SharePoint Interview Questions 5

81. What are the features that the portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include?
    The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The portal components make it easier to connect to people within the organization who have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience.
82. What are the advanced features of MOSS 2007?
    
    • User Interface (UI) and navigation enhancements
    • Document management enhancements
    • The new Workflow engine
    • Office 2007 Integration
    • New Web Parts
    • New Site-type templates
    • Enhancements to List technology
    • Web Content Management
    • Business Data Catalog
    • Search enhancements
    • Report Center
    • Records Management
    • Business Intelligence and Excel Server
    • Forms Server and InfoPath
    • The “Features” feature
    • Alternate authentication providers and Forms-based authentication
83. What are the features of the new Content management in Office SharePoint 2007?
    The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three areas:
    • Document management
    • Records management
    • Web content management
    Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the core document management functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, including check in and check out, versioning, metadata, and role-based granular access controls. Organizations can use this functionality to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.
84. Does a SharePoint Web site include search functionality?
    Yes. SharePoint Team Services provides a powerful text-based search feature that helps you find documents and information fast.
85. Write the features of the search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007?
    The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. New features provide:
    • A consistent and familiar search experience.
    • Increased relevance of search results.
    • New functions to search for people and expertise.
    • Ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications and
    • Improved manageability and extensibility.
86. What are the benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?
    
    • Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
    • Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
    • Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
    • Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
    • Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
    • Connect people with information and expertise.
    • Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
    • Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
    • Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
    • Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
87. Will SharePoint Portal Server and Team Services ever merge?
    The products will come together because they are both developed by the Office team.
88. What does partial trust mean the Web Part developer?
    If an assembly is installed into the BIN directory, the code must be ensured that provides error handling in the event that required permissions are not available. Otherwise, unhandled security exceptions may cause the Web Part to fail and may affect page rendering on the page where the Web Part appears.
89. How can I raise the trust level for assemblies installed in the BIN directory?
    Windows SharePoint Services can use any of the following three options from ASP.NET and the CLR to provide assemblies installed in the BIN directory with sufficient permissions. The following table outlines the implications and requirements for each option. Option Pros Cons Increase the trust level for the entire virtual server. For more information, see "Setting the trust level for a virtual server" Easy to implement. In a development environment, increasing the trust level allows you to test an assembly with increased permissions while allowing you to recompile assemblies directly into the BIN directory without resetting IIS. This option is least secure. This option affects all assemblies used by the virtual server. There is no guarantee the destination server has the required trust level. Therefore, Web Parts may not work once installed on the destination server. Create a custom policy file for your assemblies. For more information, see "How do I create a custom policy file?" Recommended approach. This option is most secure. An assembly can operate with a unique policy that meets the minimum permission requirements for the assembly. By creating a custom security policy, you can ensure the destination server can run your Web Parts. Requires the most configuration of all three options. Install your assemblies in the GAC Easy to implement. This grants Full trust to your assembly without affecting the trust level of assemblies installed in the BIN directory. This option is less secure. Assemblies installed in the GAC are available to all virtual servers and applications on a server running Windows SharePoint Services. This could represent a potential security risk as it potentially grants a higher level of permission to your assembly across a larger scope than necessary In a development environment, you must reset IIS every time you recompile assemblies. Licensing issues may arise due to the global availability of your assembly.
90. Does SharePoint work with NFS?
    Yes and no. It can crawl documents on an NFS volume, but the sharepoint database or logs cannot be stored there.
91. How is SharePoint Portal Server different from the Site Server?
    Site Server has search capabilities but these are more advanced using SharePoint. SPS uses digital dashboard technology which provides a nice interface for creating web parts and showing them on dashboards (pages). SS doesn't have anything as advanced as that. The biggest difference would be SPS document management features which also integrate with web folders and MS Office.
92. What would you like to see in the next version of SharePoint?
    A few suggestions:
    1. SPS and STS on same machine
    2. Tree view of Categories and Folders
    3. General Discussion Web Part
    4. Personalization of Dashboards
    5. Role Customization
    6. Email to say WHY a document has been rejected for Approval
    7. More ways to customize the interface
    8. Backup and restore an individual Workspaces
    9. Filter for Visio
    10. Better way to track activity on SPS
    11. Ability to Save as from Adobe to space on My Network Places
93. Why Sharepoint is not a viable solution for enterprise wide deployments?
    Planning an enterprise deployment using SharePoint features is a very difficult task unless you can establish a Service Oriented Architecture, using AD for managing security with well defined roles based information access(EISA). Sounds reasonable, although it seems difficult to deploy with the tools limitations in document storage. Document management does not scale beyond a single server, but scales great within a single server. For example, a quad Xeon machine with 4GB of RAM works great for a document management server that has about 900,000 - 1,000,000 document, but if you need to store 50,000,000 document and want to have them all in one single workspace then it does not scale at all. If you need a scenario like this, you need to plan your deployment right and it should scale for you, it just does not right out of the box. If you are using your server as a portal and search server most for the most part it scales great. You can have many different servers crawl content sources and have separate servers searching and serving the content. If you have < 750,000 documents per server and fewer than 4 content sources and fewer than 50,000 users, SPS should scale just fine for your needs with the proper planning.
94. What are the actual advantages of SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) over SharePoint Team Services (STS)?
    SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has MUCH better document management. It has check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, publishing, subscriptions, categories, etc. STS does not have these features, or they are very scaled back. SharePoint Portal Services (SPS) has a better search engine, and can crawl multiple content sources. STS cannot. STS is easier to manage and much better for a team environment where there is not much Document Management going on. SPS is better for an organization, or where Document Management is crucial.
95. How Does SharePoint work?
    The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.
96. How do I open an older version of a document?
    Normally, all previous versions are located in the shadow, so if you right click a published document from within the web folders, go to properties and then the third tab, versions you can view older versions.
    If you want to do this in code:
    
    strURL = "url of the last published version"
    Set oVersion = New PKMCDO.KnowledgeVersion
    Set prmRs = oVersion.VersionHistory(strURL)
    Set oVersion = Nothing
    
    prmRS will contain a recordset, which contains the url to the old versions in the shadow.
97. Why do the workspace virtual directories show the error “stop sign” symbol in the IIS snap-in?
    If World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3SVC) starts before Microsoft Exchange Information Store (MSExchangeIS), “stop sign” symbols appear under the Default Web Site folder of the Internet Information Services console in Microsoft Management Console (MMC). There is a dependency between the local paths of the SharePoint Portal Server virtual directories and the MSExchangeIS. You must start MSExchangeIS first, followed by W3SVC. Complete the following steps to prevent the stop signs from appearing each time you restart:
    1. Change the Startup type for W3SVC to Manual.
    2. Restart the server. The MSExchangeIS service starts automatically.
    3. Start W3SVC.
98. What newsgroups are available?
    There are two,
    • microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver and
    • microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.development.
99. What is SharePoint from a Technical Perspective?
    Technically SharePoint illustrates neatly what Microsoft's .net strategy is all about: integrating Windows with the Web. Microsoft has previously made accessing stuff on a PC easier, (Windows) then on a network (NT) and now on the web (.NET). SharePoint is an application written to let a user access a web accessible directory tree called the Web Storage System. SharePoint was written with a set of technologies that allow the programmer to pass data, functions, parameters over HTTP, the web's medium. These are XML, XSL and SOAP, to name a few I understand the basics of! To the user it looks easy, like Hotmail, but every time they click a button or a link, a lot has to happen behind the scenes to do what they want to do quickly and powerfully. Not as easy as you might think, but SharePoint does it for you. Accessing this Web storage system and the server itself is also done using technologies like ADO, CDO, PKMCDO, LDAP, DDSC, ADSC. More on these later. SharePoint is a great example of how the Internet Platform can be extended and integrated into an existing well adopted technology, Windows.
100. What is SharePoint from an Administration Perspective?
     Administering SharePoint mainly consists of setting it up, which is much easier than you expect, adding the content, which can be just dragging and dropping in whole directory structures and files, and then organizing the files better by giving them categories or other metadata. This is done either through the Web interface or through the SharePoint Client: a program what means you can access SharePoint as a Web folder and then right-click files to select options like "edit profile". Or add files by dragging them in individually or in bulk. Setting the security is also important, using NT accounts, either NT4 or Active Directory (or both in mixed mode) you can give users access to files/folders the same way as you do in standard Windows. Users can be grouped and the groups given access privileges to help manage this better. Also SharePoint has 3 Roles that a User or Group can be given on a particular item. Readers can see the item (i.e. document/file or folder) but not change it, Authors can see and edit items and coordinators can set security privileges for the part of the system they have control over. Thus, you could set 12 different coordinators for 12 different folder trees, and they could manage who can do what within that area only.