In a private email a few months ago, I went through a short history of acronyms from Microsoft that I’ve worked with since entering this field in 1997. I think there is a bit of good-natured humor here and this post is intended as just some good fun.
Since most of us are SharePoint geeks, I’ll start with us. For the most part, we abbreviate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as “MOSS”. At various times, however, individuals have referred to this product with different names, such as O12 or OSS. I think the reason we didn’t settle on using OSS was because we didn’t want Microsoft OSS being confused with that other OSS. In addition, you can still use SPPT to refer to the product generically (just like we did in v2), but if you need to refer to the old portal product, that is SPS, where as the new portal product is included with MOSS.
WSS started out as STS (remember Office 2000?), but we’ve known it as WSS since 2003. However, we didn’t put the year delimiter on WSS to differentiate it between the old WSS and the new WSS, I suppose, because it isn’t a branded product. So, to differentiate between versions, we append a v2 or v3 to WSS. Now, WSS leverages WF in the base platform. You might recall that the workflow people were going to use WWF until someone realized that a WWF smackdown was just a bit over the edge, so they decided to call it WinWF. More recently, it has been shortened to WF. Personally, I like saying “winwiff” as opposed to “wiff”, but it’s not really my choice.
The VS in IIS is now called a WA, the name change forced by the VS Server product. We used to create a VS, now we have to purchase it. In any case, we don’t have VSs anymore, we have WAs, which should not be confused with the WAS in VS.NET.
Now, AFAIC, the acronyms in other products are worthy of discussion. For example, we got rid of BDC’s when we moved to W2K from NT4. But now with MOSS, we have BDCs again, only now, the BDC stands for something completely different, and there’s no PDC. The BDC without a PDC seems kinda lonely to me, but perhaps that just nostalgia creeping in. CMS and SPS meld into different features sets in MOSS, and added to them are ECM, WCM, BI, ECS and OFS. Search is still Search, which is (thankfully) a readable word. But the Search services in MOSS still have two server roles: the Query server and the Index server, like they did in SPS. But the names have been changed to protect the innocent. The Search Server becomes the Query Server while the Index Server remains the Index Server. Oh – and no more Job Server. That function is rolled into the SSP. The Gatherer is now the Crawler and crawl depth limitations are now “crawl rules” while the Site Hit Frequency Rules are now “Crawler Impact Rules”. So, we have a Crawler who crawls based on the crawl rules, the crawler settings and the crawler impact rules to gather information that will be placed in the index. We still create a content source and point the content source to the content source. Happily, nothing has changed there.
Of course, CA is still CA, but now we build WAs using CA in IIS instead of VSs. But if you want to secure a WA’s URL, you’ll need a CA, but won’t use CA to configure the CA. That CA needs to be configured using the CA MMC. And please, do not confuse VSs with VSS, or for that matter, VSS. Administrators are trying to learn CAS concepts and administration, but we’ve found that even some developers don’t know what CAS is. Even more enthralling is that the WSS in the old WSS no longer exists since the metadata on crawled content is now held in the SSP’s SQL Server database.
We still have Site Collections, sites and sub-webs. But for some reason, we never abbreviate Site Collection “SC”. Maybe that’s because we don’t have a third letter and two-letter acronyms seem incomplete (except for WF). And “sites” in WSS are not the same as “sites” in the WSS. And in WSS, sometimes, a Site is really an SC, while at other times a site is really a web. Got it? It should be obvious by now that you should *never* confuse WSS, WSS and WSS. The three are completely separate products.
Because SharePoint runs on a network, we need to discuss networking concepts a bit in this post too. For example, Domains are another thing we can’t figure out here, since there are DNS, NETBios (or is it NetBIOS??), Windows and TLDs, not to mention that sometimes, some MS people will refer to the URL namespace as a “domain”, a “server” or a “hostname”. Moreover, URLs, URNs and URIs are all part of the same RFC – uniformly, of course. You’ll need to know what a URN is if you’re going to work with Managed Properties, which is different than Crawled Properties, which the Crawler crawled based on the crawl settings, crawl rules and crawler impact rules. Also, study up on the X.### standards (www.itu.org). You might want to get this information down pat, because the X.500 naming convention is part of the user profile architecture in MOSS. And don’t confuse the X.500 standard with the X.400 standard. Again, they are two separate ideas. Finally, if you’re going to talk about extranets, then you must discuss ISA, DMZ, SSL (sometimes called TLS) and PKI concepts. Oh – and don’t think you’re dyslexic if you find that PKI and KPI are both important in MOSS. They are and they’ll both require your attention and understanding.
So, if you have read this and have figured out all of the acronyms without using the legend below, then I think that, perhaps, you can consider yourself a “super-geek”.
Legend:
BDC = Business Data Catalog and Backup Domain Controller
BI = Business Intelligence
CA = Central Administration and Certificate Authority
CMS = Content Management Server
DMZ = Demilitarized Zone
ECM = Enterprise Content Management
ECS = Excel Calculation Server
KPI = Key Performance Indicators
IIS = Internet Information Services
ISA = Internet Security and Acceleration Server
MMC = Microsoft Management Console
MOSS = Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
O12 = Office 12
OFS = Office Forms Server
OSS = Office SharePoint Server, Office Server System and Open Source System
PDC = Primary Domain Controller
PKI = Public Key Infrastructure
RFC = Request for Comments
SPS = SharePoint Portal Server
SSL = Secure Sockets Layer
STS = SharePoint Team Services
SSP = Shared Services Provider
TLS = Transport Layer Security
URL = Uniform Resource Locater
URN = Uniform Resource Name
URI = Uniform Resource Identifier
VS = Virtual Server 2005, Virtual Server and Visual Studio
VSS = Visual Source Safe, Volume Shadow Copy Service
WA = Web Application
WAS = Web Application Stress tool
WCM = Web Content Management
WSS = Windows SharePoint Services, Web Storage System and Windows Server System
WWF = Windows Workflow Foundation and Worldwide Wrestling Federation