What's New in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 makes it easier to create sites to share information with others with new types of sites, lists, and libraries. Managing your sites is also much easier with an enhanced security model and tools for monitoring and controlling your sites.

The following features are just some of the additions and improvements for users of Windows SharePoint Services.

Alerts Alerts improve on the subscription notifications in SharePoint Team Services 1.0 from Microsoft. Windows SharePoint Services uses alerts to tell you through e-mail about additions, deletions, and changes to lists, list items, libraries, and other parts of sites. You can receive alert results immediately, or request daily, or weekly alert results summaries.
Lists Issue lists, calendar views, group-by views, personal views, and rich text expand the possibilities of Windows SharePoint Services lists. You can use formulas and functions in lists to create calculated columns and views. Creating a list is even easier from the one-stop Create page. Lists can be set up to require the list owner's approval before new items appear.
Document libraries Document libraries now support versions—or creating a backup copy of a file whenever you save a file to the library—as well as check in and check out, and subfolders. Windows SharePoint Services includes viewers for files that enable you to view documents from programs such as Microsoft Office 2003 even if you don't have the program installed.
Picture libraries You can store photos and graphics in new picture libraries. View pictures as thumbnails, filmstrips, or in a standard files list.
Meeting Workspace sites New Meeting Workspace sites deliver a place for managing meetings and their attendees, agendas, documents, decisions, and action items. Users can contribute to a Meeting Workspace site using a browser. You can create a Meeting Workspace site from an e-mail program compatible with Windows SharePoint Services, such as Office Outlook 2003 or by using the browser from an events list.
Document Workspace sites New Document Workspace sites deliver sites that are centered around one or more documents. You can can easily work together with coworkers on a document — either by working directly on the copy located on the Document Workspace site or by working on your own copy, which you can update periodically with changes that are saved to the copy located on the Document Workspace site. You can create a Document Workspace site from a word processing program compatible with Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you can create a Document Workspace from Microsoft Office Word 2003, Office Excel 2003, Office PowerPoint 2003, as a Shared Attachment in Office Outlook 2003, or by using the browser from a document library.
Integration with other programs You can open files from, save files to, and upload multiple files to document libraries from productivity programs that are compatible with Windows SharePoint Services, such as Office 2003. You can link events and contacts information between Windows SharePoint Services and compatible calendar and contacts programs. Document Workspace sites integrate with Windows SharePoint Services-compatible e-mail, spreadsheet, presentation, and word processing programs to enable you to send documents in a Document Workspace site as attachments. Windows SharePoint Services-compatible spreadsheet and database programs enhance SharePoint lists in Datasheet views.
Online presence integration User presence is indicated everywhere a member name appears in a site. The presence menu integrates with Microsoft Active Directory directory service, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft Windows Messenger to offer information such as free/busy status, office location, and manager.

The following are just some of the new and improved features for people who manage a site or sites.

Lists and libraries Windows SharePoint Services offers site administrators that ability to manage lists and libraries by doing the following:

Blocking specific file types from document libraries to prevent suspicious file types from being uploaded to the server
Linking a document library with a public folder based on Microsoft Exchange 2000 or later to store documents attached to e-mail messages
Specifying list permissions to allow only specific users to change a list

Customizing sites You can enable users to update the home page content and layout by using the Web Parts tool pane. Also, each list in a site is a Web Part that allows easy customization and personalization by using the browser. You can also manage themes and templates to make customization even easier.

Templates Templates can apply to entire sites, or individual lists and libraries. You can save lists as templates, and then reuse them or distribute them to other sites. You can save sites as templates to capture best practices or to define a consistent look and feel. You can store Web Parts, list templates, and site templates in libraries for use by all sites in the site collection.

International settings Windows SharePoint Services offers support for regional settings such as language, time zone, currency type, international calendar formats, and other locale settings on a per-site basis.

Site users You can use your organizational address book to choose the users to add to a site, and use domain groups to control access to your site. Windows SharePoint Services supports Microsoft Windows authentication support for anonymous, basic, integrated Windows authentication, and certificates authentication.

Site creation You can enable self-service site creation to allow users to create sites on demand without involving the IT department.

Tracking site use You can use usage information to determine how many users visit each site. Sites owners are automatically notified if their site has been inactive for a specified period of time. If multiple notices are sent to the site owner and the site remains inactive, the administrator can specify that the site be automatically deleted.

The following are some of the new and improved features for administrators of servers running Windows SharePoint Services.

Site collection management Top-level Web sites and subsites can divide site content into distinct and separately manageable sites. These site collections support customized management tools and simplified management from a single list of all sites. Each site in a server farm can be individually backed up and restored. You can set quotas for site storage size and generate automatic notifications for the site owner when a site reaches its size limit. You can use the SharePoint Central Administration pages to manage users on all sites and create cross-site groups that can be used within all sites in a site collection.
Server topology You can install and configure Windows SharePoint Services to allow your server farm to host several sites with the same Internet Protocol (IP) address, with multiple site names and separate content. You can add multiple servers running Microsoft SQL Server to the server farm to support server clusters. You can load balance your front-end Web servers by using a single back-end SQL Server computer.
Site migration You can use the Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool (Smigrate.exe) to move existing Windows SharePoint Services sites to another server. SharePoint Team Services v1.0 sites can be moved to SharePoint sites as well.
Extensibility Sites are built on Microsoft ASP.NET technology and are extensible by using the Microsoft .NET Framework. You can use the object model to create custom solutions for SharePoint Products and Technologies. You can use events in document libraries to build custom actions and send documents to a document library by using e-mail.
SQL Server integration When using Windows SharePoint Services with Microsoft SQL Server, full-text indexing provides site-wide search. To take advantage of SQL Server backup and restore capabilities, SQL Server is used to store all site data including documents.
International settings Windows SharePoint Services languages supports more languages than SharePoint Team Services v1.0. Multiple language sites can be hosted on a single server or server farm running Windows SharePoint Services. Site language is independent from server language.