Introduction
Welcome to this series of blog post that deals with Windows Sharepoint Services aka WSS. In this first part we will
review the basics of a content management system, the types of content management system and the fitment of
WSS in this space. We will delve into the technical details of WSS in the subsequent posts. The content that follows
provide a birds eye view into the basics of a CMS system.
Overview
Basically a CMS is a system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other type of contents.
Basically it can be broadly classified as follows (though this is not a strict classification)
A web CMS is a system for creating and managing HTML content. It facilitates content creation, content control,
editing and essential administrative functionalities.
An Enterprise CMS is used to manage an enterprise content i.e. content that relates to organization and its
processes
RMS (Records Management System) refers to content that is mostly history kind of data. Data which needs to
stored for longer period as per specific policies. These data is not normalyy used.
Document Management specifically relates to management, creation, controlling of various kinds of documents
including workflows that is attached to the specific document.
The above is the basic categorization. There are more specific catgegories, but thats not that important for our discussion.
What is WSS?
Windows Sharepoint Services is a set of services which provide basic content management functionalities. Specifically
it includes document management, simple workflow, list management, blogs, wikis etc.
Besides since WSS is developed on top of .net framework 2.0, we have all the extensibilty that the framework provides.
More commonly we will use webpart to customize the required functionlities and provide addition functionlities and
services.
WSS allows teams to create web sites for information sharing and document collaboration. WSS is a component of
Windows Server 2003. WSS also serves as a platform for application development.
The second post will deal with the architecture of WSS which provides a base framework for application development
as well.