Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Product Overview

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Product Overview
Updated: September 19, 2006
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Manage Content and Processes

Improve Business Insight

Simplify Internal and External Collaboration

Empower IT to Make a Strategic Impact

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides 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. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all of the intranets, extranets, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.
Manage Content and Processes
Simplify compliance efforts and keep business information secure through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity by using electronic forms and out-of-the-box workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or browsers.
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Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management ensures that proprietary and confidential information is effectively protected even if it is not connected to a server.
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Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise. Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.
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Simplify Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative sites to a portal), or cost effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple intranet, extranet and Internet sites.
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Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services-driven solutions make it possible to securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.
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Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.
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Improve Business Insight
Effectively monitor business drivers, empower better informed decisions throughout the organization, and proactively respond to important business events.
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Present business-critical information in one central location. Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business information from disparate sources by using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place to find the latest spreadsheets, reports, or KPIs.
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Instantly connect people with information. SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates people and business data along with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. The Search Center provides a single integrated location for employees to find content, processes, people, and business data relevant to their specific needs. This enables people and organizations to make decisions more quickly, based on the latest information and facts.
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Share business data broadly while helping to protect sensitive information. Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to data and analytics in real time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one centralized and up-to-date version while helping to protect any sensitive or proprietary information embedded in documents (such as financial models).
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Leverage your unstructured business networks to drive better decisions. Employees can use new knowledge management tools to get the most from their powerful unstructured business networks, both inside and outside their organizations, thereby connecting with people more quickly and efficiently. By exploring these undocumented business relationships and finding subject matter experts, individuals are able to make better decisions more quickly.
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Unlock business data. Out-of-the-box connectors provide accessibility to data in SAP and Siebel systems. The Business Data Catalog allows structured data from line-of-business applications to be integrated into SharePoint in multiple ways through Web Parts, lists, people profiles, and search. Centrally managed connections to back-end systems can be defined once and then reused by end users to access back-end data without writing any code—easily making business data part of portal content. The Business Data Catalog also provides the ability for SharePoint Enterprise Search to integrate back-end business data into the search experience, without having to write any protocol handlers, iFilters, or custom code.
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Simplify Internal and External Collaboration
Share knowledge, find information, and collaborate more easily and securely both within and across organizational boundaries. Leverage your partners and customers and utilize your personal people-networks to connect to other people effectively.
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Enhance customer and partner relationships. With smart, standards-based, electronic-forms-driven solutions, you can collect business information from customers and partners through a Web browser. Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP) integration and support for other pluggable authentication providers makes it easier to work with non-Active Directory directory service sources, thereby simplifying extranet setups and facilitating tighter connectivity with customers, partners, and suppliers.
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Ubiquitous Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 has great relevance and incorporates enterprise content such as people and business data, along with documents and Web pages, to provide more comprehensive results. Search is ubiquitous in Office SharePoint Server 2007, with tight integration into SharePoint sites, Web Parts, SharePoint lists, people profiles, and more. This enables people to look for the information they need wherever they navigate to within the portal. Enterprise Search has the capability to search through business data and the search results can be highly customized, for example, surfacing specific metadata elements of back-end records.
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Work when and where you want. With offline access to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists and document libraries, you can free yourself from limitations of corporate network connectivity. Tight integration with Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 further enhances the offline experience for users.
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Connect and share knowledge. New knowledge management tools empower employees to create and leverage people networks, both inside and outside their organizations, so they can connect and share knowledge more quickly and efficiently with other people.
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Personalize operations. My Sites provide a totally personalized experience for users, with a dedicated site for each user. Each site can be used to store, present, view, and manage content, information, and applications in a controlled fashion. Each site can also be used to present information about the user such as skills and roles, colleagues and managers, groups and distribution lists the user belongs to, and documents the user is working on. And each site contains stringent privacy control and security mechanisms, so that each user can choose how much information to present, and to whom. My Sites can also be fully customized to suit individual requirements.
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Empower IT to Make a Strategic Impact
Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms to maintain by supporting all intranets, extranets, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.
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Get enhanced interoperability support. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on a scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Office SharePoint Server 2007 also has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. This enables integration with existing systems and provides the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments. LDAP integration support for other pluggable authentication providers makes it easier to work with non-Active Directory sources. Out-of-the-box WSRP Consumer Web Part enables integration with other WSRP-compliant portal solutions. Out-of-the-box connectors and Web parts for common line-of-business systems such as SAP and Siebel simplify how business users can access data from these systems directly from within portal-based solutions.
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Enable IT to focus on more strategic tasks. Users can now create sites, initiate workflows, self-provision applications, access back-end data, define security at a per-item level, restore deleted items, and complete other tasks without involving IT. This reduced user dependence on IT improves productivity and also allows the IT department to focus on providing real value-added services to the organization. The Business Data Catalog provides the ability to define and deploy a Business Information Library of connections to back-end systems. This feature can be reused by business users to create personalized views of business data without having to develop any custom code.
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Simplify deployment, management, and system administration. Managing a Web server farm, deploying new pieces of content, and managing synchronization across those sites is now much simpler. Deployment can be done in “top-down” or “bottom-up” fashion. Simplify site staging through out-of-the-box Site-starter Templates for common Web sites, with Area and Page layout templates and pre-configured navigation. And enhanced capabilities to backup and restore content helps IT professionals schedule backups, back up multiple site collections, and then restore each one individually.
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Robust system monitoring, usage tracking, and monitoring tools. These tools help isolate and solve problems faster and improve the operational efficiency of the system infrastructure.
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
The new Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search gives customers the ability to quickly and easily deploy an enterprise-grade search solution today and upgrade to the full complement of Office SharePoint Server 2007 functionalities in the future. A security-enhanced, scalable, extensible, and manageable search solution, Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search meets the core search needs of enterprises while offering the simplicity and ease of use desired by small and medium businesses; helping to increase productivity and alleviate information overload. Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search searches content in common data repositories including file shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases. It can be extended to search other repositories using third-party or customer-built connectors, and is upgradeable to the full Office SharePoint Server 2007 offering. Connect people to relevant business information with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. To try Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, get the 2007 Microsoft Office system Beta 2.