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.

Public sites built on MOSS

Here is the another list of public sites built on MOSS platform

http://www.wssdemo.com/Shared%20Documents/Resources.aspx

How to send document to record center programatically in MOSS 2007 ?

Here is the code to send document programatically in MOSS 2007. The below code can be used in console/win apps - but in the SharePoint box because of using SharePoint Object Libraries

private void SendDocumentToRecordsCenter()
{
try
{
string MoreInfo= string.Empty
OfficialFileResult Result;

SPSite mySite = new SPSite("http://ServerName");
SPWeb myWeb = mySite.OpenWeb();

SPFile myDoc = myWeb.GetFile("LibreryName/Doc1.docx");

Result =
myDoc.SendToOfficialFile(out MoreInfo);

Console.WriteLine("Result after execution: " + Result);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Console.WriteLine("Error - " + ex.ToString());
}
}

Error in MOSS 2007 Record Center Site : "The Record Center is not properly configured for this request"

I have received the error message when i try to push a document from a MOSS site collection to the record center of the server farm.

"The Record Center is not properly configured for this request."

After a hell lot of investigations, i have found that the URL used for configuring the record center in the server farm was wrong.

It should be like
http://< Site DNS or Server Name >/<Record Center Site Name >/_vti_bin/officialfile.asmx

</ SharePointCoder>

Best practice for building SharePoint Solutions

For any SharePoint solution project, I stongly recommend prototyping before writing the complete code. We have been successfull with our prototyping approach. Prototyping helps us to get the user feedback and gives room for more successful delivery of the solution to meet the business requirement.

If we are not able to achieve some functionalities out of the box in SharePoint, we can go for customization using ASP.net code or third party components.

How to customize application master page in MOSS 2007

Here is a way how to use the site master page in application pages like settings.aspx in MOSS.

http://superbranding.codeplex.com/