Exploring the SharePoint 3.0 Wave: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

The point at which Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies really took off was the 3.0 wave. This wave saw the tightest integration between the new versions of the two products. WSS became WSS 3.0, and SPS 2003 was renamed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. In addition, Microsoft combined its Content Management Server product with SharePoint, integrating it into MOSS 2007.

MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0, as shown in Figure 1.2, saw massive adoption across the board, and many organizations started to deploy for collaboration, document management, intranets, and extranets. In addition, major industry websites started to move to SharePoint 2007, with tens of thousands of public-facing sites deployed on SharePoint within the first few years. This version saw true comprehensive document management, enterprise search, and collaboration capabilities as well, and many organizations deployed it to improve their efficiency and communications capabilities.

Figure 1.2. Viewing a legacy SharePoint 2007 environment.

SharePoint 2007’s success was one of its disadvantages as well, unfortunately, as the growth of SharePoint sites led in some cases to a proliferation of siloed SharePoint farms and sites in many spots across organizations. There was a general lack of governance of the SharePoint environments, and this ended up hurting many companies as it created redundancy of data and inefficiencies. In addition, there were certain features that were asked for that were not part of the product, and other annoyances that people complained about that Microsoft sought to fix. Organizations looked to Microsoft to further improve its product, and Microsoft busily gathered information on what people liked and didn’t like to include those new features in the next release of the product.