Microsoft Office Share Point Server 2007

 

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.

Why should you use SharePoint?

 

SharePoint solves four main problems:

 

·          As companies grow so does the amount of their files. It soon becomes difficult to keep track of the multiplying documents and their locations. SharePoint overcomes this by allowing you to store and locate your files in a central site. Files can also be located through company wide searches of your SharePoint enterprise portal.

·          Sharing work files through email is a cumbersome process. SharePoint eliminates this by allowing files to be stored in one location, allowing easy access to all team members. 

·          Today’s work occurs over multiple locations, whether it is in different countries, office locations, and separate departments or at your home office. SharePoint enables teams and individuals to connect and collaborate together regardless of where they are located.

·          It’s difficult and time consuming to create and maintain sites. SharePoint allows anyone to create sites for use within their company’s Intranet, as they are needed, whether they are departmental sites, document libraries, meetings sites, survey sites, or discussion boards.

 

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

SharePoint Products and Technologies provide enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs like managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions. Using the combined collaboration features of Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Server 2007, plus the design and customization capabilities of Office SharePoint Designer 2007, organizations can enable their users to create, manage, and easily build their own SharePoint sites, and enable these sites to be discovered throughout the organization.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

 

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a collaborative enterprise portal that is built upon WSS 3.0. MOSS 2007 allows people, teams and expertise to connect and collaborate. Unlike WSS, SharePoint Server is not free and requires an additional license. MOSS 2007 comes in two versions – Standard and Enterprise.

 

The main components of SharePoint 2007 are collaboration, portals, enterprise search, enterprise content management, business process and forms, and business intelligence. Previous versions of SharePoint Server included SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and before that SharePoint Portal Server 2001.

 

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

 

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is the platform on which all SharePoint Products and Technologies are built. WSS 3.0 is for is suitable for small teams, projects and organizations. WSS’s project collaboration, document workspace, meeting sub-site, and discussion board features allow individuals and small teams to collaborate and share information online. Past versions of Windows SharePoint Services included Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Team Services. New features in WSS 3.0 include integrated workflows, RSS feeds, blogs, wikis and ASP-style Web parts.

 

 

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Top 10 Benefits

 

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.

 

Top 10 Benefits of Windows SharePoint Services

 

Improve team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools

 

Connect people with the information and resources they need. Users can create team workspaces, coordinate calendars, organize documents, and receive important notifications and updates through communication features including announcements and alerts, as well as the new templates for creating blogs and wikis. While mobile, users can take advantage of convenient offline synchronization capabilities.

 

Easily manage documents and help ensure integrity of content

 

With enhanced document management capabilities including the option to activate required document checkout before editing, the ability to view revisions to documents and restore to previous versions, and the control to set document- and item-level security, Windows SharePoint Services can help ensure the integrity of documents stored on team sites.

 

Get users up to speed quickly

 

User interface improvements in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include enhanced views and menus that simplify navigation within and among SharePoint sites. Integration with familiar productivity tools, including programs in the Microsoft Office system, makes it easy for users to get up to speed quickly. For example, users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office system files and programs.

 

Deploy solutions tailored to your business processes

 

While standard workspaces in Windows SharePoint Services are easy to implement, organizations seeking a more customized deployment can get started quickly with application templates for addressing specific business processes or sets of tasks.

 

 

 

 

Build a collaboration environment quickly and easily

 

Easy to manage and easy to scale, Windows SharePoint Services enables IT departments to deploy a collaborative environment with minimal administrative time and effort, from simple, single-server configurations to more robust enterprise configurations. Because deployment settings can be flexibly changed, less pre-planning time is required and companies can get started even faster.

 

Reduce the complexity of securing business information

 

Windows SharePoint Services provides IT with advanced administrative controls for increasing the security of information resources, while decreasing cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, site management, and support. Take advantage of better controls for site life-cycle management, site memberships and permissions, and storage limits.

 

Provide sophisticated controls for securing company resources

 

IT departments can now set permissions as deep down as the document or item level, and site managers, teams, and other work groups can initiate self-service collaborative workspaces and tasks within these preset parameters. New features enable IT to set top-down policies for better content recovery and users, groups, and team workspace site administration.

 

Take file sharing to a new level with robust storage capabilities

 

Windows SharePoint Services supplies workspaces with document storage and retrieval features, including check-in/check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata, and customizable views. New features in Windows SharePoint Services include enhanced recycle bin functionality for easier recovery of content and improved backup and restoration.

 

Easily scale your collaboration solution to meet business needs

 

Quickly and easily manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services using a Web browser or command-line utilities. Manage server farms, servers, and sites using the Microsoft .NET Framework, which enables a variety of custom and third-party administration solution offerings.

 

Provide a cost-effective foundation for building Web-based applications

 

Windows SharePoint Services exposes a common framework for document management and collaboration from which flexible and scalable Web applications and Internet sites, specific to the needs of the organization, can be built. Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 expands these

capabilities further to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more

 

Differences between WSS and MOSS

 

When thinking of WSS and MOSS, the important thing to understand is that WSS is the foundation and MOSS is an optional add-on. In fact, you cannot install MOSS by itself. If you try to do this, you will be requested to install WSS first. So, the question is: What differs between WSS and MOSS? If you have never seen SharePoint before, some of these answers might be hard to understand. Give it a try anyhow.

 

The following chapters further flesh out the following points.

 

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0

 

WSS 3.0 has the following characteristics:

 

·          It is a web-based application.

·          It stores all information in an MS SQL database.

·          It displays information using web parts.

·          It has good document-management features.

·          It has a number of list types that you can use for storing all kinds of information.

·          It allows you to build workflow solutions that start when a document is changed.

·          It is perfect for simple, but effective, intranet solutions.

·          It is ideal for collaboration on project data, meetings, social events, and the like.

·          It has its own index and search engine.

·          Its lists and libraries can operate as RSS Feeds.

·          It comes with site temples for creating Wiki and Blog sites.

·          It is a free add-on to MS Windows 2003 Server (any edition).

 

In other words, WSS is the perfect place to collect information for your projects, your customers, and your meetings. You can move all documents from your file system into WSS and by doing so get access to the powerful document-management features it offers. It is also a very good solution when you need local intranets for teams or departments. And all this is free when you run Windows 2003 Server! But there are things that WSS does not offer. The following are just a few examples:

 

·          There is no support for indexing and searching information outside the WSS.

·          It has no advanced intranet features, such as targeted information and content management.

·          It has no advanced document management features, such as document policies.

·          It has no record management of legal and other important documents.

·          It cannot display InfoPath forms in a web browser.

·          It cannot display MS Excel spreadsheets as web parts.

·          It comes with less than 10 web parts.

·          It cannot read and write to and from external databases.

 

This is where MOSS comes in.

 

MOSS 2007 uses the same types of sites as WSS 3.0 but adds a lot of functionality to WSS 3.0, making it possible to do the following:

 

·          Use global search functionality to find any type of information regardless of type and location.

·          Target information to one or more user groups.

·          Import user data from Active Directory.

·          Use advanced content management for public Internet sites or portal sites.

·          Use the RSS web part to list information fetched from RSS feeds.

·          Display and use InfoPath forms with a web client, using the Forms Service.

·          Display MS Excel spreadsheets and charts in a web part, using Excel Services.

·          Search, display and edit content in external databases, such as SAP, using Business Data Catalog.

·          Give each SharePoint user a personal web site, for both private and public use.

 

These characteristics make MOSS a very good solution for building public Internet sites or global intranets that are smart enough to show the right information to the right people. MOSS is also a good solution when you want to build a site for displaying business data, such as MS Excel spreadsheets, forms, and key performance indicators (KPIs)

 

Features of WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007

 

This Article describes features of windows SharePoint services (WSS 3.0) and MOSS 2007. It describes basic difference between WSS 3.0 and Moss 2007.

 

Introduction

This Article describes features of windows SharePoint services (WSS 3.0) and MOSS 2007. It describes basic difference between WSS 3.0 and Moss 2007.

Features of WSS 3.0

WSS 3.0 is built on top of ASP.NET, and supports Master Page and Site navigation. It is an application framework. WSS improves team productivity.

 

Team site

primarily designed to facilitate collaboration among teams through web sites Secure, Document centric site, tracking process, sharing document, communicating with colleagues, task list, contact list, discussion forums.

 

Administration model enhancements

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes several enhancements to the administration model that helps IT organizations implement management plans and performs administrative tasks more effectively and efficiently.

 

Collaborate Easily and Effectively

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provide a single workspace for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions-within the organization and over the extranet.

Windows SharePoint Services are used as a platform to build rich, flexible, and scalable Web-based applications and Internet sites specific to the needs of your organize.

Additional Features come with MOSS 2007

Take advantage of its integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that expands platform services and common framework for document management exposed by Windows SharePoint Services to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more.

Use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to quickly and easily customize SharePoint sites and build reporting tools and applications tailored to specific tasks without writing or deploying new code.

My site personal site

The My Site personal site gives users an opportunity to aggregate information into “for me,” “by me,” and “about me.”

User profiles and profile store

Allows each user to store profile information.

Audience targeting

Enables use of  Web Part pages, Web Parts, and content to target distribution lists and groups in addition to SharePoint audiences.

InfoPath forms services

Available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 InfoPath forms services make it possible to design Web-capable forms in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 and distribute them on corporate intranets, extranets, or the Internet. Users can fill out forms in a browser or HTML enabled Mobile device with no download or client components needed.

 

Business Data Catalog (BDC)

Business Data Catalog tightly integrates external data into the Office SharePoint Server 2007 user experience, providing access to external data residing within backed LOB applications, and enabling the display of and interaction with external data through a set of Business Data Web Parts.

Difference between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007

 

 

WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Windows SharePoint Services (WSS3.0) comes free with Windows Server 2003.	MOSS is not free and it is installed on top of WSS 3.0.MOSS has both a server cost and a client access license (CAL) cost.
WSS 3.0 offers all the standard site templates to build team sites, document workspaces, blank sites, blogs, wikis, and meeting workspaces.	MOSS 2007 offers business intelligence features that allow you to track key performance indicators and build BI dashboards into your team site.
WSS 3.0 can be used to create people and group lists.	Moss is used as a super powerful content management system, which aims to provide content management, enterprise content services and enterprise search.
You can integrate WSS 3.0 sites with Access 2007, Excel 2007, Outlook 2007, Word 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.	Workflow can also be integrated into MOSS 2007.
It also serves as a platform for application development. Including such IT resources as portals, team workspaces, e-mail, presence awareness, and Web based conferencing, Windows SharePoint Services enables users to locate distributed information quickly and efficiently, as well as connect to and work with others more productively.	Moss also offers My Sites, which are individual mini-sites that can be set up to show who in your company you’re connected to, what your tasks and skills are, your contact information, and more.MOSS 2007 is the portal system, comparable to SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It brings a wealth of built-in functionality and interoperability to a company’s intranet over and above the functions of WSS 3.0.
Create Site Collection: Select template will give minimum options it’s like Collaboration and Meetings.	Create Site Collection:Select template will give more options it’s like Collaboration, Meetings, Enterprise, Custom and Publishing Only WSS 3.0

Navigation

By default both WSS and MOSS have a simple navigation system that uses tabs across the top to access sites along with the quick launch area on the left hand side to access content element within a site.This information presented in site collection.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the following new features to improve site

 

• Navigation through User-aware links; for example, removing the Settings links for users who cannot make particular changes, a capability that is provided through “link trimming”.
• Breadcrumbs to provide users with additional information about their location within a site collection.
• Customization of the top navigation bar, ranging from adding and removing links to adding Microsoft JScript drop-down menus and fly-outs, which is provided by new shared navigation and master pages. Such menus can only be enabled by modifying a master page; there is no built-in support for enabling these menus.
• Customization of the left navigation bar, which includes adding and removing links to adding JScript drop-down menus and fly-outs, which is provided through ASP.NET master pages and navigational controls such as the SiteMapPath, Menu and TreeView controls. Such menus can only be enabled by modifying a master page; there is no out-of-box support for enabling these menus.
• Common navigation bars provided through master pages.

Content Management with work flow 

Content Characteristics

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is designed to host content and applications that support such business needs as communication, collaboration, analysis, process, and knowledge management. Across those diverse functions, not all content is created equal. Imagining a spectrum of content characteristics.

Content Database is a SQL server 2005 database that maintain all of the webpage definitions, documents, lists and security information.

 

 

Structured content	Unstructured content
Made available for long-term consumption	Shorter-term lifecycle
Little-to-no support for collaboration	Support for collaboration
Process-driven	Process-driven

Work Flow

Work flow is nothing but automated process.The workflow functionality in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is built on the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a Microsoft Windows platform component that provides a programming frastructure and tools for development and execution of workflow-based applications.

The WF run-time engine provides the services that every workflow application needs, such as sequencing, state management, tracking capabilities, and transaction support.

Document libraries also support an event system that you can tap in to programmatically.These events can call into .net assemblies when new document are placed in a library, modified, or deleted.The version of WSS also comes with its own work flow engine based on WWF (Windows workflow foundation), the engine provides simple work flow process such as document approval out of box.

User can develop more sophisticated workflows using the SharePoint designer (Microsoft front page). We can create custom workflows with visual studio 2005 and harness all the power of .NET Framework

List

Task list, list of contacts .Previous version of WSS, list used a different underlying infrastructure than document libraries. In the WSS 3.0 version both are same.List also capable of raising events that you can trap in code. List also can participate in workflow process.

All the files are uploading in respective share point custom list.