After weeks of "it is just around the corner" compromises, i finally managed to create time for myself to reread the book from the start.. last time i had to stop myself half way.. coz of various reasons which i conveniently choose not to remind myself again.. now on to the book, an excellent introduction by the authors..

Why do we need such a piece of software --> every orgnaization creates 100s if not thousands of sites for themselves for marketing, internal employee and policy mgmt and what not.. going through the same grind of creating html/script based pages, accessing db through or by passing a middle tier.. designing the db etc., are definitively non productive. As the grind is a well laid out sequence of steps and not any magic, there is bound to be an automatic page creator and content manager sw and you can imagine Sharepoint to be one such.

Now a non technical person in your organization (read it as your HR Director/manager or CFO or accounts manager or your office security) can create pages and content that anyway you will not use or by all means will not be useful!!

So is it death knell for the web site developer? Not quite.. just like BPM is and turned out to be (u can create processes linking pieces of services but these services will have to be developed and made by linkable by us) here u can create pages and basic contents but you will neverthe less need our skills to customize the pages - which most often would be required.

As every book, every evangelist would say about the current version of the product (until beta of the next version is out) MOSS 2007 is unlike anything anyone has seen before or after. It is built on .net FXs 2 and 3.5, the later for WWF&WCF I presuppose and ASP.Net 2.0.

Some of the interesting points to note

• it uses HTTPHandlers for directing to WSS code from ASP.net code rather than directly rerouting from IIS using ISAPI filters... so what? one may ask and the reply (which i am going to demand from every asp.net guru i am going to interview, hence forth) is that the asp.net context would be set and be available for http handlers  - READ THIS AGAIN
  
• uses the master page feature of asp.net 2.0 
  
• customized pages (unghosted) are stored in sql server and rendered using asp.net 2.0 virtual path feature, i.e, no more are we bound to have a physical file to be compiled and converted in to html in asp.net 2.0 and SPS leverages that
  

that is all worth while to list in the definitive guide.. i remember reading more in inside wss.. so this post would most definitively have an update

Reading the definitive guide

Chanced upon this book in my machine while i was looking for inside wss.. definitely seems to be a definitive guide.

some excerpts..

you (as in ur organization) would most definitively need MOSS if 

a. you have geographically distribution teams which need to collaborate

b. there is an impending or atleast an expected document or content explosion which needs to be averted 

 

now, that puts MOSS next to roti kapda aur makaan in terms of necessity