What is SharePoint?

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a server feature set kit that provides comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerates sharing of business processes, and facilitates cross boundary information sharing to better understand your business, helping to improve your organization's productivity. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranets, extranets, and WEB applications across the enterprise through an integrated platform instead of relying on decentralized systems. In addition, the collaboration and Content Management Server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need to implement server management, application scalability, and interoperability.

Managing Content and processes

Simplify compliance and secure business information through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. By using electronic forms and directly available workflows to simplify day-to-day business processes that reduce organizational productivity, users can start, track, and participate in these electronic forms and workflows through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or Web browsers.

Control documents through extensive, scalable policy management. Define custom document management policies to control access rights at the project level, specify retention periods and expiration actions, and track content through document audit settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance work transparent and simple to employees. Integration with Information Rights Management helps ensure that proprietary and confidential information is better protected even when not connected to the server.

Centralize storage, management, and access to enterprise-wide documentation. Organizations can store and manage all business documents and content in a central location, and users have a unified mechanism to browse and find relevant information. You can modify the default repository settings to add a workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.

Simplifies the management of WEB content. Provides easy-to-use features to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master pages and page layouts provide reusable templates to ensure a consistent look. New features enable organizations to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative web site to a portal), or to effectively manage multiple-language content delivery on several Intranet, Extranet, and Internet sites.

Extend business processes across your organization. The Forms Services-driven solution makes it more secure and accurate to gather information both inside and outside the organization without having to write any custom application code. This information can then be easily integrated into industry systems, stored in document libraries, used to initiate workflows or submit to WEB services, thereby avoiding the repetitive work and costly mistakes of manually entering data.

Streamline day-to-day business activities. Automate and make some common business activities, such as document review and approval, problem tracking, and signature collection, with workflows to make them more intuitive. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Familiar Microsoft jobs through Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (Next-generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio Development Systems , organizations can easily modify the processes that are directly available or define their own processes.

Improve business insights to effectively monitor business drivers, achieve more rational decision-making across the organization, and proactively respond to important business events.

Provide business critical information in a central location. Create real-time interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that summarize and display business information from different sources by using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business Data connectivity technologies. The Centralized Report Center site allows users to find the most recent spreadsheet, report, or KPI in one place.

Quickly connect people to information. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search combines people and business data with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. The Search Center provides a single, integrated location for employees to find content, processes, people, and business data related to their specific needs. In this way, people and organizations can make decisions faster based on the latest information and facts.

Share business data extensively while helping to protect sensitive information. Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to data and analysis in a live interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheet through a Web browser. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and effectively share the latest version of a set, while helping protect any sensitive or proprietary information (such as financial models) that is embedded in the document.

Leverage unstructured business networks to help make better decisions. Employees can use the new knowledge management tools to maximize the use of powerful unstructured business networks within and outside their organizations to connect people more quickly and effectively. By exploring these unregistered business relationships and finding experts on the content of the topics, each user can make better decisions faster.

Unlocks the business data. Business data catalogs can integrate structured data from industry applications, such as SAP and Siebel systems, into Office SharePoint Server 2007 through Web parts, lists, user profiles, search, or programming. End users can define a centralized management connection for a back-end system and then reuse them to access back-end data without writing any code to easily make business data part of the portal content. The Business Data Catalog also provides Enterprise search with the ability to integrate back-end business data into the search experience without having to write any protocol handlers, IFilter, or custom code.

simplifies internal and external collaboration

More easily and securely share knowledge, find information, and collaborate within and outside your organization. Leverage your personal network to efficiently connect with other people through partners and customer networks.

Strengthen relationships with customers and partners. With standards-based, electronic form-driven intelligent solutions, you can collect business information from customers and partners through a Web browser. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration and support for other pluggable authentication providers make it easier to use a non-Active Directory directory service source, simplifying Extranet settings, and enhancing relationships with customers, partners, and vendors.

Everywhere in Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 is highly relevant and consolidates enterprise content, such as people and business data, as well as documents and Web pages, to provide more comprehensive results. Enterprise Search is ubiquitous in Office SharePoint Server 2007 because it is tightly integrated with SharePoint sites, Web parts, SharePoint lists, user profiles, and more. This allows users to browse to any location within the portal to find the information they need. Enterprise Search has the capability of searching through business data, and search results can be highly customizable, for example, to display the specific metadata elements of a backend record.

I work anytime, anywhere. With offline access to SharePoint lists and document libraries and Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, you are free from the limitations of your corporate network connection. Tight integration with Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 further enhances the user's offline experience.

Connect and share knowledge. New knowledge management tools enable employees to create and use people's networks within and outside the organization to connect and share knowledge more quickly and efficiently with other people.

Personalize the operation. "My Site" provides a dedicated website for each user with a fully personalized experience. Each Web site can be used to store, provide, view, and manage content, information, and applications in a controlled manner. Each Web site can also be used to provide information about users, such as skills and roles, co-workers and managers, groups and address books to which the user is a member, and documents that the user is working on. And each site also includes strict privacy controls and enhanced security so that each user can choose the amount of information to provide and the target object to provide. You can also completely customize my site to suit everyone's needs.

Make IT a strategic impact

Support all intranet, Extranet, and WEB applications across the enterprise with an integrated platform to increase IT responsiveness to business requirements while reducing the number of platforms that need to be maintained.

Get enhanced interoperability support. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on a scalable architecture and supports WEB services and interoperability standards, including XML and simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Office SharePoint Server 2007 also has a large number of open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. This enables integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments. LDAP integration supports other pluggable authentication providers, making it easier to use non-Active Directory sources. The WSRP Web parts that are directly available support integration with other WSRP-compliant portal solutions.

Focus the IT department on more strategic tasks. Users can now create their own web sites without requiring IT intervention, start workflows, provide applications, access back-end data, define security at the project level, restore deleted Items, and complete other tasks. The decline in user dependency on the IT department increases productivity and enables IT organizations to work to deliver truly value-added services to the organization. With business data catalogs, you can define and deploy a business application configuration to access data that resides in a back-end system. Enterprise users can use this feature repeatedly to create personalized views of business data without developing any custom code.

Simplifies deployment, management, and system management. It is now much easier to manage the Web server farm, deploy new content, and manage synchronization between Web sites. Deployment can take the "Top-down" or "bottom-up" approach. Simplifies site staging with the direct availability of site initiator templates from public Web sites and the area and page layout templates and preconfigured navigation. Enhancements to backup and restore content can help IT professionals plan backups, back up multiple site collections, and then restore them individually.

Reliable system monitoring, usage tracking and monitoring tools. These tools help to identify and resolve problems more quickly, while also helping to improve the operational efficiency of your system's infrastructure.