Schemalogic and MOSS 2007

The SchemaLogic Enterprise Suite for Microsoft SharePoint 2007 enables companies to develop and manage a common, enterprise-wide vocabulary that describes the corporate information assets stored across multiple SharePoint sites. This enterprise-wide vocabulary is published across all SharePoint sites delivering enhanced information integrity, consistent information access, and effective governance across the enterprise. The SchemaLogic solution can further be used to synchronize semantics across SharePoint and other enterprise systems, such as Enterprise Content Management and search systems, providing easy integration of content and a consistent search experience. Advantages:

• Access information with increased relevance and consistency
• Ensure corporate and regulatory compliance across the entire SharePoint environment
• Enable subject matter experts to collaborate and build common semantics across the enterprise
• Manage and publish semantic standards across SharePoint and other enterprise systems
• Create and centrally manage SharePoint content types, site columns and value lists
• Leverage controlled schemas, vocabulary lists, taxonomies, thesauri, and ontologies across the enterprise

MOSS 2007 and XML

XML is at the core of Office system 2007 spanning client and server technologies. the 2007 Office system introduces a new Open XML format that allows much easier programmatic access to Office files. Microsoft Office InfoPath uses XML for gathering information, with the flexibility to incorporate data from many sources in a single form. On the server side, XML surfaces in a variety of ways allowing enterprises to style the content in the format they want by using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). (source: Microsoft whitepaper on 2007 Office, Dec 2006)

MOSS 2007 and Content Types, a key feature

Microsoft added custom definable content types to MOSS 2007 (short for: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). So why is that a big deal? Well, because Sharepoint server 2003 did not support those, which aggravated a considerable amount of developers. Why?

• Having to create multiple document libraries to hold different types of documents because you just wanted different metadata for different document types.
• Customized an issues list for your project workspace, then found yourself having to copy those changes multiple times for all the other projects you were running.
• Created an extensive development intensive workaround to enable different document templates for different document types.
• Published a custom list template only to realize a month later (and 50 new sites using that list template) that you left out a critical piece and that all lists would have to be updated with the new field. Ouch, that hurts!

Advantages of content types:

• Content types are hierarchical. It is possible to define a content type which is based on another content type. The new content type will inherit all of the properties of the parent content type. This hierarchy can be as deep as you like.
• Changes to the Content Type can automatically propagate to all lists and all child content types.
• Each content type can have a different document template.