What is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?

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.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Capabilities
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently collaborate with team members, find organizational resources, search for experts and corporate information, manage content and workflow, and leverage business insight to make better-informed decisions.

• 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.
• Portals: Create a personal MySite portal to share information with others and personalize 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 Forms: Create workflows and electronic forms to automate and streamline your business processes.
• Business Intelligence: Allow information workers to easily access critical business information, analyze and view data, and publish reports to make more informed decisions.

Collaboration and Social Computing
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps your organization get more done by providing a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities and people-driven processes. Office SharePoint Server is an important part of the overall Microsoft collaboration vision and integrates with other collaborative products to offer a comprehensive infrastructure for working with others.

• Empower Teams Through Collaborative Workspaces Microsoft delivers a best-of-breed collaborative infrastructure that gives end users the tools to easily create their own workspaces and share assets across teams, departments, and organizations while maintaining IT control.
• Connect Organizations Through Portals Microsoft will help bring the full insight and data of the organization to the right people at the right time by making it easy to connect people with line-of-business data, experts, and business processes across the organization.
• Enable Communities with Social Computing Tools Microsoft gives organizations the tools to deliver a broad set of social computing capabilities within their existing workspace and portal infrastructure, so end users can more easily harness the collective intelligence of the organization.
• Reduce Cost and Complexity for IT by Using an Integrated Infrastructure, Existing Investments, and an Extensible Architectural Platform The Microsoft collaboration infrastructure leverages existing investments, is extensible, and interoperates with other systems, so organizations can maintain a lower cost of ownership and more easily meet business demands by building a single infrastructure.

Portals
Portal sites connect your people to business critical information, expertise, and applications. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a world class Enterprise Portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business.

Connect your people to information and expertise
Quick, easy access to critical information and expertise means better decisions and more rigorous execution.

Connect your people to key business applications
Consolidated access to existing business applications drives consistent performance of common business tasks. Streamlined development of new composite applications can lead to order of magnitude improvements in important business processes.

Connect your people to role-specific resources
Personalized information delivery increases the relevance and value of information.

Enterprise Search
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the Microsoft enterprise search solution for organizations that want to increase productivity and reduce information overload by providing their employees, partners, and customers the ability to find relevant content in a wide range of repositories and formats. With actionable search results that respect security permissions, Office SharePoint Server 2007 lets users go beyond documents and across repositories to unlock information, find people, and locate expertise in the enterprise.

Built for the enterprise
In Office SharePoint Server 2007, search results are delivered quickly and relevance is tuned for enterprise and line-of-business data.

Unlock data and expertise
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides out-of-the-box search for common enterprise repositories and file types as well as for people and experts.

Integrated user experience
Enterprise search functionality is integrated with the collaboration, portals, content management, forms and business intelligence features of SharePoint Server 2007 and can be integrated with other 2007 Office system products to help users easily find, use, and share information and increase productivity.

Enterprise Content Management
Over the last several years, organizations have created a huge volume of unstructured content that includes documents, e-mail messages, videos, instant messages, Web pages, and more. This content often exists in a state of unmanaged chaos that prevents an organization from properly using these valuable assets for better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications, and increased process efficiency. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) from Microsoft is a key component of an organization's infrastructure, that can help companies overcome these challenges. Built on a well-integrated platform, ECM from Microsoft easily extends content management to every information worker in an organization through integration with familiar tools like the Microsoft Office system. A Microsoft ECM solution can help businesses:

Manage diverse content
The document management capabilities in the Microsoft integrated ECM solution can help organizations consolidate diverse content from multiple file shares and personal drives into a centrally managed repository with consistent categorization.

Satisfy compliance and legal requirements
The Microsoft ECM solution also includes integrated records management capabilities that give organizations the capability to store and protect business records in their final state.

Efficiently manage multiple Web sites
Integrated Web content management capabilities enable people to publish Web content with an easy-to-use content authoring tool and a built-in approval process.

Streamline business processes
The Microsoft ECM solution enables businesses to streamline content-driven, collaborative business processes by providing the tools and platform for automating the tasks of these processes.

The Microsoft ECM solution provides capabilities to manage the entire lifecycle of unstructured content from creation to expiration on a single unified platform. These capabilities include:

• Document management
• Records management
• Web content management
• Forms solutions

Business Process and Forms
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archiving processes. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can also create, maintain, and analyze custom workflows, enabling you to streamline your collaborative processes. Electronic forms provided through InfoPath Forms Services are an integral part of such workflows. These InfoPath designed electronic forms make it easy to collect and validate information that drives your business processes. And you can collect and validate this information right from the Microsoft Office client applications you use every day.

Browser-based forms with InfoPath Forms Services
InfoPath Forms Services, which is part of Office SharePoint Server 2007, extends your reach to organizations that do not use Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 by allowing you to fill out forms in a common browser or even a HTML-enabled mobile device.

Integrated workflow and document information panel from within Microsoft Office client applications
With Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can initiate and interact with workflows right from within your Microsoft Office application. You can also collect and validate important document metadata via the document information panel.

Custom workflow design with Office SharePoint Designer 2007
Office SharePoint Designer 2007 makes it easy to add business logic to sophisticated no-code composite applications with the rules-based Workflow Designer.