Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and MOSS 2007
What does SharePoint do?
SharePoint is an enterprise information portal, from Microsoft, that can be configured to run Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) allows people and teams to connect and collaborate. A SharePoint enterprise portal is composed of both SharePoint Portal and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), with SharePoint being built upon WSS. WSS is typically used by small teams, projects and companies. SharePoint Server is designed for individuals, teams and projects within a medium to large company wide enterprise portal.
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 form-driven business processes, access and analyze large amounts of business data.
In addition MOSS 2007 is designed to work effectively with other programs, servers, and technologies in the 2007 Office release. For example, in many 2007 Office release programs, you can initiate or participate in workflows, which are the automated movements of documents or items through specific sequences of actions or tasks that are related to a business process, such as the approval process for an expense report.
Top Reasons to use SharePoint (WSS or MOSS 2007)
- 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. There are 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, WSS can help ensure the integrity of documents stored on team sites.
- Get users up to speed quickly. User interface improvements in WSS 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, view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office files and programs.
- Deploy solutions tailored to your business processes. While standard workspaces in WSS 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, WSS 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. WSS 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. WSS supplies workspaces with document storage and retrieval features, including check-in/check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata, and customizable views. New features in WSS 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 WSS 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. WSS 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 MOSS 2007 expands these capabilities further to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more.