When people mention SharePoint, most of the time they are referring to any solution based on either Windows SharePoint Service (WSS) or the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). SharePoint is umbrella term for the software technology developed by Microsoft for collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management, form driven business process and business intelligence.

If you are confused about the product names of SharePoint, you are not alone. Microsoft updates their technologies and changes their product names every now and then. Basically you could put them in two categories: Free Add On or Paid Server. We are now using the 3rd generation of SharePoint. The latest version is Microsoft Window SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server or you could call them WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007.

Release Date	SharePoint Services - Free Add On	SharePoint Server - Paid Server
2000	SharePoint Team Services (STS)	SharePoint Portal Server 2001 (SPS 2001)
2003	Window SharePoint Services (WSS 2.0)	SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003)
2007	Window SharePoint Services (WSS 3.0)	Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS 2007)

Check the following 10 questions. If you have answered “Yes” to 5 of questions, then your business can benefit from SharePoint.

• Do the people in my organization need to access information from the office, at home, on the go or from almost anywhere in the world?
• Are my team members located in different geographies and time zones?
• Do I need a web space for my organization to collaborate and share documentation?
• Do I need to have versioning control of my documentation?
• Do I want to control who sees what information in my organization?
• Do I want to have content management system that works well with my other Microsoft Office products such as Microsoft Outlook?
• Do I want to save time and make my business process more effective?
• Do I want to find my relevant and necessary documents quick and easy?
• Do I want to have to a complete public internet site as well as a secure extranet site for my customers or partners to interact with?
• Do I want to turn on any free features of my Window Server?

WSS 3.0 is free if you have the license for Microsoft Window Server 2003. MOSS 2007 is licensed by Server License and also client access license (CAL).

You should check out what is available for SharePoint out of box features before web part development. You tell us the functions of your current system, and what improvements you need. We will show you the SharePoint built in features, then we will help decide if custom SharePoint Web parts are needed.

Yes, you should definitely upgrade your WSS 2.0 site to WSS 3.0. There are many new features and great improvements of WSS 3.0. Here are top 5 that we like the best:

• People and Groups: It is a now unified place to manage people and their permission.
• Gantt chart view: View tasks, issues, and project issues graphically and give team members an at-a-glace indicator of a project current status.
• Tree view and breadcrumbs: New user interface (UI) elements help users identify where they are within a SharePoint site.
• Two-stage recycle bin: Helps ensure that critical information isn’t deleted accidentally and can be restored by the user or administrator
• Folder and item-level access control: Protect critical information at item level within the same document library.

We could show you more features that apply to your unique business requirements.

To help you decide, we have list the top 5 reasons why our customers upgrade their sites from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007.

• Site Manager Manage a SharePoint site’s navigation, security access, and general look and feel using this easy drag-and-drop tool. Site Manager unifies site management tasks for portals and Web sites, including management of areas, pages, listings, SharePoint site lists, and associated component parts.
• Integration with Office Outlook 2007
• New and Improved enterprise search With Office Outlook 2007, users can view calendars and contact lists stored on SharePoint sites and create and manage sites for editing documents and organizing meetings.
• Business document workflow support Automate document review, approval, signature collection, and issue tracking using workflow applications
• Forms-based Authentication User authentication for extranet at a data store instead of window account authentication.

For WSS 3.0, you will need Microsoft Window Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 to run WSS 3.0.

For MOSS 2007, you will need Microsoft Window Server 2003, SQL Server 2005 and MOSS 2007 Server. If you decide to implement a SharePoint Site for your organization, MidTech will not only help you to implement the solutions, but also help you to select and purchase the licenses for your organization.

As you are planning for your SharePoint implementation, you should keep in mind the limitations. Although the limits are quiet large, exceeding them will create performance issues.

Item	Limit
Number of site collection in a web application	50K
Number of sites in a site collection	250K
Number of subsites nested under a site	2K
Number of lists on a site	2K
Number of item in a list	10M
Number of documents in a library	2M
Number of documents in a folder	2K
Number of document file size	2GB
Number of documents in an index	50M
Number of search scopes	1K
Number of user profiles	5M

The size of the architecture depends on the number of the users, number of the sites and other issues such as size of your documentation, number of the index and the reliable of your network requirements.

Basic guideline for architectures

Architectures	Number of User	Number of Sites
Single Server	500	1,000
Small Farm	5,000	1,000
Medium Farm	100,000	10,000
Large Farm	500,000	10,000

The IT architect in MidTech could help you to design and implement the right architecture of your environment to support the SharePoint site of your organization.

For personal email, most of the people like to host their email at email service providers such as yahoo, gmail, hotmail…. Most of the business and corporation choose to host their email in house for security, flexibility and customization. IBM Lotus Note or Microsoft Exchange are two most implemented corporation email system.

There are many newly upgrade and improved features in Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007.

The top 5 reasons for our customers to upgrade to Exchange 2007 are:

• To use new build in features for anti-spam and anti virus protection
• To use the new build in email message encryption feature
• To implement a corporation email and communication policy
• To use replication exchange servers at difference geographic location
• To have the enriched Outlook 2007 experience

The first Microsoft Exchange server is called Exchange Server 4.0 see below:

Release Date	Product Name
1996	Exchange Server 4.0
1997	Exchange Server 5.0
2000	Exchange Server 2000
2003	Exchange Server 2003
2007	Exchange Server 2007

Exchange Server requires Client Access License (CAL) either by user or by devise and server license.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is set of process to transfer documentations (web pages) on web. To view your web pages on line, first web browser initiates a HTTP request to a Web Server, and then web server will return the requested documentation to the browser.

POP3 (Post Office Protocol) is a data format for delivery of emails across the Internet. It is a simple and standardized way for users to access mailboxes and download messages to their computers.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a core Internet protocol used to transfer or exchange e-mail messages between servers.

Name	Description of Attack
Email Bomb	Sending huge volumes of e-mail to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the server where the email address is hosted make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.
Spam	Sending nearly identical email messages to numerous recipients who emails were collected from chartrooms, websites, newsgroups and viruses by commercial spammers.
Phishing	Acquiring user information for criminal use by pretending to be the truthful identity via email or instant messaging to direct user enter detail sensitive information or sending information to others.
Email Worms	Sending a self-replicating computer program to receiver’s network by consuming email server bandwidth.

• Domain controller
• Web server
• Database Server
• email server

Microsoft SQL Server is data management and analysis software that enables organizations to manage information and run business applications.

Windows Server is a software operating system by Microsoft to support networks, applications, and Web services.

Active Directory (AD) is an implementation to provide central authentication and authorization services for Windows-based computers. Active Directory also allows administrators to assign policies, deploy software, and apply critical updates to an organization. Active Directory stores information and settings in a central database. Active Directory networks can vary from a small installation with a few hundred objects, to a large installation with millions of objects.

DNS stands for Domain Name System. Yes, if you need to run your website or any web application. It is a computer program running on a web server, translating domain names into IP adders so computers can connect to internet or email could be sent to the attended receivers.

FTP stand for File Transfer Protocol. It is a network process used to transfer data from one computer to another through a network, such as over the Internet.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. It is a technology that employs the simultaneous use of two or more hard disk drives to achieve greater levels of performance, reliability, and/or larger data volume sizes.

VPN stands for virtual private network. It is a computer network in which some of the links between nodes are carried by open connections or virtual circuits in some larger network (e.g., the Internet) instead of by physical wires. The link-layer protocols of the virtual network are said to be tunneled through the larger network when this is the case. One common application is secure communications through the public Internet.

IIS stands for Internet Information Services. It is the server configuration service for security setting, user authentication, and process isolation.

The process of electronically-enabled activities including exchange informational or financial electronically data within organization or with external partners and customers.

Web Services is the computing technique exchange data/information between computers and computer programs. In a Web Services environment one computer sends another computer (or computer program) a command. The second computer processes the command, formats the results as a stream of XML, and returns the XML to the first computer.

AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) increases web page responsiveness, speed, and functionality by exchanging data with a server without the whole page refreshing.

ASP.NET a web application framework developed by Microsoft that utilizes a Common Language Runtime allowing any .NET programming language to be used.

C is a general-purpose, block structured, procedural, imperative computer programming language.

C++ is a middle-level language that uses a combination of high-level and low-level language features. It supports procedural programming, data abstraction, object-oriented programming, and generic programming.

C# is a high-level object-oriented programming language developed by Microsoft as part of the .NET initiative.

Java is a high-level object-oriented language that is typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java Virtual Machine (JVM) regardless of computer architecture.

JavaScript is a scripting programming language that controls a software application. It is often used for client-side web development.

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a computer scripting language that is for server side scripting to produce dynamic web pages. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output.

Python is a general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes programmer productivity and code readability. Python's core syntax and semantics are minimalist, while the standard library is large and comprehensive.

Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) is an object-oriented computer language that can be viewed as an evolution of Microsoft's Visual Basic (VB) implemented on the Microsoft .NET framework.

Name	Produced by
Oracle	Oracle Corporation
DB2 Informix	IBM
Microsoft Access Microsoft SQL Server	Microsoft
My SQL	Sun Microsystems
Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE)	Sybase Inc
FileMaker Pro	File Maker Inc.
Firebird Ingres PostgreSQL MSQLite	Open source

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is set of process to transfer documentations (web pages) on web. To view your web pages on line, first web browser initiates a HTTP request to a Web Server, and then web server will return the requested documentation to the browser.

HTML( Hyper Text Markup Language) is a programming language used to define world wide web pages. It describes the structure of text-based information in a document — by defining certain text as links, headings, lists....It also supplement with other interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML is mostly written in the form of tags with punctuation marks to describe the appearance and meaning of communication of a document.

It is a general-purpose specification for allowing its users to define their own elements, to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems via the Internet.

Green IT involves suppliers and their corporate customers changing the way computing assets are designed, manufactured, operated, implemented, used and disposed of to gain efficiency and cost savings while reducing environmentally harmful impacts. Concerned about the environmental footprint of their companies, enterprises are constantly consolidating their IT infrastructures, processes and applications.

For the enterprise, growth is synonymous with success. More growth equals more revenue generated, and often, a broader market presence. However, growth must come from within a budget with fat profit margins, and this is getting tougher to accomplish every day. And firms’ constraints aren’t just budgetary — IT must fit within the physical infrastructure and fit the people the firm employs.

Mismanaging these resources can hinder growth and future success. The solution is IT optimization, and the path to get there is often IT consolidation — and the sooner you start the better

The IT consolidation imperative is: out of space, out of power, and out of money. There are several approaches to IT consolidation. The right path depends on your starting point and most pressing limitation. You can replace aging equipment with newer and more efficient hardware. You can migrate business applications to a centralized platform. You can eliminate optional devices (such as fax machines and printers). You can increase the utilization of your servers through virtualization or your storage through a SAN implementation.

The approaches and methods to achieve a successful IT consolidation are endless, which is a positive thing, but it’s also quite overwhelming. What’s right for one company may not be for another. MidTech will offer you advice to get you on the right consolidation path. Some considerations include:

• Implement ERP instance consolidation
• Adopt the discipline of consolidation
• IT consolidation drives Active-Active data center configuration
• Fully utilize desktop power
• Remove legacy devices (e.g. fax machine and mail slip printer).
• New technology consists of built-in Green features (Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008).

Hyper-V provides software infrastructure and basic management tools in Windows Server 2008 that you can use to create and manage a virtualized server computing environment. This virtualized environment can be used to address a variety of business goals aimed at improving efficiency and reducing costs. For example, a virtualized server environment can help you:

• Reduce the costs of operating and maintaining physical servers by increasing your hardware utilization. You can reduce the amount of hardware needed to run your server workloads.
• Increase development and test efficiency by reducing the amount of time it takes to set up hardware and software and reproduce test environments.
• Improve server availability without using as many physical computers as you would need in a failover configuration that uses only physical computers.
• Increase or reduce server resources in response to changes in demand.

WSS is a document management and team collaboration tool from Microsoft. It can be used to replace paper use in a collaborating environment for any size of companies. WSS integrates with Office and devices such as fax machines, storage media and printers. MidTech specializes this technology to help customers to achieve paperless operation.