Conceptual Overview Of SharePoint Foundation In SharePoint 2010 - Clearing Up The Confusion

Based on the MSDN Library Article Conceptual Overview of SharePoint Foundation.

Having read the above article numerous times it became obvious that I would need to rewrite the content in my own words to ensure full grasp of the content. This would probably not be necessary with in-depth prior knowledge of the SharePoint Foundation.

Basically the SharePoint Foundation is an application build on top of the IIS and the .NET Framework. So, we're dealing with a regular .NET application with certain built-in features we can take advantage of. The Microsoft SharePoint Foundation runs on a set of servers known as a server farm. Really, this doesn't seem much different than most other ASP.NET applications where you will also usually use a set of servers to keep your application running smoothly. The Farm can have multiple front-end servers and multiple database servers. This too, doesn't seem to differ greatly from "regular" ASP.NET development seeing as you would usually like to have at least some failover built-in to your set up. The need for a configuration database and a content database might differ somewhat from regular ASP.NET development. It doesn't have to, but it certainly can. The difference between the two databases should be obvious, but to spell it out the configuration database is all about configuration of the system and its administrators and the content database on the other hand is all about the content. User information is considered content and is therefore stored in one of the content databases.

The next topic of the article is site collections which I suppose is the next logical step. There can be only one!(Top level site) On the other hand, you can have as many child sites as you wish within the site collection. What binds a collection together is a set of common elements including permissions, galleries and Web Parts. It is different from other site collections in its permissions and it has its own administrator. In the collection a site stores content in pages libraries and lists and it can be secured to allow only specific users access to the site. The great thing is that this also makes it incredibly easy to target specific users with content relevant only to them.

The basic oblect type is the list. The list has many forms and functions ranging from task lists to event lists and various others. The colums in the lists are also called fields and can be customized to fit the type of content you need to show. Something that is rather fortunate as you are rarely required to use only existing functionality. As a note even though document libraries sound very file explorerish they too are just lists. Albeit very specialized lists.

The extensibilty framework that also includes deployment. Obviously you can use these features to apply the web technologies you are already familiar with, but it also allows for different deployment models. You can either deploy as a Feature or as solution package.

Although the SharePoint Foundation may be a brave new world for you the fact that it is built on familiar web technologies should enable you to find familiar ground. For this is a brave new world, but one I'm looking forward to exploring.