You can now dowload the SharePoint extensions for Visual Studio 2008

 Click Here to download.

If you haven't noticed MSDN has gone through a facelift. If you try to get to it through their site you might not be a ble to get to it so here is the direct url .

It's pretty slick - check it out http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com

Are you arriving early to next weeks Teched? Are you staying a couple more days? DO you live in there area but weren't able to go to TechEd? Well if that is the case I want to let you know that the Florida .NET community his hosting a Tweener event at Orlando's  OCC.

I'm going to be presenting at the Tweener event also called the ]inBetween[ event run by the Florida .NET community on WCF click here to register for this session http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=128291 .

A close friend of mine and a co-author Jacob Sanford, is going to be speaking around the fundamentals of Windows SharePoint Services 2007 with other SharePoint gurus Josh Carlisle, Mikhail Dikov, Doug Ware, and Ted Pattison.

The topics they will cover are:

• Installation
• What's new in 2007
• Core Concepts
• Building WebParts

Click here to register - - http://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=128289

There will be other presentations and open sessions which is located at the inbetween web site.

Now there is another thing called Open Space sessions where anyone can signup and speak about the technology they wish to speak about. It's a first come first speaks bases and you can sign up here for Open Space.

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I am currently at TechEd 2008 and I stopped by a BreakOut session on SharePoint Development and heard the good news and wanted t oshare it with you. Many of you know that the new version (1.2) of Visual Studio 2008 extensions for WSS was going to be out on June. I was expecting that this was going to be launched at this event but they didn't.

The word is that it will be out next week.So Stay Tuned !!!

Also they launched a website today you should chek it out @ - http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/

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If you’re looking for a book that walks you through how you design a SharePoint site in PhotoShop , to cutting that PhotoShop into HTML to making that a Master Page this is the book you’ve been waiting for. The name of the book is Professional SharePoint 2007 Design and it is a Wrox book. The book also covers the main concepts for designers such as Master Pages, CSS, Themes, Navigation and Publishing.

You can acces the book at amozon by visiting the following link.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047028580X

I’ll be at the WROX booth at TechEd2008 this week, please feel free to stop by if you have any questions or would like to vent about of your design issues with SharePoint.

On a personal note the past few months I’ve been pretty quiet in my blog because I’ve been working on this book with 3 other great SharePoint guys Randy Drisgill, Jacob Sanford and David Drinkwine and I want to thank my co-authors for this great experience!

Are you one of those people who installed Windows Server 2003 on your laptop because you don't like working on remote SharePoint installations? 

Well no worries Bamboo just announced that their architect Jonas Nilsson created an installer that allows you to install WSS 3.0 SP1 and MOSS on Vista.

Download the files here  - http://community.bamboosolutions.com/media/p/193.aspx 

 You can also read about it at

http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/bambooteamblog/archive/2008/05/21/how-to-install-windows-sharepoint-services-3-0-sp1-on-vista-x64-x86.aspx

 Thanks Jonas, I think a lot of developers are going to be using this.

Also as Jonathan mentioned in his comment - this is probably not supported by Microsoft.

In most cases I see that SharePoint users using audiences to secure their web parts. But as most of you know this is really not a security feature. Audiences don't look at security, it will either hide or display the web part based on the audience settings.

If you really need to have Web Parts show based on security what you have to do is use the SecurityTrimmed control. All you have to do is open your default.aspx in your SharePoint Designer and add the following code snippet.

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="ManageWeb">
 <WebPartPages:WebPartZone id="g_CC57BF5FF56740B099B0728E5C262566" runat="server" title="Secure Zone">
    </WebPartPages:WebPartZone>
    </SharePoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

This will add a Web Part Zone named SecureZone to your default.aspx page which will allow you to add web parts that will only be displayed to Administrators. The way you decide who gets to see the Web parts is by changing the value of the PermissionsString. In this case it is set to ManageWeb which is what only administrators have. So the web parts that are added to this web part zone will one be displayed to administrators.

Some of the other Permission Strings are as follows:

ManagePermissions
ViewUsageData
ManageSubwebs
ManageWeb
AddAndCustomizePages
ApplyThemeAndBorder
ApplyStyleSheets
CreateGroups
BrowseDirectories
CreateSSCSite
ViewPages
EnumeratePermissions
BrowseUserInfo
ManageAlerts
UseRemoteAPIs
UseClientIntegration
Open
EditMyUserInfo

If you already haven't check out this site, it will give you a high level understanding of how you can integrate SharePoint with Silverlight. Now that the new version of silverlight is out I think it's time to integrate it into SharePoint.

http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/ 

This site has the following sample's code, video and documentation ready for download.

1. Hello Silverlight Web Parts and the SilverlightPart
2. Silverlight Navigation Controls
3. Siverlight Social Networking Web Part
4. Visual How-To center with Silverlight
5. Picture Viewer sample
6. Silverlight Custom Field Types 

Here are the sample screen shots of the silverlight controls

Custom Field Type Example 

Picture Viewer Sample

Silverlight Navigation Controls

Microsoft has announced today their Software as a Service SAAS platform is now available. Their platform includes SharePoint, Exchange, and Live Communications servers. They announced that CocaCola will be fully moving to this platform.

You can get more information on this by visiting: http://www.microsoft.com/online/sharepoint-online.mspx   

I'm not sure if you've run into this when you're developing custom webparts or adding 3rd party webparts to a page but this happens to me quite often, I get an error stating that the page cannot be displayed and I right of way I know it's a web part I added to the page that's causing the issue but I can't get to the page to delete the web part. I don't want to open SharePoint designer either, so how do you delete the web part with the browser if you can't accesss the page?

Use the following URL on any SharePoint site to see the webparts you have installed on your SharePoint page

/_layouts/spcontnt.aspx?&url=[your_page_url_goes_here] 

So if  the page you're having issues with looks like the following

http://www.yourserver.com/site1/default.aspx

To see the web parts on that page you would use the following link

http://www.yourserver.com/_layouts/spcontnt.aspx?&url=/site/default.aspx

When you get to that page you'll see that you can Close, Reset or Delete web parts on the page that you specified.

Hope this helps!

I haven't had much time to blog the last 2 months due to my busy schedule but I'm hoping to start bloging again soon. But I wanted let the Turkish readers of sharepointblogs.com that I was invited to present at a SharePoint event held at Microsoft Turkey's Headquarters at Oct 24 2007.

 The event will be in Turkish and it will be around real life examples of what SharePoint can do for Turkish businesses. Hope to see you there!

 To sign-up for the event you can use the following link

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7582846

For those of you who live in the Wisconsin area I wanted to let you know that I will be presenting at the Wisconsin SharePoint Users Group May 22nd. The title of the presentation is "Migrating from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007".  If you're interested in the Upgrade to MOSS  2007 topic please join us at Milwaukee

 This session will discuss methods and best practices to mitigate the risks and facilitate the process in migrating to WSS 3.0 and MOSS. We will discuss:
• Concerns to address before the upgrade
• Pros and cons of three upgrade scenarios (In-Place, Parallel, Content DB)
• What to do with unghosted/customized pages
• Learn what to do with your Web Part resources
• If you have to move your custom site definition...
• Converting a WSS 2.0 site to WSS 3.0
• Issues to consider with SPS
• 3rd party tools that can help

 URL to the meeting announcement:
http://www.culminisconnections.com/sites/WSUG/Lists/Announcements/DispForm.aspx?ID=5&Source=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eculminisconnections%2Ecom%2Fsites%2FWSUG%2Fdefault%2Easpx

Hi everyone, CSUG is meeting April 19th again. This time Todd Bleeker is in town and will be talking about Unghosting, Master Pages, CSS, Themes, and the Content Editor Web Part (of course).

Sign-Up to this Event by visiting the following link https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=117591  

"My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts"

How can I create sub tasks in SharePoint task lists?  This is one of the things I hear my clients ask for all of the time and I hate to tell them that this requires custom code. Well no worries anymore there is a great team of people working on this for you!

Ishai Sagi (Owner of the Sharepoint Tips And Tricks site and also a recognized SharePoint MVP) has started a codeplex project named "SharePoint Nested Tasks"  to

The following is taken from the Architecture document for SharePoint Nested Tasks located here. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------

SharePoint Nested Tasks is meant to provide SharePoint users with the ability to create sub tasks in a (potential infinite) hierarchy.  Currently, tasks in both SharePoint and Outlook do not support sub tasks that branch from a parent, and the need for this tracking of a hierarchy of tasks is apparent.

For example, a decision maker may assign a task to a team leader, who will in turn assign sub tasks to people in his team. The team leader wants to see the status of the sub tasks aggregated into the view of the task that is assigned to him, and he also wants to make changes to the parent task that will affect the entire tree of tasks.

Are you interested, have any ideas, comments? Well check out the project site and let us know!

http://www.codeplex.com/SharePointSubTasks 

Here are some screen shots from the architecture document

If you are getting a cannot connect to database error with SharePoint 2007 or indexing status remains in the Crawling state. The following might be the solution for you.

I was troubleshooting this issue and saw that my transaction logs were growing really fast and the server we were using didn't have much disk space allocated for the transaction logs. It was a 14 GB transaction log for a 9MB content database which is not an expected behaviour.

- After further investigation I saw that the log files were showing

CGathererQueueManager::FlushQueue failed with recoverable error 0x80040e2f CGathererFilterSink::CommitLinks : pGatherAddLink->AddLinkComplete error=0x80040e2f

and

Tried stopping the search service using the following command from the command line but it wouldn't stop the service.

stsadm -o osearch -action stop

The Office SharePoint Server Search (osearch) service was stuck in Stopping mode but wouldn't stop.

Further looking into it we found an entry at Mike Hanley's blog that talked about how their Search service was stuck in the "Crawling Full" state. But I didn't like the fact that we had to recreate the indexes and recreate the SSP. So I looked further with the tips I found in Mike's entry and found this KB Article which explains how to fix the issue without creating indexes and a new SSP.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930887

After reading this article I found out that this was happening because the Database server that SharePoint 2007 was using was a SQL 2005 server which has maintenance plans that rebuilds indexes. This issue was occurring because the Rebuild index task did not restore all the options that were set on the indexes that are used by SharePoint Server 2007 after indexes are rebuilt. The Ignore duplicate values option is turned off after indexes are rebuilt.

Before you re-enable the maintenance plan, delete the Rebuild Index task or replace the Rebuild Index task with an Execute Transact-SQL Statement task. The Execute Transact-SQL Statement task should restore all options on indexes.

I had to tackle this issue at one of my clients and the way I solved this issue was by creating a table and putting the PlaceHolderSearchArea in that <TD> and aligned the <TD>

<table style="width: 100%; float:right;">
    <tr >
     <td width="100%"></td>
     <td id="SearchBox" align="right" style="text-align:right;">
       <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat="server">
        <SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="SmallSearchInputBox"/>
       </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
     </td>
    </tr>
</table>

This did the trick for me but I really did not have much time to better understand what was causing this issue and I came accross the answer in Heather's post. (for those of you who have not visited her site yet please do it's a gold mine of information.)

Heather found out that there was an empty table cell to the right of the search inputs with a width set to 100%. So you need to take care of that in order to move around your search box. To get her solution(CSS Code) to this click on the following link which will take you to her post about this topic.

SharePoint CSS Trick: Align your Search Inputs

<coskun\>

(I liked Lawrence's signature. he signs his name as a html tag and I think I'll use this as well. Pretty geeky and I like it :)

Well yesterday was the event for Chicago SharePoint User Group and I finally got to meet with Lawrence and Rob. I actually worked with Rob on a project but it was over email and IM. So it was finally great to meet them and put a face to the name.

The event was great and gave great insight to the community, and I just wanted to thank Rob and Lawrence for coming out to Chicago.

Application Templates for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
One of the biggest announcements was that the new application templates are now available. Here is the link so that you can download the templates and test them and see which one works for you.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsserver/sharepoint/wssapps/templates/default.mspx

	Board of Directors
	Business Performance Reporting
	Case Management for Government Agencies
	Classroom Management
	Clinical Trial Initiation and Management
	Competitive Analysis Site
	Discussion Database
	Disputed Invoice Management
	Employee Activities Site
	Employee Self-Service Benefits
	Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
	Equity Research
	Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
	Manufacturing Process Management
	New Store Opening
	Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
	Request for Proposal
	Sports League
	Team Work Site
	Timecard Management

Another announcement we got was the new SharePoint Community Portal  url here you if you missed this link in the meeting -

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepoint/default.aspx

"My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts"

Why do I get an error when I delete some content placeholders?
In my last post I listed all of the default content placeholders and talked about how there are some content placeholders that are empty but we can't just take them out because when we do the page doesn't render properly and you get an error.

The reason why you get an error is because the content placeholder you remove is probably being used by some other page in that site since SharePoint master pages contain references to elements that is shared across multiple pages and when that page tries to place its own custom content in that placeholder it creates an error since there is no place to show the content.

For example the "PlaceHolderPageImage" is empty on the default.master page but the Forms\AllItems.aspx uses that content placeholder to place the image (icon) for that page.

Why would you then take out a content placeholder from a master page if it throws an error?
This mostly is needed because you need to create a custom master page and you start from scratch because the default.master master page is not what you want.

The recommended approach when creating a new custom master page is to copy the default master page and start from there so you don't lose any of the required content placeholders when creating your own master page. But what if you don't like that master page and you want to start from scratch?

You can either manually create all of the content place holders I've listed in my earlier post or read below.

The answer = "Minimal Master Page"

The folks at Microsoft has created a great master page that is called the minimal master page as the name states is it's the minimal code you need to start a master page. So if you want to start from scratch and want a clean master page that has no styles attached to it this is by far the best way to do it.

Here is the Code for a Minimal Master Page

<%-- Identifies this page as a .master page written in C# and registers tag prefixes, namespaces, assemblies, and controls. --%>
<%@ Master language="C#" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<%@ Import Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePoint" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="WebPartPages" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingWebControls" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingNavigation" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="wssuc" TagName="Welcome" src="~/_controltemplates/Welcome.ascx" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="wssuc" TagName="DesignModeConsole" src="~/_controltemplates/DesignModeConsole.ascx" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="PublishingVariations" TagName="VariationsLabelMenu" src="~/_controltemplates/VariationsLabelMenu.ascx" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="PublishingConsole" TagName="Console" src="~/_controltemplates/PublishingConsole.ascx" %>
<%@ Register TagPrefix="PublishingSiteAction" TagName="SiteActionMenu" src="~/_controltemplates/PublishingActionMenu.ascx" %>
<%-- Uses the Microsoft Office namespace and schema. --%>
<html>
  <WebPartPages:SPWebPartManager runat="server"/>
  <SharePoint:RobotsMetaTag runat="server"/>

  <%-- The head section includes a content placeholder for the page title and links to CSS and JavaScript files that run on the server. --%>
  <head runat="server">
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder runat="server" id="head">
      <title>
        <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageTitle" runat="server" />
      </title>
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
    <Sharepoint:CssLink runat="server"/>
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderAdditionalPageHead" runat="server" />
  </head>
 
  <%-- When loading the body of the .master page, MOSS 2007 also loads the SpBodyOnLoadWrapper class. This class handles .js calls for the master page. --%>
  <body onload="BLOCKED SCRIPT_spBodyOnLoadWrapper();">
    <%-- The SPWebPartManager manages all of the Web part controls, functionality, and events that occur on a Web page. --%>
    <form runat="server" onsubmit="return _spFormOnSubmitWrapper();">
      <wssuc:Welcome id="explitLogout" runat="server"/>
      <PublishingSiteAction:SiteActionMenu runat="server"/> 
      <PublishingWebControls:AuthoringContainer id="authoringcontrols" runat="server">
        <PublishingConsole:Console runat="server" />
      </PublishingWebControls:AuthoringContainer>
      <%-- The PlaceHolderMain content placeholder defines where the page content should go for all the content from the page layout. The page layout can overwrite any content placeholder from the master page. Example: The PlaceHolderLeftNavBar can overwrite the left navigation bar. --%>
      <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server" />
        <asp:Panel visible="false" runat="server">
        <%-- These ContentPlaceHolders are only necessary to ensure all out of the box MOSS 2007 pages render with this master page. If the system master page is set to any default master page, the only content placeholders required are those that are overridden by your page layouts. --%>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderSearchArea" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea"  runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderLeftNavBar" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderPageImage" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderBodyLeftBorder" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderNavSpacer" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderTitleLeftBorder" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderTitleAreaSeparator" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolderMiniConsole" runat="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderCalendarNavigator" runat ="server" />
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderLeftActions" runat ="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageDescription" runat ="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderBodyAreaClass" runat ="server"/>
<asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderTitleAreaClass" runat ="server"/>
</asp:Panel>
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

If you have been working with the SharePoint 2007 master pages you probably have seen many placeholders with no content in them and some with content. But what are these content placeholders? Why is it in there? If you find yourself asking these questions here is a great article on content placeholders that would be a good place to start reading.

Here is a table that identifies all of the default content placeholders and explains what they represent

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions

If you are a SharePoint developer and or want to develop for SharePoint 2007 and if you haven't installed this tool yet don't even waste a minute get this NOW!

What do you get with this tool?

Visual Studio 2005 Project Templates

I've been tagged by a fellow friend John Holliday. Well at first I didn't know what this was all about. Working long hours makes you not not bknow about these things :) So I googled the "I've been tagged" phrase and my god there was 45M results..

Results 1 - 10 of about 44,900,000 for I've Been Tagged! . (0.12 seconds) 

Well this is a crazy little game but I like it. Even though I have no time to tagg 5 people I'll still write 5 things about me.

1. I'm married and expecting a baby girl by mid February. We will name her Tuana Ilayda Cavusoglu.

2. Love sports but only good at watching. I am a die hard Fenerbahce S.K. fan. I never missed a game when I lived in Turkey. It's kind of hard to watch their games now that I live in Chicago. But now that I live in Chicago I found a couple of teams I fell in love with over the years the Chicago Bears and a Chicago Cubs. (Go Bears!) And also another soccer team I root for is F.C. Barcelona

3. I lived in Burgos/Spain, Istanbul/Turkey and Chennai/India.

4. I graduated from ISIK University at Istanbul,Turkey

5. Was born in the USA but have Turkish parents.

I downloaded the new beta realease of CorasWorks and it seems like they have fixed most of the roll-up schema issues we've been having in the first beta release.

This is a great tool that allows you to bring v2 content to a v3 site.  Normally when you update a v2 site to v3 site with SharePoint upgrade methods you don't get the benefits of using the v3 features. So this product allows you to bring your v2 sites but also ensures that you can use the v3 features.

"My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts"

Chicago SharePoint User Group

I know this is kind of late since it's been a few weeks already but wanted to let you know that we have formed a SharePoint User Group down in Chicago, IL named the Chicago SharePoint User Group. The name says it all :)

As Chicago SharePoint experts, consultants, and administrators we felt that there wasn't a User Group just for SharePoint in Chicago and one was needed. I would like to inform yo that now we have a Chicago SharePoint User Group. If you live close to Chicago I would definitely recommend you come to the events that Chicago SharePoint User Group is conducting. We try to demonstrate new features, answer questions and also talk about SharePoint experiences that we have with our clients and at our jobs.

For example a few weeks ago I presented How to upgrade to SharePoint 2007 and demonstrated and talked about the differences between the upgrade types. It was a great training opportunity for most of the audience.

"My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts"

When designing a MOSS 2007 environment we need to understand the core elements of MOSS before you can go forward with designing a MOSS 2007 solution for your organization or your client. So let’s take a step back and review the MOSS 2007 core elements.
 
Core Elements of the SharePoint Technology
The following are the core elements that make up the foundation of SharePoint technology. You must clearly understand what each of the following elements are before you start to design your solution.

• SharePoint Web Application: This is an IIS web site that is extended with the SharePoint technology. For those of you who have worked with SPS 2003 this is your “virtual server” in SPS 2003.  A SharePoint web application is where our site collections reside and a SharePoint web application can hold more than one site collection.
• Site Collection: A site collection is a group of sites built on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services that all exist under a top-level site. A site collection contains one top-level Web site. We can also refer to the top-level Web site as the portal site. Site Collections can have multiple Subsites, workspaces, and etc.
• Managed Path: This is an optional setting you can use to group site collections. Managed paths allow you to organize URLs. Managed Path also allows you to define locations in your IIS Web site so that they are not managed by SharePoint.

WSS Core Components
The following are the core elements that make up the foundation of Windows SharePoint Services v3.0. These are the components that allow us to build solutions on WSS.

• Top-level Web Site: This is the top site in the hierarchy hence the name top-level web site. This site is also referred to as the “Root site”. Top-level web sites can have multiple Subsites, workspaces, and etc. beneath.
• Subsites: These are the child sites of the top-level Web site. Subsites can also have multiple Subsites, workspaces, and etc. beneath.
• Workspaces: These are sites that are designed for a specific purpose. Examples to workspaces are;
  • Document Workspace: Designed for collaborating on documents.
  • Meeting Workspace: Designed for coordinating meetings.
• Lists: These are the building blocks of SharePoint sites. There are out of the box lists such as the Task list and the Announcements list. You can also create custom  lists based on your needs.
• Document libraries: These are also the building blocks of SharePoint site. These are lists that are designed to hold documents.
• Web Parts: These are the boxes that contain information, custom code, list views that allow developers and site owners to display data to their visitors. If you’ve used other portal systems before you can think of Web Parts as “Portlets”.
• Web Part pages: These are pages that contain Web Parts.

SharePoint Portal Core Components

• Portal Site: This is the initial site in a site collection in a portal environment. Portal sites can have multiple Subsites, workspaces, and etc. beneath.

• Subsite: This replaces the Areas in SharePoint Portal Server 20003. These are the child sites of the top-level Web site. Subsites can also have multiple Subsites, workspaces, and etc. beneath.

• Partner Portals: Partner Portals are two or more portal sites in the same environment. (This is when you create different portal sites within on server farm.)

• Parent Portal: This is a portal site that is configured to share services with child portal sites.

• Child Portal: This is a portal site that is configured to use services from a parent portal site.

"My opinions do not reflect those of my blog host, SharePoint Experts"