Windows SharePoint Services is the engine for creating SharePoint sites that enable information sharing and document collaboration, increasing individual and team productivity. Windows SharePoint Services is a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003.

Windows SharePoint Services provides:

• Additional team services and sites to Microsoft Office and other desktop applications, and serves as a platform for application development.
  
  
• The core functionality for SharePoint sites, including lists, document libraries, calendars, and contact integration, and is closely integrated with Microsoft Office 2003.
  
  
• The tools that teams need to quickly and easily create and work within collaborative spaces by using a Web browser or a rich client, such as Microsoft Office Word 2003.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003

SharePoint Portal Server builds on Windows SharePoint Services by using SharePoint sites to create portal pages for people, information, and organizations. SharePoint Portal Server extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organization and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information captured in their SharePoint sites to the entire organization.
In addition, SharePoint Portal Server:

• Adds entire classes of additional functionality to the enterprise, connecting people, teams, and knowledge across business processes.
  
  
• Integrates information from various systems into one solution with flexible deployment options and management tools.

Putting Information to Work

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 helps you put information to work. Most organizations have a wealth of information that is stored in multiple formats and locations including file shares, Web sites, databases, and line-of-business applications. Tying this scattered information together, making it easier to find, and integrating it into the life of the business is a critical challenge. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides a unified portal to your data and information wherever it is located, and it helps you use that information effectively and productively.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides powerful indexing and search engines to help you easily find the information you need in a wide variety of supported content sources. Additionally, you can organize information into topics and narrow searches for easy discovery.

Extranet

In many organizations, communication and collaboration are not limited to the organization's intranet. More and more organizations are taking advantage of the opportunity to share information with partners and customers. You can use Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in an extranet configuration to provide external users with access to documents, data, information, and applications. This can help your organization take advantage of many business-to-business opportunities. For example, with a SharePoint Portal Server 2003-based extranet, you can permit customers to place orders, view the status of their orders, or check the availability of a specific item. For another example, you can use an extranet portal with a project management application such as Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 to provide project status and timelines to your organization's partners.

Features of SharePoint Portal Server 2003

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes a variety of features to help organizations connect people, information, and functionality. These features can be divided into the following general areas:

Portal site

• Site Directory – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes a Site Directory that you can use to aggregate, organize, find, and manage Web sites, including Windows SharePoint Services sites. From the Site Directory, you can easily create a new SharePoint site or add an existing internal or external site to the directory. To make these tasks easier, you can use metadata (for example, "date created" or "geographical region") to filter and sort the directory.
  
  
• Automatic Site Creation – With automatic site creation in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, users and teams can easily create sites as they are needed. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 automatically adds new SharePoint sites to the site registry and registers them for crawling and indexing by the search system.
  
  
• Lists – Windows SharePoint Services sites can store lists of information, including announcements, tasks, contacts, and custom lists. Additionally, you can use the search engine in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to search the contents of lists across all of your SharePoint sites. 
  
  
• Document Libraries – Each Windows SharePoint Services site can host one or more document library. Documents stored across all document libraries are fully indexed and searchable through SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Using document libraries, you can create, edit, and upload documents, check documents in and out, and track past versions of documents.
  
  
• Workspaces – With Windows SharePoint Services, you can create Document Workspace and Meeting Workspace sites, which provide to users collaboration tools and services for either collaboration on documents or for resources relevant to meetings. Workspaces can contain lists of information such as related documents, team members, and links. Document Workspace and Meeting Workspace sites can be created either via the browser, or automatically from within Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 by sending an attachment or sending a meeting request.

People

• Personal Sites – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides each user with a "My Site," a personal SharePoint site. A My Site can include personally relevant documents, news and applications, links to SharePoint sites and Web sites, and alerts about content you are tracking. You can also add Web Parts that provide read/write access to personal data, including your Microsoft Exchange inbox, calendar, and task list. You can customize the public view of your My Site to share information about yourself and your work with your organization.
  
  
• Personal Content Web Parts – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes several Web Parts that provide content to your My Site page. You can use these Web Parts to quickly find and access your own content and make your content easier for other people to find. These Web Parts include the Documents by Me Web Part, the My Links Web Part, and the My News Web Part.
  
  
• Audiences – An audience is a group of users with similar roles, interests or tasks. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses audiences to deliver targeted content to users. You can create an audience easily by manually adding users or by adding users based on group memberships in Microsoft Active Directory® or an e-mail distribution list. You can target content such as lists, news items, or Web Parts to specific audiences. For example, you can target recent or open invoices, lists of customer contacts, or billing codes to your organization's accounting staff.
  
  
• User Profiles – User profiles link information (for example, audience membership or links to personalized content) to a particular user. User profiles therefore provide a personalized portal experience for each user, and also help users find other users and their related content.

Search and alerts

• Indexed Content – The powerful indexing engine in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 gathers content from multiple sources and makes it richly searchable through the portal. This powerful indexing includes full-text search of file shares, Web sites, Exchange Server public folders, Lotus Notes databases, Active Directory entries, SharePoint sites, SharePoint Portal Server portals, and more. Within these sources of content, SharePoint Portal Server can index many Microsoft Office file formats, XML, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer (HTTPS), Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), and Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). Third-party add-ons are available for indexing Portable Document Format (PDF), WordPerfect documents, and AutoCAD files. SharePoint Portal Server search capabilities can also be extended to include additional content types and content sources through the development or integration of IFilters and protocol handlers.
  
  Topics – To make information easier to find, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 organizes information into topics that contain similar content. Topics are easy to create and manage. Administrators can add, delete, and organize topics, and they can delegate management of topics or subtopics. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 also includes the Topic Assistant, a powerful engine that automatically sorts content into topics. The Topic Assistant can identify and categorize content when a new content source is added to the portal or on an ongoing basis as content accumulates. The Topic Assistant can either replace or supplement manual categorization of content.
  
  
  Search – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 features an improved, faster search engine. Rich search results include documents, SharePoint lists, relevant people, and team Web sites. Results may also include areas and Best Bets, which show users where to go for the best quality information about a specific term or topic. Using an advanced search interface, you can search by document properties, and you can view results grouped by author, date, or location. You can limit searches by scope or content source for faster results, and you can save commonly used search queries to your My Links page so you can find the same information in the future without duplicating your work.
  
  
• Alerts – Alerts are messages that inform users when content that they are interested in changes in some way. An alert message can be delivered in an e-mail message or in a Web Part on a SharePoint site. Users can choose to receive alerts about a relevant content source, such as a document library or a list. These alerts help users stay current with the latest version of the content that is important to their work.

Application integration and extensibility

• Web Parts – Web Parts are modular pieces of code that you can embed in a portal page. You can use Web Parts for many purposes, including access to data, information, or applications. In an application integration environment, you can use Web Parts to provide user access to business applications through the portal, making the applications easy to find and embedding them in a familiar context. The portal can also provide services like single sign-on and personalization for the Web Part, which simplifies integration for the user.
  
  
• Single Sign-on – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 includes a single sign-on service that you can use to provide single sign-on access for multiple enterprise applications. With this technology, you do not need to constantly provide multiple sets of credentials because SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can manage your credentials when you access applications through the portal. This makes using applications easier. The single sign-on service allows for Web Parts to connect directly to many different back-end systems (for example, SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft), providing those systems’ native credentials when doing so.
  
  
• Microsoft BizTalk® Server Integration – Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is closely integrated with Microsoft BizTalk Server. BizTalk Server supports over 300 adapters for common business applications, including SAP, Siebel, and PeopleSoft. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can make use of these adapters through BizTalk Server to provide access to applications and data through the portal. Additionally, BizTalk Server can use the single sign-on service in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to provide credentials to supported applications.
  
  
• Microsoft ASP.NET – SharePoint sites use ASP.NET technology, which you can extend by using the Microsoft .NET Framework. You can use the capabilities of the .NET Framework to quickly and efficiently develop SharePoint Portal Server 2003 solutions. You can access most SharePoint Portal Server data programmatically using published application programming interfaces (APIs). SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses managed code on the server to make sure that faulty or malicious code is never executed.
  
  
• Web Services – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can use Web services to expose data and functionality. Web services are reusable modular pieces of code that developers and end-users can use to access server functionality and data with minimal development effort.
  
  
• Deployment and Management – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is designed for easy deployment and management, which can help reduce overall costs. By making management and support of SharePoint Products and Technologies as easy as possible, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 helps reduce the overall total cost of ownership.
  
  
• Browser-based Management – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 supports multiple browser-based management tools, including a browser interface for area managers to manage their areas. Easy-to-use tools help administrators and managers complete their tasks quickly and efficiently. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 also offers command-line administration for administrators who are more familiar with this method.
  
  
• Portal Performance and Scalability – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses distributed server architecture to enhance performance and scalability. Servers can be clustered for high availability and load balancing. This architecture helps you deploy server farms that achieve high levels of performance and reliability. To keep up with growing demand, you can add servers to the server farm as your requirements increase.
  
  
• Improved Backup and Restore –Efficient backup and restore capabilities make recovering from server failures or other disasters easier. Because SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses SQL Server as its storage platform, you can use SQL Server backup and restore technologies to protect against catastrophic data loss.
  
  
• Flexible Deployment Scenarios – SharePoint Portal Server 2003 supports several deployment methods, including top-down deployment, bottom-up deployment, and incremental deployment. In a top-down deployment scenario, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is deployed at the same time as associated SharePoint sites. In a bottom-up scenario, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is deployed over multiple existing Windows SharePoint Services team sites to create a unified portal. In an incremental deployment, you can deploy SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to a single organizational division, and then you can use the existing infrastructure to gradually deploy SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to other organizational divisions.

Scalability and Reliability

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides tools that you can use to easily deploy and manage your portal solution. Administrators can use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to connect to and manage content resources. Additionally, administrators can use the management interface in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to manage, monitor, and deploy Windows SharePoint Services sites, so your organization can work quickly and effectively.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses a distributed server architecture based on Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000. You can cluster servers that run SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to improve availability. If one server fails, users still have uninterrupted access to data, documents, and applications. Network Load Balancing distributes the processing load across multiple servers, which makes maintaining reliable services under peak load easier. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses Windows Server 2003 security to protect your documents and information from accidental or malicious harm.

There are many options on how to deploy SharePoint 2003 across an Extranet

Tri-Homed Perimeter Network

This topology is also known as a single-screened subnet because the perimeter network is bounded by only one ISA Server computer. See Figure 1.

Back-to-Back Perimeter Network

This topology is also known as a dual-screened subnet because the perimeter network is bounded by two ISA Server computers.

General Security Considerations

In a perimeter network scenario in which a SharePoint Portal Server farm deployment is physically connected to a network segment that is part of the perimeter network topology and whose servers are members of the perimeter network domain, perimeter network domain accounts should be used to run the SharePoint Portal Server IIS application pools.

However, if your SharePoint Portal Server deployment in a perimeter network needs to access an external data source that is located in your corporate intranet, it will probably need to do so using a corporate intranet domain account. For example, if you have a Web Part that needs to access data in the corporate intranet in order to render a Web page, it will probably need to use a corporate intranet domain account to do so. There is a security risk associated with this because the corporate intranet domain account is potentially exposed to the Internet. If an intruder were able to successfully attack and penetrate your perimeter network, these credentials could be exposed to the intruder, giving them access to the data in the corporate intranet.

Defending Your Environment Against External and Internal Web-Based Threats

Businesses need to eliminate the damaging effects of malware and attackers through comprehensive tools for scanning and blocking harmful content, files, and Web sites.

Web access protection with ISA Server 2006 can help organizations protect their environments from internally- and externally-originating Internet-based threats. With a hybrid proxy-firewall architecture, deep content inspection, granular policies, and comprehensive alerting and monitoring capabilities, ISA Server 2006 makes it easier to manage and protect your network.