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Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Useful VI search and Replace Linux commands

Search

/word
Search word from top to bottom
?word
Search word from bottom to top
/jo[ha]n
Search john or joan
/\< the
Search the, theatre or then
/the\>
Search the or breathe
/\< the\>
Search the
/\< ¦.\>
Search all words of 4 letters
/\/
Search fred but not alfred or frederick
/fred\|joe
Search fred or joe
/\<\d\d\d\d\>
Search exactly 4 digits
/^\n\{3}
Find 3 empty lines
:bufdo /searchstr/
Search in all open files

Replace

:%s/old/new/g
Replace all occurences of old by new in file
:%s/old/new/gw
Replace all occurences with confirmation
:2,35s/old/new/g
Replace all occurences between lines 2 and 35
:5,$s/old/new/g
Replace all occurences from line 5 to EOF
:%s/^/hello/g
Replace the begining of each line by hello
:%s/$/Harry/g
Replace the end of each line by Harry
:%s/onward/forward/gi
Replace onward by forward, case unsensitive
:%s/ *$//g
Delete all white spaces
:g/string/d
Delete all lines containing string
:v/string/d
Delete all lines containing which didn’t contain string
:s/Bill/Steve/
Replace the first occurence of Bill by Steve in current line
:s/Bill/Steve/g
Replace Bill by Steve in current line
:%s/Bill/Steve/g
Replace Bill by Steve in all the file
:%s/\r//g
Delete DOS carriage returns (^M)
:%s/\r/\r/g
Transform DOS carriage returns in returns
:%s#<[^>]\+>##g
Delete HTML tags but keeps text
:%s/^\(.*\)\n\1$/\1/
Delete lines which appears twice
Ctrl+a
Increment number under the cursor
Ctrl+x
Decrement number under cursor
ggVGg?
Change text to Rot13

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Most useful Linux advanced commands

Linux advanced commands


Command Description
apropos whatis Show commands pertinent to string. See also threadsafe
man -t man | ps2pdf - > man.pdf make a pdf of a manual page

which command Show full path name of command

time command See how long a command takes
time cat Start stopwatch. Ctrl-d to stop. See also sw
nice info Run a low priority command (The "info" reader in this case)
renice 19 -p $$ Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks
dir navigation
cd - Go to previous directory
cd Go to $HOME directory

(cd dir && command) Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir
pushd . Put current dir on stack so you can popd back to it
alias l='ls -l --color=auto' quick dir listing
ls -lrt List files by date. See also newest and find_mm_yyyy
ls /usr/bin | pr -T9 -W$COLUMNS Print in 9 columns to width of terminal

find -name '*.[ch]' | xargs grep -E 'expr' Search 'expr' in this dir and below. See also findrepo

find -type f -print0 | xargs -r0 grep -F 'example' Search all regular files for 'example' in this dir and below

find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs grep -F 'example' Search all regular files for 'example' in this dir

find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done Process each item with multiple commands (in while loop)
find -type f ! -perm -444 Find files not readable by all (useful for web site)
find -type d ! -perm -111 Find dirs not accessible by all (useful for web site)
locate -r 'file[^/]*\.txt' Search cached index for names. This re is like glob *file*.txt
look reference Quickly search (sorted) dictionary for prefix
grep --color reference /usr/share/dict/words Highlight occurances of regular expression in dictionary
archives and compression

gpg -c file Encrypt file

gpg file.gpg Decrypt file

tar -c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2 Make compressed archive of dir/

bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files)

tar -c dir/ | gzip | gpg -c | ssh user@remote 'dd of=dir.tar.gz.gpg' Make encrypted archive of dir/ on remote machine

find dir/ -name '*.txt' | tar -c --files-from=- | bzip2 > dir_txt.tar.bz2 Make archive of subset of dir/ and below

find dir/ -name '*.txt' | xargs cp -a --target-directory=dir_txt/ --parents Make copy of subset of dir/ and below

( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to /where/to/ dir

( cd /dir/to/copy && tar -c . ) | ( cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p ) Copy (with permissions) contents of copy/ dir to /where/to/

( tar -c /dir/to/copy ) | ssh -C user@remote 'cd /where/to/ && tar -x -p' Copy (with permissions) copy/ dir to remote:/where/to/ dir

dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda | gzip | ssh user@remote 'dd of=sda.gz' Backup harddisk to remote machine
rsync (Use the --dry-run option for testing)

rsync -P rsync://rsync.server.com/path/to/file file Only get diffs. Do multiple times for troublesome downloads

rsync --bwlimit=1000 fromfile tofile Locally copy with rate limit. It's like nice for I/O

rsync -az -e ssh --delete ~/public_html/ remote.com:'~/public_html' Mirror web site (using compression and encryption)

rsync -auz -e ssh remote:/dir/ . && rsync -auz -e ssh . remote:/dir/ Synchronize current directory with remote one
ssh (Secure SHell)

ssh $USER@$HOST command Run command on $HOST as $USER (default command=shell)
ssh -f -Y $USER@$HOSTNAME xeyes Run GUI command on $HOSTNAME as $USER

scp -p -r $USER@$HOST: file dir/ Copy with permissions to $USER's home directory on $HOST

ssh -g -L 8080:localhost:80 root@$HOST Forward connections to $HOSTNAME:8080 out to $HOST:80

ssh -R 1434:imap:143 root@$HOST Forward connections from $HOST:1434 in to imap:143
wget (multi purpose download tool)
(cd cmdline && wget -nd -pHEKk http://www.pixelbeat.org/cmdline.html) Store local browsable version of a page to the current dir

wget -c http://www.example.com/large.file Continue downloading a partially downloaded file

wget -r -nd -np -l1 -A '*.jpg' http://www.example.com/dir/ Download a set of files to the current directory

wget ftp://remote/file[1-9].iso/ FTP supports globbing directly
wget -q -O- http://www.pixelbeat.org/timeline.html | grep 'a href' | head Process output directly

echo 'wget url' | at 01:00 Download url at 1AM to current dir

wget --limit-rate=20k url Do a low priority download (limit to 20KB/s in this case)

wget -nv --spider --force-html -i bookmarks.html Check links in a file

wget --mirror http://www.example.com/ Efficiently update a local copy of a site (handy from cron)
networking (Note ifconfig, route, mii-tool, nslookup commands are obsolete)

ethtool eth0 Show status of ethernet interface eth0

ethtool --change eth0 autoneg off speed 100 duplex full Manually set ethernet interface speed

iwconfig eth1 Show status of wireless interface eth1

iwconfig eth1 rate 1Mb/s fixed Manually set wireless interface speed
iwlist scan List wireless networks in range
ip link show List network interfaces

ip link set dev eth0 name wan Rename interface eth0 to wan

ip link set dev eth0 up Bring interface eth0 up (or down)
ip addr show List addresses for interfaces

ip addr add 1.2.3.4/24 brd + dev eth0 Add (or del) ip and mask (255.255.255.0)
ip route show List routing table

ip route add default via 1.2.3.254 Set default gateway to 1.2.3.254
tc qdisc add dev lo root handle 1:0 netem delay 20msec Add 20ms latency to loopback device (for testing)
tc qdisc del dev lo root Remove latency added above
host pixelbeat.org Lookup DNS ip address for name or vice versa
hostname -i Lookup local ip address (equivalent to host `hostname`)
whois pixelbeat.org Lookup whois info for hostname or ip address
netstat -tupl List internet services on a system
netstat -tup List active connections to/from system
windows networking (Note samba is the package that provides all this windows specific networking support)
smbtree Find windows machines. See also findsmb

nmblookup -A 1.2.3.4 Find the windows (netbios) name associated with ip address

smbclient -L windows_box List shares on windows machine or samba server

mount -t smbfs -o fmask=666,guest //windows_box/share /mnt/share Mount a windows share

echo 'message' | smbclient -M windows_box Send popup to windows machine (off by default in XP sp2)
text manipulation (Note sed uses stdin and stdout, so if you want to edit files, append <oldfile >newfile)

sed 's/string1/string2/g' Replace string1 with string2

sed 's/\(.*\)1/\12/g' Modify anystring1 to anystring2

sed '/ *#/d; /^ *$/d' Remove comments and blank lines

sed ':a; /\\$/N; s/\\\n//; ta' Concatenate lines with trailing \

sed 's/[ \t]*$//' Remove trailing spaces from lines

sed 's/\([\\`\\"$\\\\]\)/\\\1/g' Escape shell metacharacters active within double quotes
seq 10 | sed "s/^/      /; s/ *\(.\{7,\}\)/\1/" Right align numbers

sed -n '1000p;1000q' Print 1000th line

sed -n '10,20p;20q' Print lines 10 to 20

sed -n 's/.*<title>\(.*\)<\/title>.*/\1/ip;T;q' Extract title from HTML web page

sort -t. -k1,1n -k2,2n -k3,3n -k4,4n Sort IPV4 ip addresses
echo 'Test' | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' Case conversion
tr -dc '[:print:]' < /dev/urandom Filter non printable characters
history | wc -l Count lines
set operations (Note you can export LANG=C for speed. Also these assume no duplicate lines within a file)

sort file1 file2 | uniq Union of unsorted files

sort file1 file2 | uniq -d Intersection of unsorted files

sort file1 file1 file2 | uniq -u Difference of unsorted files

sort file1 file2 | uniq -u Symmetric Difference of unsorted files

join -a1 -a2 file1 file2 Union of sorted files

join file1 file2 Intersection of sorted files

join -v2 file1 file2 Difference of sorted files

join -v1 -v2 file1 file2 Symmetric Difference of sorted files
math
echo '(1 + sqrt(5))/2' | bc -l Quick math (Calculate φ). See also bc
echo 'pad=20; min=64; (100*10^6)/((pad+min)*8)' | bc More complex (int) e.g. This shows max FastE packet rate
echo 'pad=20; min=64; print (100E6)/((pad+min)*8)' | python Python handles scientific notation
echo 'pad=20; plot [64:1518] (100*10**6)/((pad+x)*8)' | gnuplot -persist Plot FastE packet rate vs packet size
echo 'obase=16; ibase=10; 64206' | bc Base conversion (decimal to hexadecimal)
echo $((0x2dec)) Base conversion (hex to dec) ((shell arithmetic expansion))
units -t '100m/9.74s' 'miles/hour' Unit conversion (metric to imperial)
units -t '500GB' 'GiB' Unit conversion (SI to IEC prefixes)
units -t '1 googol' Definition lookup
seq 100 | (tr '\n' +; echo 0) | bc Add a column of numbers. See also add and funcpy
calendar
cal -3 Display a calendar
cal 9 1752 Display a calendar for a particular month year
date -d fri What date is it this friday. See also day
date --date='25 Dec' +%A What day does xmas fall on, this year
date --date '1970-01-01 UTC 2147483647 seconds' Convert number of seconds since the epoch to a date
TZ=':America/Los_Angeles' date What time is it on West coast of US (use tzselect to find TZ)

echo "mail -s 'get the train' P@draigBrady.com < /dev/null" | at 17:45 Email reminder
echo "DISPLAY=$DISPLAY xmessage cooker" | at "NOW + 30 minutes" Popup reminder
locales
printf "%'d\n" 1234 Print number with thousands grouping appropriate to locale
BLOCK_SIZE=\'1 ls -l get ls to do thousands grouping appropriate to locale
echo "I live in `locale territory`" Extract info from locale database
LANG=en_IE.utf8 locale int_prefix Lookup locale info for specific country. See also ccodes
locale | cut -d= -f1 | xargs locale -kc | less List fields available in locale database
recode (Obsoletes iconv, dos2unix, unix2dos)
recode -l | less Show available conversions (aliases on each line)

recode windows-1252.. file_to_change.txt Windows "ansi" to local charset (auto does CRLF conversion)

recode utf-8/CRLF.. file_to_change.txt Windows utf8 to local charset

recode iso-8859-15..utf8 file_to_change.txt Latin9 (western europe) to utf8

recode ../b64 < file.txt > file.b64 Base64 encode

recode /qp.. < file.txt > file.qp Quoted printable decode

recode ..HTML < file.txt > file.html Text to HTML
recode -lf windows-1252 | grep euro Lookup table of characters
echo -n 0x80 | recode latin-9/x1..dump Show what a code represents in latin-9 charmap
echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..latin-9/x Show latin-9 encoding
echo -n 0x20AC | recode ucs-2/x2..utf-8/x Show utf-8 encoding
CDs

gzip < /dev/cdrom > cdrom.iso.gz Save copy of data cdrom

mkisofs -V LABEL -r dir | gzip > cdrom.iso.gz Create cdrom image from contents of dir

mount -o loop cdrom.iso /mnt/dir Mount the cdrom image at /mnt/dir (read only)

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom blank=fast Clear a CDRW

gzip -dc cdrom.iso.gz | cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom - Burn cdrom image (use dev=ATAPI -scanbus to confirm dev)

cdparanoia -B Rip audio tracks from CD to wav files in current dir

cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio *.wav Make audio CD from all wavs in current dir (see also cdrdao)

oggenc --tracknum='track' track.cdda.wav -o 'track.ogg' Make ogg file from wav file
disk space (See also FSlint)
ls -lSr Show files by size, biggest last
du -s * | sort -k1,1rn | head Show top disk users in current dir. See also dutop
df -h Show free space on mounted filesystems
df -i Show free inodes on mounted filesystems
fdisk -l Show disks partitions sizes and types (run as root)
rpm -q -a --qf '%10{SIZE}\t%{NAME}\n' | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (Bytes) on rpm distros
dpkg-query -W -f='${Installed-Size;10}\t${Package}\n' | sort -k1,1n List all packages by installed size (KBytes) on deb distros
dd bs=1 seek=2TB if=/dev/null of=ext3.test Create a large test file (taking no space). See also truncate
monitoring/debugging
tail -f /var/log/messages Monitor messages in a log file
strace -c ls >/dev/null Summarise/profile system calls made by command
strace -f -e open ls >/dev/null List system calls made by command
ltrace -f -e getenv ls >/dev/null List library calls made by command
lsof -p $$ List paths that process id has open
lsof ~ List processes that have specified path open
tcpdump not port 22 Show network traffic except ssh. See also tcpdump_not_me
ps -e -o pid,args --forest List processes in a hierarchy
ps -e -o pcpu,cpu,nice,state,cputime,args --sort pcpu | sed '/^ 0.0 /d' List processes by % cpu usage
ps -e -orss=,args= | sort -b -k1,1n | pr -TW$COLUMNS List processes by mem usage. See also ps_mem.py
ps -C firefox-bin -L -o pid,tid,pcpu,state List all threads for a particular process
ps -p 1,2 List info for particular process IDs
last reboot Show system reboot history
free -m Show amount of (remaining) RAM (-m displays in MB)
watch -n1 'cat /proc/interrupts' Watch changeable data continuously
system information (see also sysinfo) ('#' means root access is required)
uname -a Show kernel version and system architecture
head -n1 /etc/issue Show name and version of distribution
cat /proc/partitions Show all partitions registered on the system
grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo Show RAM total seen by the system
grep "model name" /proc/cpuinfo Show CPU(s) info
lspci -tv Show PCI info
lsusb -tv Show USB info
mount | column -t List mounted filesystems on the system (and align output)
# dmidecode -q | less Display SMBIOS/DMI information
# smartctl -A /dev/sda | grep Power_On_Hours How long has this disk (system) been powered on in total
# hdparm -i /dev/sda Show info about disk sda
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda Do a read speed test on disk sda
# badblocks -s /dev/sda Test for unreadable blocks on disk sda
interactive (see also linux keyboard shortcuts)
readline Line editor used by bash, python, bc, gnuplot, ...
screen Virtual terminals with detach capability, ...
mc Powerful file manager that can browse rpm, tar, ftp, ssh, ...
gnuplot Interactive/scriptable graphing
links Web browser
miscellaneous
alias hd='od -Ax -tx1z -v' Handy hexdump. (usage e.g.: • hd /proc/self/cmdline | less)
alias realpath='readlink -f' Canonicalize path. (usage e.g.: • realpath ~/../$USER)
set | grep $USER Search current environment

touch -c -t 0304050607 file Set file timestamp (YYMMDDhhmm)

Monday, January 14, 2013

VI Find And Replace Text Commands with examples

How do I find and replace (substitute) test using vi or vim text editor under UNIX / Linux / BSD or Apple OS X operating systems?

Both vi and vim text editor comes with substitute command for finding and replacing text.

Syntax

The syntax is as follows:
:%s/WORD-To-Find-HERE/Replace-Word-Here/g
OR
:%s/FindMe/ReplaceME/g

Examples

The substitute command can be used as per your requirements.

Task: VI / Vim Basic Find and Replace

To find each occurrence of 'UNIX', and replace it with 'Linux', enter (press ESC, type : and following command):
:%s/UNIX/Linux/g

Task: Find and Replace with Confirmation

Find a word called 'UNIX' and replace with 'Linux', but ask for confirmation first, enter:
:%s/UNIX/Linux/gc

Task: Find and Replace Whole Word Only

Find whole words exactly matching 'UNIX' to 'Linux'; and ask for confirmation too:
:%s/\<UNIX\>/Linux/gc

Task: Case Insensitive Find and Replace

Find 'UNIX' (match UNIX, unix, UnIx, Unix and so on) and replace with 'Linux':
:%s/unix/Linux/gi
Same command with confirmation:
:%s/unix/Linux/gic

Task: Case sensitive Find and Replace

Find each 'UNIX' and replace with 'bar':
:%s/UNIX/bar/gI
Same command with confirmation:
:%s/UNIX/bar/gIc

How Do I Replace In the Current Line Only?

Find 'UNIX' and replace with 'Linux' in the current line only (note % is removed from substitute command):
:s/UNIX/Linux/g
NOTE: You need to prefix % the substitute command to make changes on all lines:
:%s/UNIX/Linux/g

How Do I Replace All Lines Between line 100 and line 250?

:{START-n},{END-n}s/word1/word2/g
Find 'UNIX' and replace with 'Linux' all lines between line 100 and line 250, enter:
:100,200s/UNIX/Linux/g
OR
:100,200s/UNIX/Linux/gc

Friday, January 11, 2013

What is Sharepoint ?

What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services -- a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 -- provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, and it serves as a platform for application development.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide additional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.

What is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server?

SharePoint Portal Server is a portal server that connects people, teams, and knowledge across business processes. SharePoint Portal Server integrates information from various systems into one secure solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities. It provides flexible deployment and management tools, and facilitates end-to-end collaboration through data aggregation, organization, and searching. SharePoint Portal Server also enables users to quickly find relevant information through customization and personalization of portal content and layout as well as through audience targeting.

What is Microsoft Windows Services?


Microsoft Windows Services is the engine that allows administrators to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office System and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a plat form for application development. SharePoint sites provide communities for team collaboration, enabling users to work together on documents, tasks, and projects. The environment for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development.

What is the relationship between Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) deliver highly scalable collaboration solutions with flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services provides sites for team collaboration, while Share Point Portal Server connects these sites, people, and business processes—facilitating knowledge sharing and smart organizations. SharePoint Portal Server also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization.

Who is Office SharePoint Server 2007 designed for?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used by information workers, IT administrators, and application developers. is designed

What are the main benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management of their electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar, everyday applications.
Organizations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners across organizational boundaries using InfoPath Forms Services–driven solutions.
Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through the facilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, access to back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can be personalized.
Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks.
Developers have a rich platform to build a new class of applications, called Office Business Applications, that combine powerful developer functionality with the flexibility and ease of deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the use of out-of-the-box application services, developers can build richer applications with less code.

What is the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have identical feature functionality. While the feature functionality is similar, the usage rights are different.

If you are creating an Internet, or Extranet, facing website, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites which does not require the purchase client access licenses. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition can only be used for Internet facing websites and all content, information, and applications must be accessible to non-employees. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition cannot be accessed by employees creating, sharing, or collaborating on content which is solely for internal use only, such as an Intranet Portal scenario. See the previous section on licensing for more information on the usage scenarios.

What suites of the 2007 Microsoft Office system work with Office SharePoint Server
2007?


Office Outlook 2007 provides bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007, included as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, will enable bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.

Features such as the document panel and the ability to publish to Excel Services will only be enabled when using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007or Office Enterprise 2007.

Excel Services will only work with documents saved in the new Office Excel 2007 file format (XLSX).

How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?


SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, who are invited to join via e-mail. In addition, the site administrator can restrict certain members' roles by assigning different permission levels to view post and edit.

Can I post any kind of document?

You can post documents in many formats, including .pdf, .htm and .doc. In addition, if you are using Microsoft Office XP, you can save documents directly to your Windows SharePoint Services site.

Can I download information directly from a SharePoint site to a personal digital assistant (PDA)?

No you cannot. However, you can exchange contact information lists with Microsoft Outlook.

How long does it take to set up the initial team Web site?

It only takes a few minutes to create a complete Web site. Preformatted forms let you and your team members contribute to the site by filling out lists. Standard forms include announcements, events, contacts, tasks, surveys, discussions and links.

Can I create custom templates?

Yes you can. You can have templates for business plans, doctor's office, lawyer's office etc.

How can I make my site public? By default, all sites are created private.

If you want your site to be a public Web site, enable anonymous access for the entire site. Then you can give out your URL to anybody in your business card, e-mail or any other marketing material. The URL for your Web site will be: http:// yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com

Hence, please take special care to name your site. These Web sites are ideal for information and knowledge intensive sites and/or sites where you need to have shared Web workspace. Remember: Under each parent Web site, you can create up to 10 sub-sites each with unique permissions, settings and security rights.

How do the sub sites work?

You can create a sub site for various categories. For example:

Departments - finance, marketing, IT
Products - electrical, mechanical, hydraulics
Projects - Trey Research, Department of Transportation, FDA
Team - Retention team, BPR team
Clients - new clients, old clients
Suppliers - Supplier 1, Supplier 2, Supplier 3
Customers - Customer A, Customer B, Customer C
Real estate - property A, property B
The URLs for each will be, for example:

http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/finance
http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/marketing
You can keep track of permissions for each team separately so that access is restricted while maintaining global access to the parent site.

How do I make my site non-restricted?

If you want your site to have anonymous access enabled (i.e., you want to treat it like any site on the Internet that does not ask you to provide a user name and password to see the content of the site), follow these simple steps:

Login as an administrator
Click on site settings
Click on Go to Site Administration
Click on Manage anonymous access
Choose one of the three conditions on what Anonymous users can access:

Entire Web site
Lists and libraries
Nothing
Default condition is nothing; your site has restricted access. The default conditions allow you to create a secure site for your Web site.

Can I get domain name for my Web site?

Unfortunately, no. At this point, we don't offer domain names for SharePoint sites. But very soon we will be making this available for all our SharePoint site customers. Please keep checking this page for further update on this. Meanwhile, we suggest you go ahead and set up your site and create content for it.

What are picture libraries?

Picture libraries allow you to access a photo album and view it as a slide show or thumbnails or a film strip. You can have separate folder for each event, category, etc

What are the advantages of a hosted SharePoint vs. one that is on an in-house server?

No hardware investment, i.e. lower costs
No software to download - ready to start from the word go
No IT resources - Anyone who has used a Web program like Hotmail can use it
Faster deployment

Can I ask users outside of my organization to participate in my Windows SharePoint
Services site?


Yes. You can manage this process using the Administration Site Settings. Simply add users via their e-mail alias and assign permissions such as Reader or Contributor.

Are there any IT requirements or downloads required to set up my SharePoint site?

No. You do not need to download any code or plan for any IT support. Simply complete the on-line signup process and provide us your current and correct email address. Once you have successfully signed up and your site has been provisioned, we will send a confirmation to the email address you provided.

I am located outside of the United States. Are there any restrictions or requirements for accessing the Windows SharePoint Services?

No. There are no system or bandwidth limitations for international trial users. Additionally language packs have been installed which allow users to set up sub-webs in languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.

Are there any browser recommendations?
Yes. Microsoft recommends using the following browsers for viewing and editing Windows SharePoint Services sites: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later.




What security levels are assigned to users?
Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels by default and additional levels can be composed as necessary.

Reader - Has read-only access to the Web site.
Contributor - Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
Web Designer - Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
How secure are Windows SharePoint Services sites hosted by Microsoft?
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Technical security measures provide firewall protection, intrusion detection, and web-publishing rules. The Microsoft operation center team tests and deploys software updates in order to maintain the highest level of security and software reliability. Software hot-fixes and service packs are tested and deployed based on their priority and level of risk. Security related hot-fixes are rapidly deployed into the environment to address current threats. A comprehensive software validation activity ensures software stability through regression testing prior to deployment.

What is the difference between an Internet and an intranet site?
An internet site is a normal site that anyone on the internet can access (e.g., www.msn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.). You can set up a site for your company that can be accessed by anyone without any user name and password. The internet is used for public presence and a primary marketing tool managed typically by web programmers and a system administrator.

An intranet (or internal network), though hosted on a Web site, can only be accessed by people who are members of a specific network. They need to have a login and password that was assigned to them when they were added to the site by the site administrator. The intranet is commonly used as an internal tool for giving employees access to company information. Content is driven by business relevance, business rules and has increasingly become a common tool in larger organizations. An intranet is becoming more and more the preferred method for employees to interact with each other and the central departments in an organization, whether or not the organization has a Web presence.

What is a workspace?
A site or workspace is when you want a new place for collaborating on Web pages, lists and document libraries. For example, you might create a site to manage a new team or project, collaborate on a document or prepare for a meeting.

What are the various kinds of roles the users can have?
A user can be assigned one of the following roles

Reader - Has read-only access to the Web site.
Contributor - Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
Web Designer - Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
Can more than one person use the same login?
If the users sharing that login will have the same permissions and there is no fear of them sharing a password, then yes. Otherwise, this is discouraged.

How customizable is the user-to-user access?

User permissions apply to an entire Web, not to documents themselves. However, you can have additional sub webs that can optionally have their own permissions. Each user can be given any of four default roles. Additional roles can be defined by the administrator.

Can each user have access to their own calendar?
Yes there are two ways to do this,

by creating a calendar for each user, or
by creating a calendar with a view for each user
How many files can I upload?
There is no restriction in place except that any storage consumed beyond that provided by the base offering may have an additional monthly charge associated with them.

What types of files can I upload / post to the site?
The only files restricted are those ending with the following extensions: .asa, .asp, .ida, .idc, .idq. Microsoft reserves the right to add additional file types to this listing at any time. Also, no content that violates the terms of service may be uploaded or posted to the site.

Can SharePoint be linked to an external data source?
SharePoint data can be opened with Access and Excel as an external data source. Thus, SharePoint can be referenced as an external data source. SharePoint itself cannot reference an external data source.

Can SharePoint be linked to a SQL database?
SharePoint 2007 Portal Server (MOSS2K7) allows connections to SQL based datasources via the Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC also allows connecting to data via Web Services.

Can I customize my Windows SharePoint Services site?
YES! Windows SharePoint Services makes updating sites and their content from the browser easier then ever.

SharePoint includes tools that let you create custom lists, calendars, page views, etc. You can apply a theme; add List, Survey and Document Library Web Parts to a page; create personal views; change logos; connect Web Parts and more.

To fully customize your site, you can use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Specifically, you can use FrontPage themes and shared borders, and also use FrontPage to create photo galleries and top ten lists, utilize standard usage reports, and integrate automatic Web content.

Will Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 run on a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows?
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Forms Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search will support 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

How Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help you?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help us:

Manage content and streamline processes. Comprehensively manage and control unstructured content like Microsoft Office documents, Web pages, Portable Document Format file (PDF) files, and e-mail messages. Streamline business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity.

Improve business insight. Monitor your business, enable better-informed decisions, and respond proactively to business events.

Find and share information more simply. Find information and expertise wherever they are located. Share knowledge and simplify working with others within and across organizational boundaries.

Empower IT to make a strategic impact. Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms that have to be maintained by supporting all the intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities can help improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides these capabilities in an integrated server offering, so your organization doesn't have to integrate fragmented technology solutions itself.

What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?
The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people within the organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.

What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?

User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
Document management enhancements
The new Workflow engine
Office 2007 Integration
New Web Parts
New Site-type templates
Enhancements to List technology
Web Content Management
Business Data Catalog
Search enhancements
Report Center
Records Management
Business Intelligence and Excel Server
Forms Server and InfoPath
The “Features” feature
Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication
What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?
The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:

Document management
Records management
Web content management
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.

Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?
Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you find documents and information fast.

Write the features of the search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. New features provide:

A consistent and familiar search experience.
Increased relevance of search results.
New functions to search for people and expertise.
Ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications and
Improved manageability and extensibility.
What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
Connect people with information and expertise.
Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?
The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.

What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?
If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides error handling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled security exceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where the Web Part appears.

How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?
Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option.

Option Pros Cons

Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server. For more information, see "Setting the trust level for a virtual server" Easy to implement.

In a development environment, increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure.

This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server. There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server.

Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see "How do I create a custom policy file?" Recommended approach.

This option is most secure.

An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirements for the assembly.

By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your Web Parts.

Requires the most configuration of all three options. Install your assemblies in the GAC

Easy to implement. This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed in the BIN directory.

This option is less secure.

Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as it potentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope than necessary

In a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies.

Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.

Does SharePoint work with NFS?
Yes and no. It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the sharepoint database or logs cannot be stored there.

How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?
Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them on dashboards (pages). SS doesn't have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference would be SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.

What would you like to see in the next version of SharePoint?

A few suggestions:

SPS and STS on same machine
Tree view of Categories and Folders
General Discussion Web Part
Personalization of Dashboards
Role Customization
Email to say WHY a document has been rejected for Approval
More ways to customize the interface
Backup and restore an individual Workspaces
Filter for Visio
Better way to track activity on SPS
Ability to Save as from Adobe to space on My Network Places
Why Sharepoint is not a viable solution for enterprise wide deployments?
Planning an enterprise deployment using SharePoint features is a very difficult task unless you can establish a Service Oriented Architecture, using AD for managing security with well defined roles based information access(EISA). Sounds reasonable, although it seems difficult to deploy with the tools limitations in document storage.

Document management does not scale beyond a single server, but scales great within a single server. For example, a quad Xeon machine with 4GB of RAM works great for a document management server that has about 900,000 - 1,000,000 document, but if you need to store 50,000,000 document and want to have them all in one single workspace then it does not scale at all. If you need a scenario like this, you need to plan your deployment right and it should scale for you, it just does not right out of the box. If you are using your server as a portal and search server most for the most part it scales great. You can have many different servers crawl content sources and have separate servers searching and serving the content.

If you have < 750,000 documents per server and fewer than 4 content sources and fewer than 50,000 users, SPS should scale just fine for your needs with the proper planning.

What are the actual advantages of SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) over SharePoint Team Services (STS)?
SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has MUCH better document management. It has check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, publishing, subscriptions, categories, etc. STS does not have these features, or they are very scaled back. SharePoint team Services (SPS) has a better search engine, and can crawl multiple content sources. STS cannot. STS is easier to manage and much better for a team environment where there is not much Document Management going on. SPS is better for an organization, or where Document Management is crucial.

How Does SharePoint work?
The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

How do I open an older version of a document?

Normally, all previous versions are located in the shadow, so if you right click a published document from within the web folders, go to properties and then the third tab, versions you can view older versions.

If you want to do this in code:

strURL = "url of the last published version"
Set oVersion = New PKMCDO.KnowledgeVersion
Set prmRs = oVersion.VersionHistory(strURL)
Set oVersion = Nothing
prmRS will contain a recordset, which contains the url to the old versions in the shadow.

Why do the workspace virtual directories show the error “stop sign” symbol in the IIS snap-in?
If World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) starts before Microsoft Exchange Information Store (*), “stop sign” symbols appear under the Default Web Site folder of the Internet Information Services console in Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

There is a dependency between the local paths of the SharePoint Portal Server virtual directories and the *. You must start * first, followed by W3SVC.

Complete the following steps to prevent the stop signs from appearing each time you restart:

Change the Startup type for W3SVC to Manual.
Restart the server. The * service starts automatically.
Start W3SVC.
What newsgroups are available?
There are two,

microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver and
microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development.
What is SharePoint from a Technical Perspective?
Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft's .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System.

SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web's medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of!

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

What is SharePoint from an Administration Perspective?

Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like "edit profile". Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.
What is Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services? How is it related to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Windows SharePoint Services is the solution that enables you to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services -- a key piece of the information worker infrastructure delivered in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 -- provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office system and other desktop applications, and it serves as a platform for application development.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide additional capabilities including collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence.

What is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server?

SharePoint Portal Server is a portal server that connects people, teams, and knowledge across business processes. SharePoint Portal Server integrates information from various systems into one secure solution through single sign-on and enterprise application integration capabilities. It provides flexible deployment and management tools, and facilitates end-to-end collaboration through data aggregation, organization, and searching. SharePoint Portal Server also enables users to quickly find relevant information through customization and personalization of portal content and layout as well as through audience targeting.

What is Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft Windows Services is the engine that allows administrators to create Web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services provides additional functionality to the Microsoft Office System and other desktop applications, as well as serving as a plat form for application development. SharePoint sites provide communities for team collaboration, enabling users to work together on documents, tasks, and projects. The environment for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development.

What is the relationship between Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Windows Services?

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies (including SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services) deliver highly scalable collaboration solutions with flexible deployment and management tools. Windows SharePoint Services provides sites for team collaboration, while Share Point Portal Server connects these sites, people, and business processes—facilitating knowledge sharing and smart organizations. SharePoint Portal Server also extends the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services by providing organizational and management tools for SharePoint sites, and by enabling teams to publish information to the entire organization.

Who is Office SharePoint Server 2007 designed for?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 can be used by information workers, IT administrators, and application developers. is designed

What are the main benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management of their electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar, everyday applications.
Organizations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners across organizational boundaries using InfoPath Forms Services–driven solutions.
Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through the facilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, access to back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can be personalized.
Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks.
Developers have a rich platform to build a new class of applications, called Office Business Applications, that combine powerful developer functionality with the flexibility and ease of deployment of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the use of out-of-the-box application services, developers can build richer applications with less code.

What is the difference between Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 have identical feature functionality. While the feature functionality is similar, the usage rights are different.

If you are creating an Internet, or Extranet, facing website, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet sites which does not require the purchase client access licenses. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition can only be used for Internet facing websites and all content, information, and applications must be accessible to non-employees. Websites hosted using an “Internet sites” edition cannot be accessed by employees creating, sharing, or collaborating on content which is solely for internal use only, such as an Intranet Portal scenario. See the previous section on licensing for more information on the usage scenarios.

What suites of the 2007 Microsoft Office system work with Office SharePoint Server
2007?

Office Outlook 2007 provides bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries, discussion groups, contacts, calendars, and tasks.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007, included as part of Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007, will enable bidirectional offline synchronization with SharePoint document libraries.

Features such as the document panel and the ability to publish to Excel Services will only be enabled when using Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007or Office Enterprise 2007.

Excel Services will only work with documents saved in the new Office Excel 2007 file format (XLSX).

How do I invite users to join a Windows SharePoint Services Site? Is the site secure?

SharePoint-based Web sites can be password-protected to restrict access to registered users, who are invited to join via e-mail. In addition, the site administrator can restrict certain members' roles by assigning different permission levels to view post and edit.

Can I post any kind of document?

You can post documents in many formats, including .pdf, .htm and .doc. In addition, if you are using Microsoft Office XP, you can save documents directly to your Windows SharePoint Services site.

Can I download information directly from a SharePoint site to a personal digital assistant (PDA)?

No you cannot. However, you can exchange contact information lists with Microsoft Outlook.

How long does it take to set up the initial team Web site?

It only takes a few minutes to create a complete Web site. Preformatted forms let you and your team members contribute to the site by filling out lists. Standard forms include announcements, events, contacts, tasks, surveys, discussions and links.

Can I create custom templates?

Yes you can. You can have templates for business plans, doctor's office, lawyer's office etc.

How can I make my site public? By default, all sites are created private.

If you want your site to be a public Web site, enable anonymous access for the entire site. Then you can give out your URL to anybody in your business card, e-mail or any other marketing material. The URL for your Web site will be: http:// yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com

Hence, please take special care to name your site. These Web sites are ideal for information and knowledge intensive sites and/or sites where you need to have shared Web workspace. Remember: Under each parent Web site, you can create up to 10 sub-sites each with unique permissions, settings and security rights.

How do the sub sites work?

You can create a sub site for various categories. For example:

Departments - finance, marketing, IT
Products - electrical, mechanical, hydraulics
Projects - Trey Research, Department of Transportation, FDA
Team - Retention team, BPR team
Clients - new clients, old clients
Suppliers - Supplier 1, Supplier 2, Supplier 3
Customers - Customer A, Customer B, Customer C
Real estate - property A, property B
The URLs for each will be, for example:

http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/finance
http://yoursitename.wss.bcentral.com/marketing
You can keep track of permissions for each team separately so that access is restricted while maintaining global access to the parent site.

How do I make my site non-restricted?

If you want your site to have anonymous access enabled (i.e., you want to treat it like any site on the Internet that does not ask you to provide a user name and password to see the content of the site), follow these simple steps:

Login as an administrator
Click on site settings
Click on Go to Site Administration
Click on Manage anonymous access
Choose one of the three conditions on what Anonymous users can access:

Entire Web site
Lists and libraries
Nothing
Default condition is nothing; your site has restricted access. The default conditions allow you to create a secure site for your Web site.

Can I get domain name for my Web site?

Unfortunately, no. At this point, we don't offer domain names for SharePoint sites. But very soon we will be making this available for all our SharePoint site customers. Please keep checking this page for further update on this. Meanwhile, we suggest you go ahead and set up your site and create content for it.

What are picture libraries?

Picture libraries allow you to access a photo album and view it as a slide show or thumbnails or a film strip. You can have separate folder for each event, category, etc

What are the advantages of a hosted SharePoint vs. one that is on an in-house server?

No hardware investment, i.e. lower costs
No software to download - ready to start from the word go
No IT resources - Anyone who has used a Web program like Hotmail can use it
Faster deployment

Can I ask users outside of my organization to participate in my Windows SharePoint
Services site?

Yes. You can manage this process using the Administration Site Settings. Simply add users via their e-mail alias and assign permissions such as Reader or Contributor.

Are there any IT requirements or downloads required to set up my SharePoint site?

No. You do not need to download any code or plan for any IT support. Simply complete the on-line signup process and provide us your current and correct email address. Once you have successfully signed up and your site has been provisioned, we will send a confirmation to the email address you provided.

I am located outside of the United States. Are there any restrictions or requirements for accessing the Windows SharePoint Services?

No. There are no system or bandwidth limitations for international trial users. Additionally language packs have been installed which allow users to set up sub-webs in languages other than English. These include: Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Spanish and Swedish.

Are there any browser recommendations?
Yes. Microsoft recommends using the following browsers for viewing and editing Windows SharePoint Services sites: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 with Service Pack 2, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 with Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape Navigator 6.2 or later.




What security levels are assigned to users?
Security levels are assigned by the administrator who is adding the user. There are four levels by default and additional levels can be composed as necessary.

Reader - Has read-only access to the Web site.
Contributor - Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
Web Designer - Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
How secure are Windows SharePoint Services sites hosted by Microsoft?
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Technical security measures provide firewall protection, intrusion detection, and web-publishing rules. The Microsoft operation center team tests and deploys software updates in order to maintain the highest level of security and software reliability. Software hot-fixes and service packs are tested and deployed based on their priority and level of risk. Security related hot-fixes are rapidly deployed into the environment to address current threats. A comprehensive software validation activity ensures software stability through regression testing prior to deployment.

What is the difference between an Internet and an intranet site?
An internet site is a normal site that anyone on the internet can access (e.g., www.msn.com, www.microsoft.com, etc.). You can set up a site for your company that can be accessed by anyone without any user name and password. The internet is used for public presence and a primary marketing tool managed typically by web programmers and a system administrator.

An intranet (or internal network), though hosted on a Web site, can only be accessed by people who are members of a specific network. They need to have a login and password that was assigned to them when they were added to the site by the site administrator. The intranet is commonly used as an internal tool for giving employees access to company information. Content is driven by business relevance, business rules and has increasingly become a common tool in larger organizations. An intranet is becoming more and more the preferred method for employees to interact with each other and the central departments in an organization, whether or not the organization has a Web presence.

What is a workspace?
A site or workspace is when you want a new place for collaborating on Web pages, lists and document libraries. For example, you might create a site to manage a new team or project, collaborate on a document or prepare for a meeting.

What are the various kinds of roles the users can have?
A user can be assigned one of the following roles

Reader - Has read-only access to the Web site.
Contributor - Can add content to existing document libraries and lists.
Web Designer - Can create lists and document libraries and customize pages in the Web site.
Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
Can more than one person use the same login?
If the users sharing that login will have the same permissions and there is no fear of them sharing a password, then yes. Otherwise, this is discouraged.

How customizable is the user-to-user access?
User permissions apply to an entire Web, not to documents themselves. However, you can have additional sub webs that can optionally have their own permissions. Each user can be given any of four default roles. Additional roles can be defined by the administrator.

Can each user have access to their own calendar?
Yes there are two ways to do this,

by creating a calendar for each user, or
by creating a calendar with a view for each user
How many files can I upload?
There is no restriction in place except that any storage consumed beyond that provided by the base offering may have an additional monthly charge associated with them.

What types of files can I upload / post to the site?
The only files restricted are those ending with the following extensions: .asa, .asp, .ida, .idc, .idq. Microsoft reserves the right to add additional file types to this listing at any time. Also, no content that violates the terms of service may be uploaded or posted to the site.

Can SharePoint be linked to an external data source?
SharePoint data can be opened with Access and Excel as an external data source. Thus, SharePoint can be referenced as an external data source. SharePoint itself cannot reference an external data source.

Can SharePoint be linked to a SQL database?
SharePoint 2007 Portal Server (MOSS2K7) allows connections to SQL based datasources via the Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC also allows connecting to data via Web Services.

Can I customize my Windows SharePoint Services site?
YES! Windows SharePoint Services makes updating sites and their content from the browser easier then ever.

SharePoint includes tools that let you create custom lists, calendars, page views, etc. You can apply a theme; add List, Survey and Document Library Web Parts to a page; create personal views; change logos; connect Web Parts and more.

To fully customize your site, you can use Microsoft FrontPage 2003. Specifically, you can use FrontPage themes and shared borders, and also use FrontPage to create photo galleries and top ten lists, utilize standard usage reports, and integrate automatic Web content.

Will Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 run on a 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows?
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Forms Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search will support 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2003.

How Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help you?
Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help us:

Manage content and streamline processes. Comprehensively manage and control unstructured content like Microsoft Office documents, Web pages, Portable Document Format file (PDF) files, and e-mail messages. Streamline business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity.

Improve business insight. Monitor your business, enable better-informed decisions, and respond proactively to business events.

Find and share information more simply. Find information and expertise wherever they are located. Share knowledge and simplify working with others within and across organizational boundaries.

Empower IT to make a strategic impact. Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms that have to be maintained by supporting all the intranet, extranet, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 capabilities can help improve organizational effectiveness by connecting people, processes, and information.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides these capabilities in an integrated server offering, so your organization doesn't have to integrate fragmented technology solutions itself.

What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?
The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people within the organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.

What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?
User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
Document management enhancements
The new Workflow engine
Office 2007 Integration
New Web Parts
New Site-type templates
Enhancements to List technology
Web Content Management
Business Data Catalog
Search enhancements
Report Center
Records Management
Business Intelligence and Excel Server
Forms Server and InfoPath
The “Features” feature
Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication
What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?
The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:

Document management
Records management
Web content management
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.

Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?
Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you find documents and information fast.

Write the features of the search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007?
The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. New features provide:

A consistent and familiar search experience.
Increased relevance of search results.
New functions to search for people and expertise.
Ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications and
Improved manageability and extensibility.
What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
Connect people with information and expertise.
Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?
The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.

What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?
If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides error handling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled security exceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where the Web Part appears.

How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?
Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option.

Option Pros Cons

Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server. For more information, see "Setting the trust level for a virtual server" Easy to implement.

In a development environment, increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure.

This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server. There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server.

Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see "How do I create a custom policy file?" Recommended approach.

This option is most secure.

An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirements for the assembly.

By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your Web Parts.

Requires the most configuration of all three options. Install your assemblies in the GAC

Easy to implement. This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed in the BIN directory.

This option is less secure.

Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as it potentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope than necessary

In a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies.

Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.

Does SharePoint work with NFS?
Yes and no. It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the sharepoint database or logs cannot be stored there.

How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?
Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them on dashboards (pages). SS doesn't have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference would be SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.

What would you like to see in the next version of SharePoint?
A few suggestions:

SPS and STS on same machine
Tree view of Categories and Folders
General Discussion Web Part
Personalization of Dashboards
Role Customization
Email to say WHY a document has been rejected for Approval
More ways to customize the interface
Backup and restore an individual Workspaces
Filter for Visio
Better way to track activity on SPS
Ability to Save as from Adobe to space on My Network Places
Why Sharepoint is not a viable solution for enterprise wide deployments?
Planning an enterprise deployment using SharePoint features is a very difficult task unless you can establish a Service Oriented Architecture, using AD for managing security with well defined roles based information access(EISA). Sounds reasonable, although it seems difficult to deploy with the tools limitations in document storage.

Document management does not scale beyond a single server, but scales great within a single server. For example, a quad Xeon machine with 4GB of RAM works great for a document management server that has about 900,000 - 1,000,000 document, but if you need to store 50,000,000 document and want to have them all in one single workspace then it does not scale at all. If you need a scenario like this, you need to plan your deployment right and it should scale for you, it just does not right out of the box. If you are using your server as a portal and search server most for the most part it scales great. You can have many different servers crawl content sources and have separate servers searching and serving the content.

If you have < 750,000 documents per server and fewer than 4 content sources and fewer than 50,000 users, SPS should scale just fine for your needs with the proper planning.

What are the actual advantages of SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) over SharePoint Team Services (STS)?
SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has MUCH better document management. It has check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, publishing, subscriptions, categories, etc. STS does not have these features, or they are very scaled back. SharePoint team Services (SPS) has a better search engine, and can crawl multiple content sources. STS cannot. STS is easier to manage and much better for a team environment where there is not much Document Management going on. SPS is better for an organization, or where Document Management is crucial.

How Does SharePoint work?
The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.

How do I open an older version of a document?
Normally, all previous versions are located in the shadow, so if you right click a published document from within the web folders, go to properties and then the third tab, versions you can view older versions.

If you want to do this in code:

strURL = "url of the last published version"
Set oVersion = New PKMCDO.KnowledgeVersion
Set prmRs = oVersion.VersionHistory(strURL)
Set oVersion = Nothing
prmRS will contain a recordset, which contains the url to the old versions in the shadow.

Why do the workspace virtual directories show the error “stop sign” symbol in the IIS snap-in?
If World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) starts before Microsoft Exchange Information Store (*), “stop sign” symbols appear under the Default Web Site folder of the Internet Information Services console in Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

There is a dependency between the local paths of the SharePoint Portal Server virtual directories and the *. You must start * first, followed by W3SVC.

Complete the following steps to prevent the stop signs from appearing each time you restart:

Change the Startup type for W3SVC to Manual.
Restart the server. The * service starts automatically.
Start W3SVC.
What newsgroups are available?
There are two,

microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver and
microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development.
What is SharePoint from a Technical Perspective?
Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft's .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System.

SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web's medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of!

To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.

What is SharePoint from an Administration Perspective?
Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like "edit profile". Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk.

Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.

What is SharePoint from a Users Perspective?
From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessible over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name "Share-Point". Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, and version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint's Search facility. Even documents not "in" SharePoint can be included in the search engine's index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it's a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.

What are the various Sharepoint 2003 and Exchange integration points?
Link to Outlook
This is a button on contacts or events lists that lets Outlook 2003 add a pst file named Sharepoint Folders and it links to the data on the site. It’s read-only, but you could make the home page for that PST be the Sharepoint site for easier viewing. The link to outlook feature seems more to be where some can public a calendar, but not want too much collaboration. For example, a holiday schedule, company meeting schedule, etc, can be made available for people to be able to view from Outlook without having to go to a web browser. Another nice thing about OL2K3 is that you can compare these calendars with others side by side.

Searching Public Folders
With SPS you can index Exchange’s public folders with the search engine so that all that precious public folder content is searchable. You’ll want to look at content sources and indexing in Sharepoint administration.

Displaying Public Folders in a web part
Since exchange web-enables public folders, you can create a web part that displays that content. IE, http://exchangeserver/Public/IT/Helpdesk will display the IT/Helpdesk public folder via OWA. So you add the Page Viewer web part to a page and point it at that URL. The key here is to add ?cmd=contents to the end of the url if you don’t want the navigator pane on the left.

Smart web parts
Some of the web parts that come with SPS allow you to add a web part to a page that actually takes the users outlook info (calendar, inbox, contacts, tasks) and put them into the page.

The SmartPart Web Part project template for Visual Studio allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to:

* write a web user control (ASCX)
* wrap the user control in a SmartPart instance
* generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment
* generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation



Can SharePoint compare two document versions?
"In Word 2003, you can compare documents side by side. Open two documents. Then, from the Window menu of one of them, select the Compare Side By Side command. If you have only two documents open, the command will automatically choose to compare them. If you have three or more documents open, you'll have to select which document to compare with the current file.

A floating toolbar with two buttons will open. If the button on the left is selected, Word will scroll both documents at the same time. Press the button on the right side of the toolbar to return to where the cursor was located when you started comparing."

What are the integration differences between SPS 2003 and the various Office versions?
SPS webpage can detect you have installed the Office 2003 and run local dll to implement some SPS function, e.g. multi-file upload only works when you have office 2003 installed.

Integration with Office XP is gone.

You will get guys telling you that you can integrate with SPSv2 if you install a backwards compatible document library - but that’s really just putting a bit of SPS 2001 on the server.

Believe me, check-in, check-out, which are themselves very basic, are not available from inside Office XP, or even from the context menu in Windows Explorer.
What is SharePoint from a Users Perspective?
From a Users perspective SharePoint is a way of making documents and folders on the Windows platform accessible over the web. The user visits the SharePoint Portal web page, and from there they can add documents, change documents & delete documents. Through this Portal, these documents are now available for discussion, collaboration, versioning and being managed through a workflow. Hence the name "Share-Point". Details about the document can be saved too, such as: who wrote it, when, for whom, its size, and version, category or target audience. These can then be used to find the document through SharePoint's Search facility. Even documents not "in" SharePoint can be included in the search engine's index so they become part of the portal. All in all, it's a great way to get stuff up on the web for users with average technical skills, and for administrators to manage the content.

What are the various Sharepoint 2003 and Exchange integration points?
Link to Outlook
This is a button on contacts or events lists that lets Outlook 2003 add a pst file named Sharepoint Folders and it links to the data on the site. It’s read-only, but you could make the home page for that PST be the Sharepoint site for easier viewing. The link to outlook feature seems more to be where some can public a calendar, but not want too much collaboration. For example, a holiday schedule, company meeting schedule, etc, can be made available for people to be able to view from Outlook without having to go to a web browser. Another nice thing about OL2K3 is that you can compare these calendars with others side by side.

Searching Public Folders
With SPS you can index Exchange’s public folders with the search engine so that all that precious public folder content is searchable. You’ll want to look at content sources and indexing in Sharepoint administration.

Displaying Public Folders in a web part
Since exchange web-enables public folders, you can create a web part that displays that content. IE, http://exchangeserver/Public/IT/Helpdesk will display the IT/Helpdesk public folder via OWA. So you add the Page Viewer web part to a page and point it at that URL. The key here is to add ?cmd=contents to the end of the url if you don’t want the navigator pane on the left.

Smart web parts
Some of the web parts that come with SPS allow you to add a web part to a page that actually takes the users outlook info (calendar, inbox, contacts, tasks) and put them into the page.

The SmartPart Web Part project template for Visual Studio allows developers to create quickly a project which contains the base infrastructure to:

* write a web user control (ASCX)
* wrap the user control in a SmartPart instance
* generate a SharePoint Solution file (WSP) for easy deployment
* generate a setup package for a wizard driven installation



Can SharePoint compare two document versions?
"In Word 2003, you can compare documents side by side. Open two documents. Then, from the Window menu of one of them, select the Compare Side By Side command. If you have only two documents open, the command will automatically choose to compare them. If you have three or more documents open, you'll have to select which document to compare with the current file.

A floating toolbar with two buttons will open. If the button on the left is selected, Word will scroll both documents at the same time. Press the button on the right side of the toolbar to return to where the cursor was located when you started comparing."

What are the integration differences between SPS 2003 and the various Office versions?
SPS webpage can detect you have installed the Office 2003 and run local dll to implement some SPS function, e.g. multi-file upload only works when you have office 2003 installed.

Integration with Office XP is gone.

You will get guys telling you that you can integrate with SPSv2 if you install a backwards compatible document library - but that’s really just putting a bit of SPS 2001 on the server.

Believe me, check-in, check-out, which are themselves very basic, are not available from inside Office XP, or even from the context menu in Windows Explorer.