Hello, everyone! Here at last we have the long-delayed Part 3 of my SharePoint Genealogy. In our previous articles, I have described the FrontPage and Office Server extensions, how the Office client itself evolved to support them, and how many of today's SharePoint concepts had their genesis from Site Server. None of these applications, though, had much influence over SharePoint's modular user interface – Web Parts, and Web Part Pages. These did not spring fully-formed into existence, however. There was yet another "parent" to today's SharePoint – the Digital Dashboard.
Like many Microsoft technologies, Digital Dashboards went through a few revisions before gaining much acclaim. The first version of the Digital Dashboard tool kit, though offering a modular framework, never really gained much traction. With version 2.0, however, much of what we now see became much more mature. A "Dashboard" was a web page with some special components designed to support a modular framework of Web Parts. XML was used to define the content, and CSS the look, of the page. We also got introduced to the .DWP extension. (DWP originally stood for Dashboard Web Part.)
The dashboard framework was able to support many different kinds of storage – from the local file system on the web server, to SQL Server, to the Exchange message store. Although the Exchange and local file stores were dropped in version 3 of what was now known as the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit (DDRK), the Exchange store didn't vanish completely. Instead, it was adapted to become the Web Storage System for SharePoint Portal Server 2001, and the Digital Dashboard became the primary SPS user interface.
Another evolution of the Dashboard and Exchange was the Team Folders concept. This gave Exchange and Outlook users a place to easily collaborate. These made use of Public Folders, HTML, and a special component called the Outlook View Control (OVC). This control allows access to one's mailbox from a web page, as long as you have an Outlook profile on your PC. That isn't quite the same as Outlook Web Access (OWA). OWA renders HTML based upon the web server talking to the Exchange Server. The OVC, on the other hand, communicates with Exchange from the client PC. While this gives the OVC an exact duplicate of the Outlook mailbox functionality, it does mean that it can't be used outside of the network.
Finally, the Office Server Extensions were evolved into SharePoint Team Services (STS), providing yet another collaborative environment. STS introduced the concepts of Lists and Document Libraries to a web site. (SPS 2001 also had document libraries, but they were implemented in the Web Storage System, and operated quite differently.) STS sites were easy for end users to create and manage, and proved to be very popular.
When the time came to bring out the "new" versions of SharePoint for 2003, Microsoft decided to consolidate a lot of these technologies and concepts. They merged the DDRK's SQL storage system and web parts, with SharePoint Team Services lists and libraries, and the new .NET framework to create Windows SharePoint Services (WSS). SharePoint Portal Server, formerly a completely separate technology from the similarly named SharePoint Team Services, was built upon the new WSS - finally allowing for a single collaborative development model.
The SharePoint Products and Technologies are a family with a large, and sometimes distinguished, family tree. Through carefully breeding-in the best elements of a large number of products, Microsoft has produced a first-rate system, that is going to become even better with the next release.
