SharePoint on earth, in the clouds and beyond the horizon: years, products, names
As I promised , I inform you that the following two notes of my series on products of the SharePoint family are published. The new notes provide a brief history of the development of the family and some specific features of its products, services and their names associated with it, causing serious misunderstandings to almost all those who first come across the specified Microsoft products. At the same time, the ten-year history of this family will be of less interest to us from the point of view of bare chronology, and more as a basis for a better understanding of the concept of SharePoint, its structural and functional features - from where the legs grow, where it all moves and, most importantly, what is further from this family you can continue to expect.
The material of the “historical” section is divided into two subsections, a separate note is devoted to each of them. The first covers the period from 1998 to 2006 (from Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 to Windows SharePoint Services / WSS 3.0). This subsection is preceded by a general overview of the specifics of SharePoint products.
The second article provides general information about products released in 2007 and 2008 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Online). The features of their delivery are indicated and the main cost characteristics are given. The first attempt is also made in the most general way to predict some tendencies of further development of SharePoint.
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In preparing these notes, I relied on numerous sources (cited). Not all of them I managed to check, but here, unfortunately, there were also rather contradictory ones. Therefore, I thank in advance all those who make amendments, clarifications and additions to the material presented.
The main text can be found in my iTech Bridge-blog. Below are only the introductory and final fragments of the "historical" section.
The eventful history of SharePoint is, first of all, the history of two main, closely related product lines: the so-called portal-server (generally, SharePoint Portal Server ) and service (generally, SharePoint Services ). The first (portal-server) line, as the name implies, has “lived” on the server side of the Microsoft client-server system since its birth, the second (service line), born on the client side, very quickly moved to the server .
The rest of the keywords in the names of the two lines will not tell you anything, on the contrary, they can only confuse. Both lines, as I said, work under Windows Server . Software products of both can be assigned to the class B2B (Enterprise Software) , which is designed to work in companies and organizations. Both are focused on the joint creation of documents and work with them.
Each successive main product of both lines provides users with a set of interacting services : social network services and traditional content management services (documents and web content). Products of both lines can be considered as open for third-party developers and expandable multifunctional sites (portals). Moreover, from the moment of their birth and, in any case, until recently, all these products “prefer” to work, being separated from the outside world by “corporate” walls, i.e., on the Intranet ).
Products of the first lines (portal-server line) are delivered as usual application programs (application). They are quite expensive. A target portal built on the basis of such a product is usually an intra-corporate portal for large companies and organizations .
The products of the second line (service line) are delivered as add-ons to the Windows Server, although with respect to the operating system, such a delivery is practically no different from the delivery of a regular program. This add-on is based on the open API library (ASP .Net) and is delivered free of charge . In turn, the target portal created on the basis of SharePoint Services is intended, as a rule, for servicing relatively small and medium-sized companies (SME) and organizations . This line of SharePoint today formed the basis of the on-line (SaaS) product line of SharePoint Online, although some participation in the birth and, especially, in the development of a new direction and portal-server line cannot be ruled out.
Another very important feature of any SharePoint Services product is not only a portal, but also an open basic platform on the basis of which other portals can be created. In particular, SharePoint Portal Server is built on the basis of SharePoint Services, another product of the family.
As will be shown later, the confusion caused by the discrepancy between the names and distinctive features of the two SharePoint lines is largely determined by this dual role of the products of the second (service) line . From a certain point in time, each “service” product began to appear both as an object of autonomous delivery , and as an integral part - the core of a “portal-server” product.
Build target portals based on stand-alone or embedded SharePoint Services using Visual Studio and a set of templates and other specialized elements ( SharePoint SDK ) that extend the ASP .Net library.
Social network services incorporated in the products of both lines include blogs, wikis, forums (discussion board), personal and group pages (sites), user profiles, “signed” by information from corporate databases built on the basis of Microsoft Active Directory, personal and group pages (sites) that are used to build web parts (Web Parts) - widgets, in Microsoft terminology.
Among the content management services of these SharePoint lines, it is possible to distinguish those that will be implemented within the framework of the support mechanisms of the Document Library. This includes the functions of storing multiple versions of documents, registering and storing all changes to them, protection against unauthorized access and conflicts related to simultaneous reading and editing attempts, prompt notification of all interested project participants when a new document appears or modifying an old one, weekly status reports libraries, and the like.
Recently, there have been other events that, at first glance, were either fairly indirectly related to the SharePoint family or were not related to it at all. However, if you look at these events more closely, then it seems to me that you can see in them some interesting trends of the rapid advancement of Microsoft to the market for business products (B2B) that I predicted almost two years ago. Trends that, one way or another, should hurt and SharePoint.
Or maybe not only hurt, but also predetermine the ways of its further development. Moreover, I do not exclude that all the recent events directly follow from the strategy of this very development adopted by Microsoft. Briefly in chronological order I will list those of the events of the past year, which seemed to me the most significant in terms of the possible future of SharePoint. More on the concepts and trends associated with some of them, I will focus on one of his next notes.
1. At the very beginning of 2008, Microsoft acquires for $ 1.2 billion the Norwegian company Fast (Fast Search and Transfer) - one of the leaders in industrial search (Enterprise Search). In particular, the search engine of this company can “ look into” blogs and work with other information generated by users. Hopelessly, while losing Google in the market of “domestic” search engines, with this purchase the corporation has significantly strengthened its position in the field of search engines for business applications. And these are absolutely two different markets. Moreover, if we consider that Search Server is one of the main parts of the SharePoint technology, then we should expect further strengthening of the role of the family under consideration as a contender for the central place in the integrated management and design systems (Enterprise Software) working in companies and organizations.
2. In the spring of this year, Microsoft transferred its MS Office Live to open “beta”. It seems to me that now we can well expect a closer integration of this product with SharePoint Online - another “live” Office - oriented corporation product. After all, both of them are designed for small and medium-sized companies.
3. In the summer, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Microsoft Live Lab presents its social and network resource TownSquare , which allegedly was run-in within Microsoft itself. The ultimate goals of this “Facebook for business” are still in the fog, and its fate is not known to anyone outside Microsoft itself. However, I do not rule out the emergence in the future of a very interesting symbiosis of SharePoint with publicly available social networking tools. That is exactly what Bill Gates was aiming for when he threatened most of Facebook last year.
4. If a competitor cannot win, unite with him. Another time, participants in the same conference in Boston recalled this axiom of business life, when one after another there were reports that almost all the tools entering Enterprise 2.0 began to include tools for integration with MOSS. The initiative put ClearSpace - one of the leaders in this market. The trend is symptomatic - after all, as I have already said, the providers of traditional content management services were mainly involved in combining with SharePoint. Now, the market for social network resources has become interested in the possibilities of the open SharePoint platform . Thus, in a certain sense, we can say that the revolution of social platforms has not bypassed SharePoint.
5. Toward the end of the year, the already mentioned research lab Microsoft Live Lab launches for the general use another social and network resource Thumbtack . In the resource, some of the features inherent in social bookmarking services are combined with the ability to jointly extract data from the texts to which these bookmarks refer, followed by streamlining the data obtained. As you have noticed, all this refers to the tasks of Business Intelligence (BI), to which MOSS 2007 has already begun to be “selected”.
6. Around the same autumn time, Microsoft made a presentation of its future Azure operating system, I work in the clouds. With the fact that SharePoint Online is, of course, SaaS, today everyone agrees. But does this product work now in a one hundred percent "cloud" environment? Here I, like many others, have certain doubts. After all, the elasticity, which focuses on Azure, in today's Microsoft server infrastructure is missing. I think that the situation with this infrastructure will change radically by the time Azure is launched into actual operation. As I have no doubt that truly cloud-based SharePoint will be one of the first products running on the Azure operating platform.
7. In the fall, another very important event occurred. Microsoft, together with IBM, Oracle, SAP, EMC, OpenText, and Alfresco, is adopting the Content Management Interoperability Services ( Interoperable Content Management Services ) standard. The standard defines the interface and order of integration at the sites of consumers of CMS services offered by various suppliers. Thus, this standard, together with the technology of Web Parts (widgets) embedded in SharePoint, opens the way for SharePoint to enter the SOA (service-oriented architecture) market. This, in turn, makes it easier for consumers to quickly create their own specialized applications, the so-called light-weight type.
And, in fact, I wonder what is there beyond the horizon?
Read the full text (includes a list of 48 sources and the main cost characteristics):
The first subsection covers the period from 1998 to 2006 (from Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 to Windows SharePoint Services / WSS 3.0)
The second subsection describes products released in 2007 and 2008 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Online).
The material of the “historical” section is divided into two subsections, a separate note is devoted to each of them. The first covers the period from 1998 to 2006 (from Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 to Windows SharePoint Services / WSS 3.0). This subsection is preceded by a general overview of the specifics of SharePoint products.
The second article provides general information about products released in 2007 and 2008 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Online). The features of their delivery are indicated and the main cost characteristics are given. The first attempt is also made in the most general way to predict some tendencies of further development of SharePoint.
')
In preparing these notes, I relied on numerous sources (cited). Not all of them I managed to check, but here, unfortunately, there were also rather contradictory ones. Therefore, I thank in advance all those who make amendments, clarifications and additions to the material presented.
The main text can be found in my iTech Bridge-blog. Below are only the introductory and final fragments of the "historical" section.
Group portrait of the family in the interior of applications for businesses
The eventful history of SharePoint is, first of all, the history of two main, closely related product lines: the so-called portal-server (generally, SharePoint Portal Server ) and service (generally, SharePoint Services ). The first (portal-server) line, as the name implies, has “lived” on the server side of the Microsoft client-server system since its birth, the second (service line), born on the client side, very quickly moved to the server .
The rest of the keywords in the names of the two lines will not tell you anything, on the contrary, they can only confuse. Both lines, as I said, work under Windows Server . Software products of both can be assigned to the class B2B (Enterprise Software) , which is designed to work in companies and organizations. Both are focused on the joint creation of documents and work with them.
Each successive main product of both lines provides users with a set of interacting services : social network services and traditional content management services (documents and web content). Products of both lines can be considered as open for third-party developers and expandable multifunctional sites (portals). Moreover, from the moment of their birth and, in any case, until recently, all these products “prefer” to work, being separated from the outside world by “corporate” walls, i.e., on the Intranet ).
Products of the first lines (portal-server line) are delivered as usual application programs (application). They are quite expensive. A target portal built on the basis of such a product is usually an intra-corporate portal for large companies and organizations .
The products of the second line (service line) are delivered as add-ons to the Windows Server, although with respect to the operating system, such a delivery is practically no different from the delivery of a regular program. This add-on is based on the open API library (ASP .Net) and is delivered free of charge . In turn, the target portal created on the basis of SharePoint Services is intended, as a rule, for servicing relatively small and medium-sized companies (SME) and organizations . This line of SharePoint today formed the basis of the on-line (SaaS) product line of SharePoint Online, although some participation in the birth and, especially, in the development of a new direction and portal-server line cannot be ruled out.
Another very important feature of any SharePoint Services product is not only a portal, but also an open basic platform on the basis of which other portals can be created. In particular, SharePoint Portal Server is built on the basis of SharePoint Services, another product of the family.
As will be shown later, the confusion caused by the discrepancy between the names and distinctive features of the two SharePoint lines is largely determined by this dual role of the products of the second (service) line . From a certain point in time, each “service” product began to appear both as an object of autonomous delivery , and as an integral part - the core of a “portal-server” product.
Build target portals based on stand-alone or embedded SharePoint Services using Visual Studio and a set of templates and other specialized elements ( SharePoint SDK ) that extend the ASP .Net library.
Social network services incorporated in the products of both lines include blogs, wikis, forums (discussion board), personal and group pages (sites), user profiles, “signed” by information from corporate databases built on the basis of Microsoft Active Directory, personal and group pages (sites) that are used to build web parts (Web Parts) - widgets, in Microsoft terminology.
Among the content management services of these SharePoint lines, it is possible to distinguish those that will be implemented within the framework of the support mechanisms of the Document Library. This includes the functions of storing multiple versions of documents, registering and storing all changes to them, protection against unauthorized access and conflicts related to simultaneous reading and editing attempts, prompt notification of all interested project participants when a new document appears or modifying an old one, weekly status reports libraries, and the like.
What is there beyond the horizon?
Recently, there have been other events that, at first glance, were either fairly indirectly related to the SharePoint family or were not related to it at all. However, if you look at these events more closely, then it seems to me that you can see in them some interesting trends of the rapid advancement of Microsoft to the market for business products (B2B) that I predicted almost two years ago. Trends that, one way or another, should hurt and SharePoint.
Or maybe not only hurt, but also predetermine the ways of its further development. Moreover, I do not exclude that all the recent events directly follow from the strategy of this very development adopted by Microsoft. Briefly in chronological order I will list those of the events of the past year, which seemed to me the most significant in terms of the possible future of SharePoint. More on the concepts and trends associated with some of them, I will focus on one of his next notes.
1. At the very beginning of 2008, Microsoft acquires for $ 1.2 billion the Norwegian company Fast (Fast Search and Transfer) - one of the leaders in industrial search (Enterprise Search). In particular, the search engine of this company can “ look into” blogs and work with other information generated by users. Hopelessly, while losing Google in the market of “domestic” search engines, with this purchase the corporation has significantly strengthened its position in the field of search engines for business applications. And these are absolutely two different markets. Moreover, if we consider that Search Server is one of the main parts of the SharePoint technology, then we should expect further strengthening of the role of the family under consideration as a contender for the central place in the integrated management and design systems (Enterprise Software) working in companies and organizations.
2. In the spring of this year, Microsoft transferred its MS Office Live to open “beta”. It seems to me that now we can well expect a closer integration of this product with SharePoint Online - another “live” Office - oriented corporation product. After all, both of them are designed for small and medium-sized companies.
3. In the summer, at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, Microsoft Live Lab presents its social and network resource TownSquare , which allegedly was run-in within Microsoft itself. The ultimate goals of this “Facebook for business” are still in the fog, and its fate is not known to anyone outside Microsoft itself. However, I do not rule out the emergence in the future of a very interesting symbiosis of SharePoint with publicly available social networking tools. That is exactly what Bill Gates was aiming for when he threatened most of Facebook last year.
4. If a competitor cannot win, unite with him. Another time, participants in the same conference in Boston recalled this axiom of business life, when one after another there were reports that almost all the tools entering Enterprise 2.0 began to include tools for integration with MOSS. The initiative put ClearSpace - one of the leaders in this market. The trend is symptomatic - after all, as I have already said, the providers of traditional content management services were mainly involved in combining with SharePoint. Now, the market for social network resources has become interested in the possibilities of the open SharePoint platform . Thus, in a certain sense, we can say that the revolution of social platforms has not bypassed SharePoint.
5. Toward the end of the year, the already mentioned research lab Microsoft Live Lab launches for the general use another social and network resource Thumbtack . In the resource, some of the features inherent in social bookmarking services are combined with the ability to jointly extract data from the texts to which these bookmarks refer, followed by streamlining the data obtained. As you have noticed, all this refers to the tasks of Business Intelligence (BI), to which MOSS 2007 has already begun to be “selected”.
6. Around the same autumn time, Microsoft made a presentation of its future Azure operating system, I work in the clouds. With the fact that SharePoint Online is, of course, SaaS, today everyone agrees. But does this product work now in a one hundred percent "cloud" environment? Here I, like many others, have certain doubts. After all, the elasticity, which focuses on Azure, in today's Microsoft server infrastructure is missing. I think that the situation with this infrastructure will change radically by the time Azure is launched into actual operation. As I have no doubt that truly cloud-based SharePoint will be one of the first products running on the Azure operating platform.
7. In the fall, another very important event occurred. Microsoft, together with IBM, Oracle, SAP, EMC, OpenText, and Alfresco, is adopting the Content Management Interoperability Services ( Interoperable Content Management Services ) standard. The standard defines the interface and order of integration at the sites of consumers of CMS services offered by various suppliers. Thus, this standard, together with the technology of Web Parts (widgets) embedded in SharePoint, opens the way for SharePoint to enter the SOA (service-oriented architecture) market. This, in turn, makes it easier for consumers to quickly create their own specialized applications, the so-called light-weight type.
And, in fact, I wonder what is there beyond the horizon?
Read the full text (includes a list of 48 sources and the main cost characteristics):
The first subsection covers the period from 1998 to 2006 (from Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 to Windows SharePoint Services / WSS 3.0)
The second subsection describes products released in 2007 and 2008 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and SharePoint Online).
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/48524/
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