Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Technologies

70 4.2 MOSS extensions to WSS 3.0

sumed the shared services. And there was no way to switch off shared services

once you had enabled it other than a re-install!

Shared services are configured at the farm level and are consumed by

the Web applications and site collections running on that farm. Further-

more you can have inter-farm shared services, which allow, for example, a

single My Site across any number of site collections, regardless of which

farm or Web application is hosting that site collection. Shared services

themselves need to be managed; you will need to create a Shared Services

Provider (SSP), which will have an associated Web application for its

administration. Separate content databases are also created to hold the data

associated with each service—for example, a search database. The majority

of implementations will only require one SSP, but you can actually create

multiple SSPs and scope them to individual Web applications should you

need to—such as in the case of a hosted environment, or when you need

secure isolation of services and service data.

The major shared services that are provided with MOSS are Indexing

and Search, User Profiles and My Sites, Business Data Catalog (BDC), Audi-

ences, Usage Reporting, and Excel Services.

4.2 MOSS extensions to WSS 3.0

4.2.1 Administration Additions

Additional solution areas bring additional administrative responsibilities in

overall farm management, individual applications, and even individual site

Figure 4.1

MOSS 2007

solution areas.

4.2 MOSS extensions to WSS 3.0 71

Chapter 4

collections. MOSS adds more components to tier 2 of the architecture—for

example, an updated Search, Indexing, and Excel calculation server—and

these have to be considered when you are designing your topologies from a

farm-wide perspective. Another farm-wide addition is the area of Informa-

tion Life Cycle Management (ILM), such as the ability to apply policies to

document libraries and to audit their usage. We will take a closer look at

these ILM capabilities in Chapter 5 on Content Management.

At the application level, we see additions for managing Search, InfoPath

Forms Service, and the MOSS Shared Services. One thing I haven’t men-

tioned so far is that the whole administration model is modular, enabling

other applications to come along and plug in nicely. Proof of this can be seen

in Figures 4.2 and 4.3, which show the Operations and Applications tab

from Central Administration before and after a WSS 3.0 installation is

upgraded to MOSS. You will also see the management of SSPs integrated

into Central Administration.

4.2.2 MOSS Permissions and Groups

No extra user permissions are added when you install MOSS, but there are

many more permission levels and SharePoint Groups created to make it eas-

ier to control the different types of activities that would be performed in the

Figure 4.2

Operations in WSS

3.0 and MOSS

administration.

Figure 4.3

Applications in

WSS 3.0

and MOSS

administration.

72 4.2 MOSS extensions to WSS 3.0

different types of MOSS sites. For example, if you have a Web publishing

site, you will want to control who can design and publish pages. For this pur-

pose, we see groups such as Designers and Quick Deploy Users being intro-

duced to sites that have the publishing feature enabled. Even in a MOSS

team site, the number of groups and permissions levels are extended quite

considerably, as shown in Figure 4.4. The permission level additions here to a

WSS 3.0 team site are Manage Hierarchy, Approve, Restricted Read, View

Only, and Records Center Submission Completion.

4.2.3 MOSS Features

Features light up sites, and MOSS introduces some excellent functionality

that can be used to enhance existing and new sites. If you were to browse to

\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\

12\TEMPLATE\FEATURES in a default WSS 3.0, installation you would

see 31 folders containing features. In a MOSS installation, you will find

137—should give you an idea of the amount of extra functionality you get

with MOSS! Features are enabled depending on whether you are running the

Standard or Enterprise version of MOSS, but there is a central administrative

option to enable Enterprise features should you upgrade from Standard

(there is also an option to convert your license type by entering a new prod-

uct key). New sites created after you install MOSS will have the features asso-

ciated with the level of installation you have (Standard or Enterprise) but

there is also an option to enable the new features on existing sites that you

Figure 4.4

MOSS permission

levels on a

team site.