SharePoint Question and Answer

Important Question and Answer of SharePoint frequently asked in Interviews:-

1.     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.

2.     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.

3.     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

4.  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.

5.  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.

6.  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).

7.  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.

8. 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.

9.   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.

10.  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.

11.   Can I create custom templates?

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

12.  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.

13.  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.

14.  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.

15.   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.

16. 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

17. 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

18.  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.

19.  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.

20.  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.

21. 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.

22.  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.

23.   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.

 

Benefits of communities:-

   

                  Brief description of benefits of SharePoint communities:

·         Work Together the Way You Want

With SharePoint 2010 Communities, people can work together the way they want using a full set of collaboration tools—from wikis to workflows and team sites to tagging. A single, flexible platform makes it easy to manage these tools and design the right collaborative experiences for different business needs

·         Rely on a Secure Collaboration Platform

The SharePoint 2010 collaboration platform is secure, easy to manage, and scalable. People can work together more safely with the platform’s granular security and privacy controls, centralized policy setting, and detailed reporting and analysis.

·         Extend the Value of Your Community Solutions

SharePoint 2010 provides a single collaboration platform that lets people use the tools and applications they already know. SharePoint 2010:

• Works seamlessly with the rest of the Microsoft Business Productivity infrastructure, including Microsoft Office applications, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Dynamics.

• Adheres to open standards, so people can use third-party applications and systems.

• Uses Business Connectivity Services to surface information from other business applications.

Related feature of SharePoint communities

·         Tags

Classify and organize large amounts of information in your company by applying tags. Use standardized taxonomy tags defined by the organization and informal social tags defined by employees.

·         Blogs

Use the new SharePoint Ribbon to format blog text and easily upload images.

·         Colleague Suggestions

Keep your colleague network current with an automated service that suggests colleagues based on your reporting structure, communities membership, e-mail distribution lists, Office Communicator contact lists, and analysis of most common Office Outlook e-mail recipients.

·         My Content

Centrally store and manage your documents, favorite links, personal blog, and wiki pages on the My Content section of your My Site. Customize your pages and set access and permission levels for any content in the section.

·         Organization Browser

Navigate your organizational structure to see managers, peers, and direct reports.

·         Photos and Presence

Help people recognize each other with photos. Use presence to email, IM, or call someone with the click of a button.

·         Ratings

Rate SharePoint pages, lists, libraries, and individual documents with a five-star rating system.

·         Recent Activities

Let people know what you're up to with the Recent Activities feed on your profile page.

·         Wikis

Create pages that combine the ease of wikis with the functionality of Web Parts.

Microsoft new product SharePoint 2010

What is SharePoint and why we use SharePoint?

SharePoint server is server product that relies on SharePoint foundation tachnology to provide a consistent familiar framework for lists and libraries, site administration and site customization. Using SharePoint 2010, your people can set up Web sites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, and publish reports to help everyone make better decisions.

Why Use SharePoint?

The capabilities of SharePoint 2010 work together to help any company quickly respond to changing business needs. Using SharePoint 2010,  people can share ideas and expertise, create custom solutions for specific needs, and find the right business information to make better decisions. For IT, SharePoint 2010 helps you cut training and maintenance costs, save time and effort, and focus on higher business priorities.






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Amezing qualities of SharePoint

Microsoft always provide us better environment and great platform to perform our task,so moving ahead in this Microsoft provide SharePoint for developing website,portals,content management system etc.now i'm going to describ briefly what is Sharepoint, history of SharePoint.

What is SharePoint ?

Microsoft SharePoint, is a software platform and a family of software products developed by Microsoft for collaboration and web publishing combined. These capabilities include developing web sites, portals, intranets, content management systems, search engines, wikis, blogs, and other tools for business intelligence. This family of products include: Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, Microsoft Search Server, Microsoft SharePoint Designer and Microsoft SharePoint Workspace.


History of SharePoint

The first version, called SharePoint Team Services (usually abbreviated to STS), was released at the same time as Office XP and was available as part of Microsoft FrontPage. STS could run on Windows 2000 Server or Windows XP.

Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 was marketed as an upgrade to SharePoint Team Services, but was in fact a completely redesigned application. SharePoint Team Services stored documents in ordinary file storage, keeping document metadata in a database. Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 on the other hand, stores both the document and the metadata in a database, and supports basic document versioning for items in Document Libraries. Service Pack 2 for WSS added support for SQL Server 2005 and the use of the .NET Framework 2.0.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was released on November 16, 2006 as part of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite and Windows Server 2003. WSS 3.0 is built using .NET Framework 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 Windows Workflow Foundation to add workflow capabilities to the basic suite. By the beginning of 2007 WSS 3.0 was made available to the public. Windows 2000 Server is not supported by WSS 3.0.

WSS version 3 marked a significant maturation of the product. Version 3 supported more features commonly used in Web 2.0 solutions like Blogs, Wikis and RSS feeds. Microsoft has launch next version 4.0 to SharePoint Foundation 2010.

Features in SharePoint Foundation 2010

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (formerly known as Windows SharePoint Services) is a free add-on to Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 providing a web portal with commonly needed features.

1. Alerts Enhancements

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 expands the alerts framework to enable users to have alerts sent as Short Message Service (SMS) messages to their mobile devices.

Extensible Mobile Messaging Framework

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SharePoint Foundation 2010 takes advantage of the new mobile messaging framework to enhance its Alerts feature. To support the new option, the SPAlert class now has a property that indicates whether the alert is delivered as e-mail or as an SMS message. The SharePoint Foundation Web application is given its own account, which can be programmatically changed, with a mobile messaging service provider.

The mobile messaging framework is itself extensible, so you can create your SharePoint Foundation solutions that incorporate SMS messages that are sent to mobile telephones. You can create a completely customized alert system if you want. If your messaging solution uses the Office Mobile Service (OMS) protocol, most of your development work has already been done for you. A rich set of classes has been added to the object model to represent the Web Methods and response types of the protocol. If your solution requires a different protocol, base classes have been provided with default implementations of essential properties and methods.

2. Business Connectivity Services

Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS), formerly named the Business Data Catalog, provides read/write access to external data from line-of-business (LOB) systems, Web services, databases, and other external systems within Microsoft SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2010 has product features that can use external data directly, both online and offline. Developers can gain access to a rich set of features and rapidly build solutions by using familiar tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010.

Business Connectivity Services enhances SharePoint application capabilities and their UI through features, services, and tools. These enhanced capabilities and UI streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services. Power users, developers, and business unit IT professionals can integrate assets from external systems and enable interaction with the external data through many types of applications. The Business Connectivity Services feature set enables rapid development and deployment of scalable and security-rich solutions.

The following are some of the features of Business Connectivity Services.

Write-back to External Systems

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Using Business Connectivity Services, you can create, read, update, delete, and query (CRUDQ) to the external system from a Microsoft Office application or SharePoint site if the external system supports the operations and is modeled appropriately in the Business Data Connectivity (BDC) service.

Familiar UI

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External content types provide SharePoint behaviors (such as lists, Web Parts, and profile pages) to external data and services. As a result, users can work in their familiar work environments without needing to learn different (and often proprietary) user interfaces.

More Connectivity Options

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The core function of BDC is to provide connectivity support to the following types of external systems:

• Databases

• Web and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services

• Microsoft .NET connectivity assemblies

• Custom data sources

Extensible Provider Model

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In addition to connectors for the previous list of data sources provided by BDC, BDC provides a pluggable framework with which developers can plug in connectors for new external system types, thus enabling these new data source types to be accessed via the BDC.

Batch and Bulk Operation Support

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In Office SharePoint Server 2007, BDC supported only single item operations, such as search. BDC now provides batch and bulk operation support which enable you to read multiple items in a single call thus reducing round trips to the backend dramatically.

Read BLOBs

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BDC now supports reading Binary Large Object (BLOB) data. This is useful for streaming BLOBs of data from the external system.

Read and Write-back of Complex Types

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BDC now supports dot notation in field names and therefore enables you to read and write complex types.

Life Cycle Management

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Business Connectivity Services provides a set of tools to facilitate creation of models and Office 2010 application artifacts, declaratively and by writing code. You can use SharePoint Designer 2010 to rapidly create composite solutions that meet external unit needs without writing code. You can use Visual Studio to create or extend solutions with sophisticated workflows and data that spans structured LOB systems, unstructured SharePoint applications or Microsoft Office applications, and Web 2.0 services.

Enhanced API Set and Extensibility

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Developers can use the BDC Runtime object model to write generic applications by using the stereotyped APIs as building blocks. Such generic applications are then assured to work against any external system, including those that are preexisting and those that are yet to be built.

Developers can also write specific applications that make assumptions about the abstract entity model (the fields exposed by these, and the types of the fields).

And with the .NET Assembly Connector, Custom Connector and the pluggable Secure Store Provider, it provides a rich extensibility mechanism for software developers.

3. Client Object Model

________________________________________Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 introduces three new client APIs for interacting with SharePoint sites: from a .NET managed application (not earlier than Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5), from a Microsoft Silverlight application (not earlier than Silverlight 2.0), or from ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) that executes in the browser. These new APIs provide access to a subset of the types and members that are contained in the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace of the server-side object model.

The new client object models provide an object-oriented system for interoperating with SharePoint data from a remote computer, and they are in many respects easier to use than the already existing SharePoint Foundation Web services. You start by retrieving a client context object that represents the current request context, and through this context, you can obtain access to client objects at site-collection level or lower in the SharePoint Foundation hierarchy. Client objects inherit from the ClientObject class (ECMAScript: ClientObject), and you can use them to retrieve properties for a specific SharePoint object, to retrieve child objects and their properties, or to retrieve child items from a collection.

4 Custom Field Rendering Enhancements

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 makes two significant changes to the way that you define how custom field types render.

XSLT Stylesheet Rendering on List Views

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In Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, fields were rendered on list view pages by a RenderPattern element in a field definition file, fldtypes*.xml. In SharePoint Foundation 2010, fields are rendered on list view pages by XSLT stylesheets. Consequently, you now define the rendering of your custom field types by creating a custom XSLT stylesheet rather than adding a custom RenderPattern element to a field type definition. See How to: Create a Custom Field Type Definition and Understanding the FldTypes.xml File for more information about field type definitions. See Overview of XSLT List View Rendering System and How to: Customize the Rendering of a Field on a List View for more information about XSLT rendering and how to customize it.

RenderPattern Elements are Now Obsolete

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In Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, fields were also typically rendered in Display mode by means of a RenderPattern element in a field definition file. It was also possible, although rare, to render a field in Edit and New modes with a RenderPattern element. It was more common to render fields in Edit and New modes with a user control (ASCX), known as a RenderingTemplate, and it was possible to use a user control to render a field in Display mode. In SharePoint Foundation 2010, custom fields should always be rendered with user controls in all three modes. Although some long-standing built-in fields still use a RenderPattern element, for development of custom fields RenderPattern elements are obsolete.

PropertySchema Elements are Now Obsolete

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In Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, when a custom field had a variable property (that is, a property with a different value on different lists), a control was needed on the New Site Column, Change Site Column, Create Column, and Change Column pages so that users could set the property value. One of the ways that custom field designers could define the rendering of this control was with a PropertySchema element in a field definition file. This method is now obsolete. You should create an editing control as a user control (ASCX). Point your custom field to the user control by setting the FieldEditorUserControl property. For more information about such editor controls, see Custom Field Type Property Rendering and How to: Create an Editor Control for a Field Type Property.

Backward Compatibility

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If there is no user control (RenderingTemplate) for a field, the runtime looks for a RenderPattern element in the field type definition file and, if found, uses it. One implication of this behavior is that custom fields that you created for versions earlier than SharePoint Foundation 2010 can still use their existing field type definitions with RenderPattern elements for Display, Edit, or New mode.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 will not automatically render your legacy custom fields on list views by using the Render Pattern in the field type definition for the field. However, if you do not want the default rendering that is given to the field by the XSLT stylesheet, you can re-enable the RenderPattern by adding a TRUE element to the field type definition. For more information, see Understanding the FldTypes.xml File and RenderPattern Element (Field Types).