Solution Overview

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

The key feature areas are as follows:

• 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• 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

Business Benefits

A well thought out portal strategy, with a leading edge solution like Office SharePoint 2007 can bring immense productivity benefits to your organization. Key benefits are summarized as below :

• 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 organization. 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 organization-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 personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organizations store and organize 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 organizational 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. Centralized 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