MS SharePoint Server 2007
Collaboration, Content and Document Management and BI in one Product
MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides all the features and functionality necessary to create and manage a website from collaboration to business intelligence features
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is an integrated suite of tools that are used to create and maintain highly available internet, intranet and extranet sites. It’s a suite that enables a business to build a portal that has built in search, content management, security and collaboration and business intelligence capabilities.
Built on the foundation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, SharePoint Server provides the following additional server features:
Enterprise Content Management: Enterprise Content Management is comprised of web content management, records management and document management. The document management capability is one of SharePoint’s best features with check-in check-out, versioning and workflow functionality built-in. The web content management is not as good as the document management, but functions well for most sites needing web publishing capabilities.
Enterprise Search: Much improved from its last version, SharePoint’s enterprise search capabilities include the ability to not allow search across SharePoint sites and site collections but to also include other websites and data sources, like relational databases and Lotus notes databases.
Collaboration: Probably the best reason to implement SharePoint Server is to get the collaboration functionality. Wikis, blogs, discussion groups, presence awareness – these are just some of the collaboration capabilities within the product.
Portal: Implementing SharePoint Server 2007 over MS SharePoint Services is putting a portal in place. The core of SharePoint Server is the Portal. It provides audience profiling and targeting capabilities which is the key functionality for portals today.
Business Intelligence: This is a very in-demand capability for intranets and portals today – the ability to use the site for sharing important business information like KPI (key performance indicators). Users can share important business intelligence information using excel spreadsheets, link into line of business applications to provide business information online, create dashboards and report centers. They do this by publishing excel spreadsheets using Excel services, and by creating connections to line of business applications through the Business Catalog. Users can create custom web parts and dashboards with excel graphs to display critical business information.
Business Process and Form: SharePoint Server 2007 comes with InfoPath 2007 a product that enables the publishing of forms on the website in well-defined xml formats. A business user can create the form in InfoPath and then publish a version to the intranet or internet site. Multiple views of forms can be created and each view can be restricted to certain groups of users. The ability to create and use forms online helps put business processes on the intranet or internet (i.e. creating expense forms for a trip).
SharePoint was released mid 2006 and is still a relatively new product on the market. Gartner Research says although it’s not in the top of market for web content publishing, it’s one to watch carefully. SharePoint is noted by many as the next big product to come on the market with many companies who are Microsoft users working on plans to migrate their internet and intranet sites to this new platform.
