Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

14 Part I: Introduction to SharePoint Products and Technologies
Server Farm Scenario
Portal Sites
Security
Note If you are a developer, note that the SharePoint Products and Technologies
object model uses the (sometimes overlapping) names from
SharePoint Team Services for many of the new SharePoint Products and
Technologies components. Use the preceding table to cross-reference
terms from the old and new naming conventions.
In a server farm scenario, the terminology remains the same, and the requirement
that all SharePoint sites use the same SQL Server configuration database as the toplevel
website remains the same. However, you can use multiple stateless front-end
Web servers to support a large number of user connections and to render ASP.NET
Web pages. Logically located behind these front-end Web servers, a SharePoint
Products and Technologies configuration can use many back-end database servers.
You can use multiple content database servers to support multiple site collections
and to provide fault-tolerant failover. Optionally, you can use separate database
servers to store the configuration database for server farm configuration maps
and site collection-to-content database maps.
One of the minimum system requirements for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is Windows
SharePoint Services. When you install SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Setup
automatically installs Windows SharePoint Services if it is not already installed.
You can configure only one portal site for each end-user IIS virtual Web server.
The portal site corresponds to the SharePoint Products and Technologies top-level
website for both the virtual server and the site collection rooted at the virtual server.
The new security features in SharePoint Products and Technologies is described in
this section. Included is an introduction to groups, authorization, and authentication.
Site Groups and Rights
SharePoint Products and Technologies uses a security model based on site groups
and rights. Site groups are groups of users with related security requirements. Security
rights are assigned to each security group. You can customize the rights assigned
to these site groups or add new site groups to combine different sets of rights. By
default, Windows SharePoint Services includes the following five site groups: