Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

2.1. Architectural Overview of SharePoint

SharePoint is a three-tiered application (see Figure 2-1). The presentation layer lives in the file system as an ASP.NET application, the logic lives in .NET assemblies, and the data resides in a SQL Server database. On the surface, Windows SharePoint Services is a web application platform that provides a collection of services accessed through SharePoint web pages, XML web services, and a .NET application programming interface (API). SharePoint's core functionality is provided by an infrastructure of .NET assemblies and Windows Services. SharePoint stores all content and configuration in SQL Server databases. These databases contain stored procedures and other potential points of interaction, but they should never be directly accessed or modified. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) augments WSS with features for portals (Chapter 8), search (Chapter 9), content management (Chapters 10 though 11), business processes (Chapter 14 and 15), and business intelligence (Chapter 16).

Figure 2.1. Figure 2-1

Upon installation, SharePoint requires a SQL database server and an IIS web server. The first database created is the configuration database. SharePoint is installed into a subtree popularly called the "12 hive" which defaults to the following location:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12

The 12 hive ...