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SharePoint
What is Microsoft Window SharePoint Services?
Windows SharePoint Services capabilities provide the foundation for a smart workplace—whether you are an IT administrator looking for an all-in-one solution for managing effective collaboration and communication organization-wide, or whether you are a team member looking for a fast, robust way to share information with others and collaborate effectively on team projects.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SharePoint in the Media
Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession
New York Time - August 7, 2009
Think of SharePoint as the jack-of-all-trades in the business software realm. Companies use it to create Web sites and then manage content for those sites. It can help workers collaborate on projects and documents. And it has a variety of corporate search and business intelligence tools too. Read the article ...
The Ultimate Business Timesaver Forbes - April 2, 2009
"SharePoint is our main system for collaborating on just about everything that goes on in our company." Read the article ...
SharePoint Solutions: Smart Investments in a Recession
Network World - Feb 27, 2009
If collaboration solutions were a smart investment in 2008, they are even smarter in the recession of 2009. Well architected SharePoint solutions are likely to be one of the smartest investments companies can make to survive and thrive in this challenging economy. Read the article ...
How Windows SharePoint Services Works?
Windows SharePoint Services sites take file storage to a new level, providing communities for team collaboration and making it easy for users to work together on documents, tasks, contacts, events, and other information. In addition, team and site managers can coordinate site content and user activity easily. The Windows SharePoint Services environment is designed for easy and flexible deployment, administration, and application development.
SharePoint sites are made up of Web Parts and Windows ASP.NET-based components. Web Parts are designed to be added to pages and configured by site administrators and users, creating complete page-based applications. Windows SharePoint Services ships with a number of ready-to-use Web Parts; more will be available in the future from Microsoft and third-party vendors.
Top 10 Reasons to Deploy Windows SharePoint Services
Instead of just dumping files into directories, Windows SharePoint Services supplies Web sites with document storage and retrieval with check-in and check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata, and flexible, customizable views. Users can find and share data, with the added assurance that data will not be lost.
SharePoint sites store event calendars, contacts, Web links, discussions, issues lists, announcements, and much more. By using Windows SharePoint Services, you can create smart places that help your users share information and get work done, not just a place to save files.
You can grant users the ability to create sites, allow them to control site membership, monitor site usage directly, and moderate content submissions. Users can even create site templates and share them with one another, reusing customized, proven site solutions.
Despite the authority delegated to users, Windows SharePoint Services also enables you to track which sites are created, who owns them, how long a site has gone unused, and so on. You can enforce quotas for sites, users, and storage; block users from adding specific file types to sites; and automatically delete sites that are unused for long periods of time.
You can deploy Windows SharePoint Services in server farms that support tens of thousands of sites and can handle the typical load of hundreds of thousands of users. Windows SharePoint Services supports load balancing for Web servers and server clustering technology for all data—including configuration, documents, and list data.
Despite the fact that it was engineered to scale to large enterprise deployments, Windows SharePoint Services runs well on deployments for small business, departmental, or pilot environments.
Site owners and users can add the Web Parts you provide to their site pages, adding new features to the sites they already use. ASP.NET developers can write Web Parts to provide data access, Web services, and many other applications and content to SharePoint sites.
You can manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services right out of the box by using a Web browser or command-line utilities. You can also manage server farms, servers, and sites by using the Microsoft .NET Framework–based object model and Web services, making possible a great many custom and third-party administration solution offerings.
Thanks to the Web services provided by Windows SharePoint Services, programs in the Microsoft Office System—including Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, Microsoft Office InfoPath, and Microsoft Office OneNote—can use information in SharePoint sites natively. Programs in the Microsoft Office System allow users to add members to sites, assign tasks, and communicate with members both by e-mail or in real time by using online presence, all while working on documents stored in SharePoint sites. With Microsoft Office Outlook, users can view calendars and contact lists stored on SharePoint sites and can create and manage sites devoted to editing documents and organizing meetings.
Windows SharePoint Services provides large numbers of individually productive places. SharePoint Portal Server connects these places to people, teams, knowledge, and applications to create smart organizations. It adds site organization and navigation, content topics, targeted news, personalized sites, content search, organization-wide alerts, enterprise application integration, and more to a Windows SharePoint Services deployment.
SharePoint Services Benefits
Benefits for IT Professionals.
Built on the Windows Server 2003 platform, Windows SharePoint Services makes it easy for IT professionals to implement a dependable, scaleable collaboration infrastructure, using straightforward administrative tools and services. IT administrators will benefit from the following:
Whether deployed on a single server supporting a small organization or in a large enterprise with tens of thousands of sites and thousands of users, Windows SharePoint Services provides a cost-effective, scaleable collaboration and information sharing solution, without compromising system reliability, security, or performance.
The rich, built-in functionality and ease of use of Windows SharePoint Services gives IT administrators the means by which to decrease the cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, site management and support, operations, and backup and restore. Moreover, because Windows SharePoint Services is so easy to extend as an organization grows, as well as easy to integrate with a variety of applications and systems, it is possible to build a collaboration environment with minimal administrative time and effort.
Windows SharePoint Services is fully integrated with Windows Server 2003, enabling administrators to benefit from the rich functionality offered by such services as Active Directory, Live Communications Server, and MSN Connect. Centralized administration, effective data life-cycle management, and improved network and site performance are just some of the benefits administrators will enjoy.
Benefits for Users.
Windows SharePoint Services provides the following advantages to the individuals and teams who use it:
Finding and accessing information across a distributed workplace is a major challenge for which Windows SharePoint Services offers an effective solution. By providing users with a single Web-based team environment and built-in search capabilities, Windows SharePoint Services helps users to find information more effectively than with traditional file shares.
With the built-in alert capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services, users can be notified when changes are made to shared information. Microsoft Office Live Communication Server provides users with the means to communicate instantly, whether by video or audio, and Microsoft Office Live meeting enables users to communicate and collaborate with anyone.
The process of document creation and review is made simpler and more effective with built-in document versioning plus check-in and check-out capabilities. Additionally, using Windows Rights Management Services, authors can determine how their documents are distributed and used by others.
By integrating Web-based team collaboration services into everyday tools such as Microsoft Office, users can quickly and effectively adopt new collaboration tools and services. And by providing Web-browser access, Windows SharePoint Services makes it easy for users to access team information through a single site on demand.
View the Demo
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Overview Demo
See Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in action. Find out how this integrated suite of server capabilities can help your organization by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.
