1. What are the integration differences between SPS 2003 and the various Office versions?

SPS webpage can detect you have installed the Office 2003 and run local dll to implement some SPS function, e.g. multi-file upload only works when you have office 2003 installed.

Integration with Office XP is gone.

You will get guys telling you that you can integrate with SPSv2 if you install a backwards compatible document library - but that's really just putting a bit of SPS 2001 on the server.

Believe me, check-in, check-out, which are themselves very basic, are not available from inside Office XP, or even from the context menu in Windows Explorer.

The ONLY option you have is to use the web interface to check-in or check-out.

2. Can SharePoint compare two document versions?

"In Word 2003, you can compare documents side by side. Open two documents. Then, from the Window menu of one of them, select the Compare Side By Side command. If you have only two documents open, the command will automatically choose to compare them. If you have three or more documents open, you'll have to select which document to compare with the current file.

A floating toolbar with two buttons will open. If the button on the left is selected, Word will scroll both documents at the same time. Press the button on the right side of the toolbar to return to where the cursor was located when you started comparing."

3. What are the various Sharepoint 2003 and Exchange integration points?

Link to Outlook

This is a button on contacts or events lists that lets Outlook 2003 add a pst file named Sharepoint Folders and it links to the data on the site. It's read-only, but you could make the home page for that PST be the Sharepoint site for easier viewing. The link to outlook feature seems more to be where some can public a calendar, but not want too much collaboration. For example, a holiday schedule, company meeting schedule, etc, can be made available for people to be able to view from Outlook without having to go to a web browser. Another nice thing about OL2K3 is that you can compare these calendars with others side by side.

4. What is SharePoint from a Users Perspective?

From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessible over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name "Share-Point". Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, and version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint's Search facility. Even documents not "in" SharePoint can be included in the search engine's index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it's a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.

5. What is SharePoint from an Administration Perspective?

Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like "edit profile". Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.

6. What is SharePoint from a Technical Perspective?

Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft's .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System.

SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web's medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of!

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

7. What newsgroups are available at SharePoint Server?

There are two,

* microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver and
* microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development.

8. Why do the workspace virtual directories show the error “stop sign” symbol in the IIS snap-in?

If World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) starts before Microsoft Exchange Information Store (MSExchangeIS), “stop sign” symbols appear under the Default Web Site folder of the Internet Information Services console in Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

There is a dependency between the local paths of the SharePoint Portal Server virtual directories and the MSExchangeIS. You must start MSExchangeIS first, followed by W3SVC.

Complete the following steps to prevent the stop signs from appearing each time you restart:

1. Change the Startup type for W3SVC to Manual.
2. Restart the server. The MSExchangeIS service starts automatically.
3. Start W3SVC.

9. How do I open an older version of a document?

Normally, all previous versions are located in the shadow, so if you right click a published document from within the web folders, go to properties and then the third tab, versions you can view older versions.

If you want to do this in code:

strURL = "url of the last published version"
Set oVersion = New PKMCDO.KnowledgeVersion
Set prmRs = oVersion.VersionHistory(strURL)
Set oVersion = Nothing

prmRS will contain a recordset, which contains the url to the old versions in the shadow.

10. How Does SharePoint work?

The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

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