HOW SHAREPOINT STORES DATA ?

One of the most important benefits of using SharePoint as an application platform is the ability to use its storagecontainers for storing application data, especially in the form of a list ‐ which is the fundamental data structure in SharePoint.
There are two kinds storage containers inside SharePoint: 1) Administration Store ‐ This store contains data relatedto site administration, containing information such as server farm and node setup, etc. ; and 2) Content Store ‐ Thisstore contains data related to site hierarchy as well as the content associated with the site, including user data ,layout, menu items, etc. The content database is where most application data will tend to reside. The use ofSharePoint storage containers is centered on the notion of list. A list is a collection of items or rows and can be usedto store application data.

WHAT IS SITE PROVISIONING ?

Site provisioning in MOSS is the process of creating an instance of website/application using the pre-defined site definitions.

While creating an instance, the SP admin will choose a template that are registered in the server farm, (site definitions). In case, the site need to be modified after it has been provisioned,
Features allows change to an existing functionality associated with a provisioned site. Like SiteDefinition, Features is a collection of XML files that, once registered, becomes available to site administrators. A Feature applied at a SPSite scope is automaticallyavailable to all nested SPWebs

WHAT IS SITE DEFINITION IN MOSS ?

Any web application is ultimately a collection of static or dynamically generated web pages. WSS has two core entities, SPWeb and SPSite. An SPWeb entity is acollection of web pages and can be thought of as a sub‐site. A SPSite is a collection of SPWebs. Together SPWeb and SPSite allow the creation of custom web application topologies by defining what is knownas a site definition. It contains a number of SPWebs and how they are nested and other components such as
navigation, contents, custom code etc. Once the template or site definition has been defined and registered, SharePoint administrators can use them to provision sites.

WHY MOSS AS AN APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM?

There are two major motivations for choosing MOSS/SharePoint as an application development platform:

1. The need to provision more than one website based on a logical grouping ‐ such as department, regionor country ‐ rather than have one website that serves all users.
   For example, a company needs to develop a web application for its partners that allow them access to pertinent sales information. The partners may want the sales information to surface differently (i.e. grouped byregions vs. grouped by cities), or they may want to co‐locate additional applications on the same page(i.e. a tax calculator). Rather than building all of this personalization in code, it is easier to provision asite for each partner that is based on a single common site blueprint. Each partner can then customizetheir site based on their specific needs via a single code base.
2. The need to manage un‐structured content (i.e. documents, web casts, etc.) along with the structureddata stored in a SQL database. A distinction between the structured content and unstructured content is that the former deals with data that can be viewed andmanaged using set‐based groupings (database views), whereas, the latter deals with data that ismanaged as explicit standalone entities along with the associated metadata. Not only is it important tomanage the integrity and security of standalone entities (such as documents); it is also important tomanage the relationships among them (for instance, the association relationship between a documentand structured application data).

Microsoft has introduced platforms/products such WSS and MOSS that build on ASP.NET technology to provide higher‐level building blocks such as the document library and lists, end‐user‐definedforms, search, personalization and workflow.