One of the things I've wanted to pull together is a way to understand the SharePoint platform in a nutshell. Towards that end we created a developer map (hosted from here; look for WSS Platform.pdf.) The idea behind this was to try to bucket and organize the list of tools that SharePoint provides for web application developers.
This is an abstracted overview:
Basically, this breaks down the SharePoint platform into several large buckets:
SharePoint Data Store. The data store is the core of the SharePoint platform. This consists of the site model (an SPSite is a hierarchical collection of SPWebs) plus the lists and libraries infrastructure that is part of every SPWeb. A security model is integrated with this, and content management capabilities are built on top of this infrastructure as well.
Provisioning. One of the strengths of SharePoint is the ability to support many, many sites based on particular site definitions. How those site definitions are defined – and deployed to SharePoint servers, is described in the Provisioning bucket. In some ways, provisioning is the most exciting to me because the site definitions and XML files really define the heart of what a SharePoint application looks like (well, to a developer).
Administration. This area describes how to integrate your central administration components and infrastructure in with SharePoint.
Services. Services deliver some important bits of the value of developing on top of SharePoint – things like the notion that lists have RSS feeds or alerts. This is the stuff you get "for free" when your data is hosted in SharePoint.
Pages and User Interface. Of course, almost all applications built on top of SharePoint will likely have some web based user interface. The Pages and User Interface bucket discusses things like web parts, the page model, and more.
Anyway, hopefully over the next few months I’ll be able to add some posts on the more obscure topics in each of these areas.
If you haven't had an opportunity to take a look the developer map, and familiarize yourself with all of the technologies and features of the SharePoint platform, please take a look!