Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

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3

Collaboration

Back in the days before WSS 2.0, the only vehicle that the native Windows

operating system offered in terms of collaborating with others was file shares.

WSS 2.0 changed that, providing rich sharing capabilities well beyond that

of file shares in the form of Web-based team sites and various collaboration

type Web Parts. (SharePoint Team Services V1.0 was available before WSS

2.0, but was not part of the operating system. However, it was free, became

extremely popular, and essentially laid the ground work for adopting WSS

2.0 into the operating system).WSS 3.0 significantly extends the ways you

can collaborate with others and adds some great enhancements to the capa-

bilities you are used to with WSS 2.0. And there is good reason to extend the

methods of collaboration—many new and commonly used ways of collabo-

rating that grew up in the consumer world are now seen as crucial ingredients

for any enterprise that wants to make the most of its intellectual capital.

We’re not only talking about the ways we communicate, but also the devices

we use—mobile devices are more and more common, as is accessing corpo-

rate data from outside the firewall.

So let’s take a look at how WSS 3.0 supports these new ways of working

and offers a powerful collaboration solution. For the rest of this chapter, we

will focus on wikis, blogs, RSS, mobility, e-mail integration, and enhance-

ments to standard libraries and lists. Note that while we may at times men-

tion integration with Office 2007, we will cover this subject in more detail in

Chapter 9, Office and Exchange Integration.

3.1 Wikis, Blogs, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

Exciting new site definitions are shipping with WSS 3.0 to support modern

ways of working using wikis and blogs. Furthermore, WSS 3.0 also allows

information in lists and libraries to be consumed using RSS, thereby extend-

ing the reach of your intellectual capital. Let’s take a look at each of these in

turn and highlight their capabilities.

46 3.1 Wikis, Blogs, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication)

3.1.1 Wikis

What is a wiki? Don’t know? Just ask Wikipedia! Oh, hang on, if you don’t

know what a wiki is, you probably don’t know what Wikipedia is, so check

out this URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki. From that definition you

can see that, in computer terms, a wiki is “…a Web site that allows visitors to

add, remove, edit, and change content, typically without the need for regis-

tration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of

interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collabora-

tive authoring.”

WSS 3.0 has the necessary core platform services to build “an effective

tool for mass collaborative authoring” in terms of storage, authorization, and

flexibility in displaying content. We have shown some screenshots of a wiki

site, but let’s take a closer look and dissect the site shown in Figure 3.1 in

order to understand how WSS 3.0 meets the business need of “mass collabo-

rative authoring.”

Ultimately each page in a wiki site is a Web page (aspx page) to which

anyone with write access can make changes. When you author something in

a wiki site, you are creating such a page, and it is being stored for you in a

library within the site. Since every item contained within a site has a URL

that is within the same namespace of the site itself, you can link to other

pages. The URLs for these links point to other pages within the library.

Again, this is all done automatically for you.

When you provision a site using the wiki template, the library is pre-cre-

ated for you with a couple of pages already in it. The site definition for a wiki

Figure 3.1

A Wiki Site