The SharePoint Ride

     I’ve been really neglecting my web site of late.  For the last few months things have been a whirlwind… but, in a good way.  Now I’m working on making a public web site using SharePoint 2007 – otherwise known as MOSS 2007 – for a local city school district on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.  What is SharePoint, you may ask?  (As I was asking last July.)

     SharePoint is a Content Management System (CMS) on the Windows platform.  It uses something called Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) to provide back-end services to applications in the Office Suite (Word, InfoPath, Excel, Access, Outlook) so you can publish content to your web site directly from those applications… if everything is set up correctly.  I’ve used a number of CMS programs on the PHP side of the equation; Mambo, Jamroom, WordPress… they are all powerful in their own right.  But, SharePoint brings some serious power to the table.  It is primarily designed to be a team/colloboration platform with Workflows and document libraries with versioning.  It has fine-grained permissions, blogs, wikis, personal sites, the list goes on and on.

     The problem is that it is a beast.  The out-of-the-box version doesn’t present anything that would be acceptable as a public internet site.  And, don’t expect the MSDN SharePoint forum to be of much help.  It’s useful, yes, but not a lot of hot action going on there.  However, once you get your head around the virtualized directory structure, you can pretty much skin it with whatever you please.    There are also about 40 free web applications templates that you can plug in to really get more bang for your buck:  Human Resources, Sports, Publishing, Asset Tracking… all of it very customizable.  Just be ready for some command line action.

     A great place for some excellent video training is the MSDN Screencast site.  There is some great stuff there for beginner to hard-core coder.  For the beginning, check out the SharePoint Designer Primer vid.  And, get a taste of Custom Workflows while you’re there.

     Though the site I’m working on isn’t quite finished yet, the deadline is near.  I’ve been living, eating, breathing and sleeping (!) with SharePoint for about 2 months now.  I’m by no means an expert (yet), but I’ve had my trial by fire and have learned so ever-so-crucial things you need to know if you’re going to set one of these systems up for use as a public site with anonymous access.  Main thing you have to keep in mind is that SharePoint wasn’t really built with anonymous access as it’s priority… it’s meant to be used as an intranet site… a collaboration site.  And, anonymous access in SharePoint isn’t “truly” anonymous access to whatever you tell it.

     For a while there, I was pulling my hair out, until… but, wait.  That’s the next blog post.