Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 (MOSS) is an integrated suite of server capabilities that improves organisational effectiveness. It provides comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes and facilitating information sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. This enables increased business value to be derived from information assets by allowing employees to efficiently find, share and manage information across boundaries. Simple, enterprise-wide access to one consistent version of information is enabled and business information can be shared externally with greater security and confidence.

Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the single, integrated platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility and interoperability across the organisation.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organisational resources, search for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow and leverage business insight to make better-informed decisions. Some of the key characteristics of SharePoint are as follows:

SharePoint in Plain English

Collaboration. Allow teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows and share information through the use of wikis and blogs.

Portal. Create a personal MySite portal to share information with others and personalise the user experience and content of an enterprise Web site based on the user’s profile.

Enterprise Search. Quickly and easily find people, expertise and content in business applications.

Enterprise Content Management. Create and manage documents, records and Web content.

Business Process and Digital Forms. Create workflows and electronic forms to automate and streamline your business processes.

Business Intelligence. Allow information workers to easily access critical business information analyse and view data and publish reports to make more informed decisions.

Integration with 2007 Microsoft Office System

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is designed to work effectively with other programs, servers, and technologies in the 2007 Office release. For example, with Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, you can create a slide library on an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site that allows other users to pick specific slides for their own presentation and receive notifications and updated versions when the slides have been modified. Click here for more examples of how specific 2007 Office release programs work with Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

SharePoint Products and Technologies provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs like managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, plus the design and customisation capabilities of Office SharePoint Designer 2007, organisations can enable their users to create, manage, and easily build their own SharePoint sites, and enable these sites to be discovered throughout the organisation.

Why implement SharePoint – The Benefits

Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. This tight integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ services themselves and facilitates product adoption.
Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities. Take advantage of out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. You can complete these activities without any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers provide you with a simple, consistent experience. Modifying and extending these out-of-the-box workflow processes is made easy through tools like Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next release of Microsoft Office FrontPage).
Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content. By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively. And you can reduce litigation risk for your organisation. Tight integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with familiar desktop applications means that policy settings are rendered onto client applications in the Microsoft Office system, making it simpler for employees to be aware of and comply with regulatory requirements.
Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value. Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual content is simplified through new document library templates that are specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.
Simplify organisation-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems. Give your users access to business data found in common line-of-business systems like SAP and Siebel through Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalised views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organisations store and organise business documents in one central location.
Connect people with information and expertise. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 incorporates business data along with information about documents, people, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the relevance of the results, so you can easily find what you need.
Accelerate shared business processes across organisational boundaries. Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.
Share business data without divulging sensitive information. Give your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents (such as financial models).
Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location. Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralised Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.
Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on an open, scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The server has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.

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