Exploring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, or MOSS 2007 is the third release of Microsoft’s portal offering. You may have heard that Microsoft products hit their stride in the third release. Having worked with SharePoint since the first release (SharePoint Portal Server 2001), we believe that Microsoft has stayed true to form, releasing a robust, mature, and feature-rich portal platform in this version.

You can find many definitions of portal in the marketplace, but because this book is focused on Microsoft’s portal offering, we will share the Microsoft definition with you:

A portal is a central Web site that can be used to organize and distribute company information. The portal components in MOSS 2007 provide technology to facilitate connections between people within the organization who have the required skills, knowledge, and project experience. Some of the portal-specific features provided in MOSS are:

• User profiles: Each user has a set of attributes, such as a phone number or workgroup, which constitutes a user profile. Users can control which attributes in their user profile can be viewed by others. In addition, user profiles can be used when creating audiences to control content viewing.

• Audiences: An audience is a group of users defined based on their user profiles. Portal content can be targeted to specific audiences.

• Content targeting: The portal content that appears is customized depending on the group membership or SharePoint audience of the person accessing the portal. This increases productivity by ensuring that users get information that is relevant to them.

• My Site: Each user can have his or her own personal site named My Site. This site allows users to store their own content and can serve as a central starting point when they are looking for information. Content in My Site can be designated as private or public to control whether other users have access to the content.

• Enhanced notification services: Basic notifications can be sent by e-mail to inform users about changed items in lists or document libraries. Users participating in a workflow automatically receive e-mail notifications related to the workflow. Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds the ability to be notified when the results of a search query change.

• Enterprise search: Enterprise content such as documents, PDF files, SQL databases, Exchange e-mail files, Lotus Notes, and other types of content can all be crawled by the portal server and exposed by using a search query from any page in the portal.

MOSS 2007 improves organizational effectiveness by providing an extensive set of technologies and features that address a diverse set of business-critical needs that are often classified in the following categories:

• Portals: Including, but not limited to:

  • Knowledge: Collections of organizational knowledge and information

  • Enterprise: Aggregation points for enterprise applications and data

  • Business intelligence: Utilizes OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) and other analytic techniques to provide a dashboard view of trends and data comparisons that shorten the time needed to make decisions

  • Intranet/extranet: Internal and externally facing portals and Web sites

  • Partner: Provides a business partner–facing Web presence

  • Sales and marketing: Web site focused on sales and marketing materials

• Enterprise search: Indexing of many types of enterprise documents and data, providing users the ability to issue one query with results returned by relevance regardless of location and format of content

• Content management: Web-content organization, publishing, and editing capabilities

• Document management: Version control, security, check in/check out, indexing, and archival capabilities

• Policy and records management: Regulatory and compliance management using a rules disposition engine and records vault with auditing capabilities

• Collaboration: Working with teams or projects in geographically dispersed locations using document libraries, lists, blogs, wikis, discussions, and real-time collaborative tools

• Process automation: Adding business rules, approvals, and forms to business process

Many of these scenarios are possible with the out-of-the-box configuration, and others are developed as composite applications or third-party solutions that use MOSS 2007 as a set of backend services and functionality.

SharePoint 2007 continues to integrate well with Microsoft’s products. By exposing collaborative Web-based functionality in Microsoft Office applications, end users can take advantage of advanced features with minimal training in the context of what they are working on. Microsoft Office XP has basic integration with SharePoint, Office 2003 provided many integration enhancements, and Office 2007 provides the most comprehensive and deepest integration with the platform.