Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a new server program that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.
You can quickly create SharePoint sites that support specific content publishing, content management, records management, or business intelligence needs. You can also conduct effective searches for people, documents, and data, participate in forms-driven business processes, and access and analyze large amounts of business data.
When considering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for enterprise Web solutions, there are six major feature areas to explore and they are as follows:
1. Collaboration The enabling technologies that allow teams to work together effectively, providing intuitive, flexible, and secure mechanisms for sharing information through the use of wikis and blogs, collaborating on and publishing documents, maintaining task lists, conducting surveys, developing and maintaining site templates customized for specific business uses, and implementing workflows.
2. Portal The facilities that provide the capabilities to personalize the user experience of an enterprise Web site, to target content to various audiences based on sets of rules, to automatically facilitate intuitive navigation through the Web site while tailoring the navigation to the individual rights of the user, to deliver comprehensive site content management and structural facilities, and more.
3. Enterprise Search The critical ability to quickly and easily locate relevant content distributed across a wide range of sites, document libraries, business application data repositories, and other sources, including files shares, various Web sites, Microsoft Exchange public folders, and Lotus Notes Databases — and to find the appropriate people who can help answer questions or be involved in projects.
4. Content Management The facilities for the creation, publication, and management of content, regardless of whether that content exists in discrete documents or is published as Web pages. Content management scenarios include document management, records management, and Web content management.
5. Business Forms and Integration The ability to rapidly and effectively implement forms-based business processes, from design to publication to user access, by using standard Web browsers or a rich client application such as Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. Also includes the ability to connect with structured systems such as databases and line-of-business applications, and the ability to access that information in a number of ways.
6. Business Intelligence The ability to deliver information critical to business objectives through a wide range of mechanisms, from server-based spreadsheets accessing business data in real time and performing sophisticated analyses to the presentation of key performance indicators (KPIs) through enterprise Web sites.