Beginning SharePoint® 2007 Administration: Windows® SharePoint® Services 3.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007

3.1. Important Concepts

WSS 3.0 is a web application. It uses web sites and web-related concepts to do its job. Some of these terms and functionality may be well known to you already. But some have very specific meanings in the SharePoint environment. You may recall from previous chapters that WSS is the basic foundation for SharePoint and that there is an optional extension called Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). Even if you implement MOSS, you will still need the information in this chapter to understand how the WSS part works, since the basic structure and functionality is based on WSS, regardless of whether it is a WSS site or a MOSS site.

3.1.1. Administration Web Sites and User Web Sites

Windows SharePoint Services has two types of web sites:

• The SharePoint Central Administration web site that is used for advanced configuration and management of WSS.

• The user web site (also known as team sites, project sites, and meeting workspaces) contains the actual information that is shared between users, such as documents, lists, and images. There can be as many of these web sites as needed.

One important distinction between these two types of web sites is that only a SharePoint administrator will use the Administration web site, whereas everyone may use the user web sites. As you may remember from Chapter 2, these two web sites use two different web applications, that is, they are using different virtual IIS servers:

• SharePoint Central Administration: Used by the Administration ...