that are part of the team site. Document libraries are a special type of list (not a type of site), and are covered extensively in Chapter 6. Libraries collect related documents and share them with all members of the site. Documents can be organized into folders within the library, allowing you to categorize documents as shown in Figure 1-15.

Figure 1-15: Using document libraries to organize completed documents

Every document workspace site actually includes a document library for the work-in-progress, but because document workspaces are subsites of the team site, not everyone has access to those files. Storing completed documents in a library at the team site makes those documents more widely available.

You can't create document libraries from the Shared Workspace task pane—you do it by viewing the SharePoint site in a browser and choosing Create → Document Library and completing the New Document Library form. Of course, there's always an exception: you can create picture libraries using the task pane in Office Picture Manager, as shown in Figure 1-16.

Figure 1-16: Creating and modifying picture libraries from Office Picture Manager

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SharePoint's default site template is kind of boring-looking in my opinion. If you are creating a site for public view, you'll probably want to customize the look by applying a theme, modifying the home page, and/or adding your own pages to the site.

Themes control the color scheme of a site. To choose a theme for a SharePoint site, choose Site Settings → Apply a Theme. SharePoint lets you choose from a list of themes and preview the result, as shown in Figure 1-17.

You can modify any SharePoint page by choosing Modify Shared Page → Design This Page, but you have more control over changes if you open the site in FrontPage 2003. FrontPage can open SharePoint sites right from their server location, make changes, and save the new pages right back to SharePoint—you will never even notice you're writing to a database (see Figure 1-18).

Finally, you can upload pages from existing web sites using FrontPage or by creating a document library in SharePoint. Document libraries can contain any type of content, including HTML and ASPX pages.

Figure 1-17: Use themes to improve the look of a site

Figure 1-18: Using FrontPage to edit SharePoint pages

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Because SharePoint is designed to be used by different members with different responsibilities, the software needs for each team member vary depending on their role, as shown in Table 1-4.

Table 1-4: Software needs for different team members
Role	Responsibilities	Software needed
Administrator	Creates team sites, adds members.	Web browser, Remote Desktop Connection utility included with Windows XP Professional (recommended)
Designer	Designs pages on site, creates site templates.	FrontPage 2003
Contributor	Adds documents, lists, tasks, announcements, etc.	Office 2003
Contributor with data entry	Completes InfoPath forms.	Office 2003, InfoPath 2003
Reader	Views sites and documents, but makes no changes.	Office Reader
Programmer	Creates custom web parts.	Visual Studio .NET, FrontPage 2003, InfoPath (optional)

Where's the server software? You don't need actual

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I recommend using the 30-day free trial of SharePoint before installing it on Windows 2003. There are three good reasons for this: it's free, it's painless, and it's quick. Then, if you like it go ahead and put it on your server.

To get a free SharePoint site, go to http://www.sharepointtrial.com/default.aspx. Follow the signup instructions and wait for email confirming your site has been created. If everything goes correctly, you'll get a new SharePoint site that looks something like Figure 1-19.

Figure 1-19: Creating a free trial site before installing SharePoint

You can then experiment with sharing workspaces and lists, or you can just mess around with your new SharePoint site for a while, changing the home page, adding users (choose Site Settings → Manage Users), adding a welcome announcement (choose Add new announcement), or posting your vacation pictures (choose Pictures → Create Picture Library). Get a feel for what it can do.

SharePoint is a foundation for building sites that solve specific problems. The general site types Microsoft includes (team sites and workspaces) are a starting point, not an end point. If you have more specific needs, look for SharePoint add-ons (sometimes called accelerators ). Some accelerators, such as workflow management systems, are already available from multiple vendors. See the "Resources" section for a link to a set of Microsoft accelerators you can try for free.

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SharePoint is an excellent way to create data-driven web sites, in my opinion, but there are other times where I don't think it's the best choice. For example, SharePoint isn't a substitute for a code management library, such as SourceSafe. (Microsoft is working on this for Visual Studio 2005, however, so watch out!) Also, SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Office, Windows, and .NET means that users of other operating platforms (Mac, Linux) or non-Microsoft browsers may have problems using the sites.

In particular, SharePoint authentication does not seem to work with Internet Explorer for the Macintosh or Mozilla prior to Version 1.7.2. In addition, SharePoint pages look different in FireFox, Mozilla, and Netscape Navigator than they look in Internet Explorer. You can compare these differences by using different browsers to view public SharePoint sites such as the last two listed in "Resources." (Users of these other platforms can still get to the files, but they can't really take advantage of SharePoint's integration and management features.)

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To get	Look here
Free trial versions of SharePoint	`http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/`
SharePoint Portal Server pricing	`http://www.microsoft.com/office/sharepoint/howtobuy/default.mspx`
Online SharePoint tutorial	`http://www.usingsharepoint.com/SPTraining/`
A great SharePoint FAQ	`http://wss.collutions.com/`
A great SharePoint demo site	`http://www.wssdemo.com/`
SharePoint accelerators	`http://www.microsoft.com/office/solutions/accelerators/`

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There are several ways to get SharePoint Services. The biggest choice is whether to host SharePoint on your own server or whether to buy the services from a hosting provider. The primary advantage of hosted services is that you don't need to wrangle with installing and maintaining SharePoint yourself. The main disadvantage is that you lose some of the flexibility and control you get from using your own server.

In this chapter, I show you how to get started using a hosted site; then I explain how to install SharePoint on your own server. These two tasks build on each other: if you create a hosted site first, you'll be better prepared when you install SharePoint. Even if you don't intend to host your own site, you can still develop some advanced skills by completing the chapter.

It's easy to create new web sites using SharePoint—in fact, perhaps it's too easy. Before you begin, it's important to understand how SharePoint structures sites and how those structures affect what you can do later.

The simplest site structure is a single top-level site located on a single server. In that scenario, members of the site have one set of permissions, and those permissions determine which lists and libraries they can see, as well as what actions they can take on those lists and libraries.

Lists and libraries in this simple site are stored in subfolders (for example, http://www.mysite.com/Lists/Announcements), but those subfolders exist within the site's boundaries. The concept of site boundaries is important for the following reasons:

Member permissions may or may not be inherited across site boundaries.
Lists and libraries cannot be easily shared across site boundaries.
Searches do not cross site boundaries (unless you purchase SharePoint Portal Server, which provides cross-site searching).

Notice that I haven't mentioned workspaces. That's because workspaces are a type of site and so establish new boundaries.

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It's easy to create new web sites using SharePoint—in fact, perhaps it's too easy. Before you begin, it's important to understand how SharePoint structures sites and how those structures affect what you can do later.

The simplest site structure is a single top-level site located on a single server. In that scenario, members of the site have one set of permissions, and those permissions determine which lists and libraries they can see, as well as what actions they can take on those lists and libraries.

Lists and libraries in this simple site are stored in subfolders (for example, http://www.mysite.com/Lists/Announcements), but those subfolders exist within the site's boundaries. The concept of site boundaries is important for the following reasons:

Member permissions may or may not be inherited across site boundaries.
Lists and libraries cannot be easily shared across site boundaries.
Searches do not cross site boundaries (unless you purchase SharePoint Portal Server, which provides cross-site searching).

Notice that I haven't mentioned workspaces. That's because workspaces are a type of site and so establish new boundaries.

Let's extend the simple scenario above: you open a document in Word and choose Tools → Shared Workspace to share the document on http://www.mysite.com. SharePoint creates a new document workspace site and copies that document up to the workspace.

The new workspace site is named after the document (http://www.mysite.com/ProjectPlan, for example) and has only one member: you. That's because new workspaces use unique permissions, and by default you have to add members manually. To change the default permissions so that all members from the parent site automatically have access:

Open the workspace in the browser.
Choose Site Settings

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Hosted solutions are a great way to try out SharePoint without committing a lot of resources up front. Table 2-1 lists some of the hosting providers currently available; several offer a free trial period.

Table 2-1: Some SharePoint hosting providers
Company	Site	Provides
Apptix	`http://www.apptix.net/default.aspx`	Free 30-day trial
ASP-One, Inc.	`http://www.asp-one.com/default.asp`	Combined Microsoft Exchange/SharePoint Server hosting
Enlightened Technology Group, Inc.	`http://www.etgroup.net/pages/sharepoint_hosting.aspx`	SharePoint Server hosting at different service levels
FrontPages Web Hosting Network	`http://www.frontpages-web-hosting.net/sharepoint.hosting.htm`	SharePoint and other types of hosting
724 Hosting	`http://www.724hosting.com/sharepoint/`	Free 30-day trial

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To add members to a SharePoint site:

From the home page navigation bar, click Site Settings → Manage users → Add users. The results are displayed in Figure 2-1.
Enter the usernames to add and select a group for the new members. Groups determine what privileges members have on the site as listed in Table 2-2. When you click Next, SharePoint displays Figure 2-2.
Type a greeting to send the new SharePoint members and click Finish to complete the task. New members will receive email including their user name and an automatically generated password for the site.

Adding members by site group lets you add new members in batches, rather than one at a time. Table 2-2 lists SharePoint's built-in groups in ascending order of access privileges.

Figure 2-1: Adding names for members and selecting their group

Figure 2-2: Sending email to alert new members

Table 2-2: Built-in SharePoint member groups
Group	Allows
Guest	No access by default, but can be granted access to specific items.
Reader	Read-only access to the site.
Contributor	Add content to existing document libraries and lists.
Web designer

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Administrators and web designers can change the appearance of pages on the SharePoint site by applying themes, designing an existing page, or by using FrontPage. Table 2-4 summarizes those different techniques.

Table 2-4: Ways to change SharePoint pages
Use	To
Themes	Change the fonts and color scheme for all pages on a site.
Design a page	Add, move, or delete web parts on a page through the browser.
FrontPage 2003	Significantly change the content or appearance of a page, or create new pages on the site.

To apply a theme, click Site Settings → Apply Theme to site, and choose a theme. Themes affect only the current site: subsites and workspaces subordinate to the site are unaffected.

To design a page, click Modify Shared Page → Design this page in the upper right-hand corner (Figure 2-5). SharePoint displays the page in edit mode, showing the web part zones. You can drag web parts from one zone to another, or you can select Modify shared web parts to change a web part Changing a page in this way is handy for minor changes such as changing the text in a title bar of a web part.

Figure 2-5: Changing a page through the browser

For example, to change the "Announcements" titlebar shown in Figure 2-5 to "Quote of the day":

Click Modify Shared Page → Modify Shared Web Parts → Announcements. SharePoint displays the Announcements web part in edit mode.

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There are many ways to add content to a SharePoint site depending on the type of content you want to add. The following sections describe different ways to add lists , libraries, pages, and workspaces to a SharePoint site and explain when to use each approach.

At the simplest level, you can add content to the home page by clicking Add new announcement, Add new event, or Add new link. Clicking on any of these displays a form view for adding items to the SharePoint list, as shown in Figure 2-8. When you click Save and Close, SharePoint adds the announcement to the list which appears on the home page in the Announcements web part.

To create your own lists from the browser:

Click Documents and Lists → Create → Custom List. SharePoint displays the New List page.
Enter the list information and click Create. SharePoint displays the new list in its default view.

Figure 2-8: Adding items to the Announcements list
Click Modify settings and columns → Add new column to add columns to the list. SharePoint displays Figure 2-9.
Add column information and click OK.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each column in the list.

Figure 2-9: Adding columns to a new list

To display the new list on the home page:

From the home page, click Modify Shared Page

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You'll encounter two security issues when first using a SharePoint site over the Internet:

Opening files from a library or workspace displays a security warning, as shown in Figure 2-18.
You can't create workspaces from Office applications.

You can't get rid of the security warning: Internet Explorer always warns you when you open files, such as Word or Excel files, that might contain viruses. However, if you open the file using the Office application or open a local file linked to the SharePoint site, you won't see the warning in Figure 2-18.

Figure 2-18: Security warning when opening Office files from the Internet

The virus risk comes from macros the file might contain, and in any case, the Office macro security settings determine whether or not macros are run. To check those settings in your Office application, choose Tools → Macro → Security.

You can solve the second issue by adding your SharePoint site to the list of trusted sites in Internet Explorer:

Choose Tools → Internet Options → Security → Trusted Sites → Sites. Internet Explorer displays a list of the trusted sites for your local computer (Figure 2-19).
Type the address of your site and click Add → OK → OK to close the dialog.

Figure 2-19: Adding a SharePoint site to Internet Explorer's list of trusted sites

Once the SharePoint site is trusted, Office applications can create workspaces on the site from the Shared Workspace task pane. Neither of these security issues occurs for SharePoint sites on your local area network: those sites are included in the Local intranet zone, which has a higher level of trust.

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All of the tasks in the preceding sections also apply to sites you create on your own server. The major differences between hosted and self-hosted sites are that:

You usually access self-hosted sites over an intranet rather than the Internet, so those sites are automatically trusted, and you have fewer client security issues to worry about.
Since self-hosted sites are usually part of your network, you can quickly grant all network users access to the site (see the section "Adding Members Quickly" later in this chapter).
You must install and maintain SharePoint yourself, which requires more knowledge about tools like IIS, SQL, and Windows security than you need when using hosted sites.
You have direct access to the server, so you have both more control and more responsibility (for backups, etc.) than in a hosted environment.

The rest of this chapter explores installing SharePoint and creating SharePoint sites on your own server. If you've already decided to stick with a hosted site, you can skip ahead to the section "Allowing Anonymous Access," because the next sections don't really apply to you.

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SharePoint Services is a component in Windows Server 2003. To install those services on an existing server you'll need the following:

An account with Administrative privileges for the server
Physical access to the server or access through the Windows XP Professional Remote Desktop utility
Access to a dedicated SQL Server or SQL Server installed on the target server (recommended)

There are three configuration options for installing SharePoint Services, and you should choose your target configuration before proceeding. The main difference among configurations is where data is stored, as described in Table 2-6.

Table 2-6: Possible SharePoint Services database configurations
Description	Database used	Advantages	Disadvantages
Default	WMSDE	Least expensive, simplest configuration	Capacity limited to 2 GB; no full-text search; database maintenance more difficult
Single server with SQL Server	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3	Supports full-text search; backups are easy to manage; capacity is better than WMSDE	Additional expense; web server and database share single processor; limiting performance
Server farm	Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP3 installed on dedicated server

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By default, SharePoint uses network domain accounts to authenticate users. Once authenticated, SharePoint checks the user's identity against the list of members for the site. If the user is a member, he or she is granted permissions based on the group that he or she belongs to (Guest, Reader, Contributor, Web Designer, or Administrator).

You can add individual members to your SharePoint site by following the procedure in "Adding Members" earlier in this chapter, but that can be a lot of work if you have a large organiza

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