Essential SharePoint

What Software Do You Need?

Because SharePoint is designed to be used by different members with different responsibilities, the software needs for each team member vary depending on their role, as shown in Table 1-4.

Table 1-4. Software needs for different team members

Role	Responsibilities	Software needed
Administrator	Creates team sites, adds members.	Web browser, Remote Desktop Connection utility included with Windows XP Professional (recommended)
Designer	Designs pages on site, creates site templates.	FrontPage 2003
Contributor	Adds documents, lists, tasks, announcements, etc.	Office 2003
Contributor with data entry	Completes InfoPath forms.	Office 2003, InfoPath 2003
Reader	Views sites and documents, but makes no changes.	Office Reader
Programmer	Creates custom web parts.	Visual Studio .NET, FrontPage 2003, InfoPath (optional)

Where's the server software? You don't need actual physical access to a SharePoint server to create or manage SharePoint sites, because such tasks can be done remotely from your own PC by viewing one of the administrative web pages in the browser. However, you do need access to a SharePoint server, and here, listed from least to most expensive, are your access options:

• You can purchase SharePoint services on a monthly basis from an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This is a simple and inexpensive way to try SharePoint—in fact, Apptix offers a free 30-day trial at http://www.sharepointtrial.com/welcome.aspx.

• You can purchase a Windows 2003 server. SharePoint is part of Windows 2003, so you can configure the machine as a SharePoint server using the Windows setup procedure.

• You can purchase multiple servers and buy a SharePoint Portal Server license from Microsoft if you plan to create an enterprise-wide web portal based on SharePoint.

Table 1-5 lists the relative advantages of each approach.

Table 1-5. Different ways to purchase SharePoint

Buy SharePoint as	Advantage	Disadvantage
Hosted site	Inexpensive, simple, quick.	Access is over Internet; user accounts must be added manually.
Windows 2003 service	One-time cost, integrates with network and user accounts.	Requires some installation and maintenance.
SharePoint Portal Services	Can provide a single interface to all your corporate resources.	More expensive than other options; configuring multiple servers is complicated.

SharePoint Portal Server lets you integrate multiple sites across physical servers and provides single-sign-on access through the web portal to corporate databases and other secured resources. However, the price of Portal Server ranges from about $4,000 to $30,000 per physical server, depending on the number of users.

In contrast, SharePoint Services is part of Windows 2003, and so is included under your server license. SharePoint Services is a subset of Portal Server, so I'll focus most of my attention on using SharePoint Services.