Building a Searchable Phone Directory with Windows SharePoint Services

Of all of the capabilities of SharePoint, I thought I would start with the most basic installation - as a corporate intranet. It is likely that we will need to discuss some of the elements of SharePoint as we go along, so this also gives us the opportunity to review these elements for future reference.

Before going into too much detail, I would like to point out that you can try the core SharePoint framework (known as Windows SharePoint Services or WSS) for free. On Microsoft's Web site you can download a trial version of Virtual PC 2004 (VPC). Using VPC, you can install the Windows 2003 Evaluation Kit and the WSS add-on. This combination will give you 45 days to evaluate the setup.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) is the next version of WSS 2.0, released on 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) is built on top of this. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 takes full advantage of Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 and the core Microsoft .NET 2.0 runtime. WSS 3.0 offers a lot of new features and programmability support. I have consolidated a list of new features and enhancements in the below section:

Silverlight 3, .NET RIA Services, and Windows Azure Services Platform makes a 3-tier Cloud application easier to build: Silverlight 3 as presentation tier, .NET RIA services as the business logic and data access tier, and Windows Azure Table as the data storage tier. The sample application in this article demonstrates the architecture with a simple Survey application with all these technologies working together from Windows Azure.

Many Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phones and Windows Mobile Smartphones can be connected to a Windows PC via Bluetooth for use as a wireless dial-up modem. If your Windows Mobile device supports Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking, or Bluetooth DUN, and your Windows PC Bluetooth-enabled, you have everything you need.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phones or Smartphones as a Bluetooth modem for Windows XP PCs.

When you create a site in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services by using the default Team Site template, the home page includes two default graphics. A Windows SharePoint Services graphic appears in the body of the page, and a picture of a house in a circle appears near the site title. You can change these graphics to customize your site. Changing the smaller graphic requires a Windows SharePoint Services compatible Web page editor

When you create a built-in or custom list in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Windows SharePoint Services creates a Web Part, a basic building block of a SharePoint site, to display that list. These Web Parts are called List View Web Parts. Windows SharePoint Services stores List View Web Parts in the site collection Web Part gallery. (The site collection Web Part gallery is the most central gallery of Web Parts for a work group. By default, the gallery name is the name of the site, such as "Our Team Site Web Part Gallery." )

What is a SharePoint site for?
A SharePoint site is a Web site that provides a central storage and collaboration space for documents, information, and ideas. A SharePoint site is a tool for collaboration, just like a telephone is a tool for communication, or a meeting is a tool for decision making. A SharePoint site helps groups of people (whether work teams or social groups) share information and work together. For example, a SharePoint site can help you:

Coordinate projects, calendars, and schedules.
Discuss ideas and review documents or proposals.
Share information and keep in touch with other people.

Becoming familiar with Web Part customization techniques gives you a range of page-customization choices. For example, you can customize your site's home page so that it displays the specific information that your team needs. You can rearrange the list items on the home page, add lists, and even change the images on the home page. As you become more familiar with Web Part Page customization techniques, you can build interactive Web Part Pages that makes the data in lists more dynamic and useful, and you can add new Web Parts that provide access to external data and Web services.

Document libraries are collections of files that you can share with team members on a Web based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. For example, you can create a library of common documents for a project, and team members can use their Web browsers to find the files, read them, and make comments. Users with Microsoft Office 2003 can check out and edit the files as if they resided on a local or network drive.

By default, your team Web site comes with a built-in document library named Shared Documents, which is listed on the Quick Launch bar as well as on the Documents and Lists page.

Installing and Uninstalling Services.Unlike most projects you create in Visual Studio .NET, Windows Service projects cannot be run directly from the development environment by pressing F5. This is because the service in the project must be installed before the project can run.

You can quickly install your service application by using a command line utility called InstallUtil.exe.