Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

A.2. The SharePoint Family Tree

Meanwhile, back on the server, the FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) were being enhanced until, in the Microsoft Office 2000 releases, a new layer was created over the FPSE called the Office Server Extensions (OSE). The OSE added services for managing discussions and sending email alerts. In addition, file management protocols — including the then-new WebDAV — were added, allowing the Office client applications such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel to both read from and write to web sites directly for the first time.

Office 97 applications supported reading and writing via the FTP protocol.

A.2.1. The Years BSP (before SharePoint)

There were many other web server initiatives taking place at Microsoft during this time frame. Two of them — Microsoft Site Server 3.0 and the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit (DDRK) — warrant special notice as ancestors of SharePoint, as shown in the family tree in Figure A-1.

Figure A-1. Figure A-1

Microsoft Site Server 3.0 was a massive product with many parts that were not directly related to one another beyond being installed and accessed through a common user interface. Several of these components, however, form conceptual (if not direct code) predecessors to components of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. First, Site Server included content management and deployment functionality, allowing the staging ...