Top 10 Benefits of WSS 3.0 Office SharePoint Server 2007 1. 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, organise 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 synchronisation capabilities. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. Deploy solutions tailored to your business processes While standard workspaces in Windows SharePoint Services are easy to implement, organisations seeking a more customised deployment can get started quickly with application templates for addressing specific business processes or sets of tasks. 5. 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 preplanning time is required and companies can get started even faster. 6. 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. 7. 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. 8. 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 customisable views. New features in Windows SharePoint Services include enhanced recycle bin functionality for easier recovery of content and improved backup and restoration. 9. 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 thirdparty administration solution offerings. 10. 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 organisation, 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, personalised sites, and more. Top 10 Benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007 1. 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. 2. 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). 3. 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 organisation. 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.
4. 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. 5. Simplify organisation-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 personalised views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organisations store and organise business documents in one central location. 6. 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. 7. Accelerate shared business processes across organisational 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. 8. 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). 9. Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting businesscritical 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. Centralised Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs. 10. 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.
Collaboration By using the following features in Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can work more efficiently and effectively with other people in your organisation: Use site templates to collaborate or manage meetings: When you create a new Office SharePoint Server 2007 site, you can start by selecting one of several different kinds of site templates for collaborating with other people and managing meetings. The site templates in the Collaboration group are designed to help teams within an organisation work on projects and collaborate on documents. For example, by using the Document Workspace site template, you can work with other people on a document or a set of documents. The site templates in the Meetings group are designed to help teams within an organisation manage different kinds of meetings. The templates in this group support everything from basic meetings to decisionfocused meetings or even social events. Share documents, contacts, tasks, and calendars: You can synchronise your Office SharePoint Server 2007 calendar with Office Outlook 2007. You can enter allday events and specify more types of repeating, or recurring, events. You can track team projects more effectively with visual day and month views. Brainstorm easily with wiki sites: A wiki site enables you to brainstorm ideas, collaborate on a team design, build an encyclopaedia of knowledge, or just gather routine information in a format that is easy to create and modify. Your team members can contribute to wikis from their browsers they don't need a word processor or special technical knowledge. Share ideas with blogs: A blog, or weblog, consists of frequent short posts that are displayed in order, starting with the most recent post. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, it just takes a few clicks to create a blog, post to a blog, subscribe to updates to a blog, or customise a blog. Receive updates to lists and libraries with RSS: Lists and libraries use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) technology, so that members of your workgroup can automatically receive updates. RSS is a technology that enables people to receive and view updates or feeds of news, blogs, and other items of interest in a consolidated location. Manage projects: You can create a Project Tasks list, which includes a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is a type of visual overview of project tasks that you can use to monitor the dates and progress of team tasks. Get mobile access to content: You can view portals, team sites, and lists on a mobile device to help you stay current on team projects and tasks when you are travelling. For example, lists appear on phones (or other telecommunications devices that support international standards) in a simplified text format, with a link to scroll through the content of each page. Send e-mail to Office SharePoint Server 2007: You can use an e-mail program to participate in discussions, meetings, and documents on an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site. Just as you send e-mail messages to your team to discuss tasks and projects, you can also send e-mail messages to an Office SharePoint Server 2007 site or to a specific list or library.
Manage documents and some types of lists offline: You can take your important work with you wherever you go. With Office Outlook 2007, you can work offline on files in a library and items in the following types of lists: calendars, contacts, tasks, and discussions. When you connect back online, you can update your files on the server. List items are updated automatically. Searching In Office SharePoint Server 2007, search results are delivered quickly and relevance is tuned for enterprise and line-of-business data. Relevance is tuned for enterprise content with the best results across structured and unstructured data sources determined by a rich and broad range of factors. Robust security, granular administrative controls comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and reporting help ensure compliance and protect intellectual property (IP). Enterprise-grade scalability, extensibility, and manageability meet the needs of even the largest organisations. 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. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can: Search file shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Exchange Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases out of the box and easily extend search to third party sources and file types. Index, search, and intelligently display information from line-of-business applications, relational databases, and other structured content using the Business Data Catalog. Leverage "people search" capabilities to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests. 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. Find, use and share information in the context of where you are working with the familiar tools you use every day. Results are displayed more clearly, hits are highlighted, duplicate entries are collapsed, and synonyms are suggested. Results are actionable and further enhanced through optional integration with tools such as real-time communications.
Links Contact Us http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/sharepointserver/fx100492001033.aspx http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/sharepointserver/ha101656531033.aspx For more information call us on 0845 3379 146 or email information@eacs.com.