Solutions: Microsoft SharePoint

What is Windows SharePoint Services (WSS)?

Traditionally, most situations that require a group of users to share a frequently updated document tend to get messy. One way that the situation is often handled is that a user might make an update and then email the updates to everyone else in the group. Another common situation is that the document might be placed in a shared folder where it can be updated as needed. Both of these techniques have problems though. For example, what happens if two people try to make contradictory updates at the same time? What happens if a user updates the document incorrectly, ruining the document in the process. These are issues that business units within corporations have had to deal with for years. Fortunately, those days are over thanks to a free add-on to Windows Server 2003 called Windows SharePoint Services (WSS).

WSS was designed to allow users to organize and to more easily share information in a collaborative environment.

All informaton is stored on a web portal which is easily accessible through an Internet browser such as Internet Explorer.

For example, let’s go back to the example that I gave earlier in which a group of users needed to share a common document related to a project. Rather than trying to maintain the document in the usual way, the team could create a SharePoint Web site with a document library. The document library would allow users in the group to check the document in and out, thus guaranteeing that there was no chance of two users updating the document simultaneously. The document library can also maintain previous versions of documents so that if the team needed to revert to a previous version they could easily do so without having to restore a backup. The document library even offers a manageable set of permissions that control who can read, create, or modify documents. You can even structure approval routing so that a change to a document will not be posted to the library until it has been approved by a manager.

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How SharePoint Integrates with Business Processes

Most businesses utilize one or more Microsoft solutions to run their business. Nearly everyone utilizes Microsoft Office and is familiar with its popular suite of software. Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services sits on top of the Microsoft suite of applications, providing a centralized location where information can be compiled, analyzed, and reported. By utilizing popular spreadsheet programs, such as Microsoft Excel, information and data can be manipulated and reported in a WSS site. In addition to its collaborative platform, WSS can also tightly integrate with other popular Microsoft products, such as Microsoft Project, Microsoft Customer Relations Manager, and Office Communications Server for real-time presence awareness.

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Which SharePoint Version is Right for You?

SharePoint Allows You To:

• Deploy intranet portal solutions that can be customized easily to serve your company, departments, teams and your clients and partners.
• Improve your company’s document authoring, review, and publication practices and enable your employees to more easily find the information they need to improve their productivity.
• Empower your employees to build team workspaces, without IT assistance, that foster better communication, collaboration, and project management.

How Can I Use SharePoint?

Microsoft SharePoint can be used for a wide range of collaboration needs within an organization, including:

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SharePoint Features List

	Admin Tools Administrate security and group permissions		Document Libraries Share documents securely with anyone		Outlook Integration Manage email and calendars in Outlook.
	Alerts Set alerts and reminders for big dates and tasks.		Employee Directory Keep track of employee information in one place.		Project Sites Create team sites specific to projects and groups.
	Announcements Post and share important announcements		Export to Excel Send spreadsheets and reports to Excel.		Reports Manage multiple reports online.
	Blogs Post thoughts and ideas online with your own blog.		Image Libraries Store and share images securely		Surveys Conduct online surveys in minutes .
	Contact Lists Organize business contacts		Meeting Workspaces Store meeting information in one.		Task Manager Manage tasks and activities for your team.
	Databases Create and manage your information.		Office Integration Integration with Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, etc.		Web Sites Create your own personal web site. Its simple to edit.
	Discussions Exchange ideas, comments, and more.		Online Calendars Schedule group meetings and events		Wikis Let users create your web content and edit freely.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)

Experience full enterprise functionality with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). This elegant, yet powerful, ensemble allows users to document, search, organize and collaborate with stunning efficiency.

Building on Windows SharePoint Services

MOSS 2007 builds on the core functions delivered through WSS 3.0 to add benefits to larger organizations that need more features, greater customization, greater scalability and integration with Enterprise level business systems such as the Microsoft Dynamics range of applications, SAP or indeed most other ERP or financial products.

There are a number of different editions of the MOSS suite with each one building on the functionality of the core product. For example, Document Management and Versioning Control come as standard in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, the Records Repository is available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) Standard Edition and the business intelligence and KPI functionality comes with MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) Features:

• Collaboration: Help keep teams connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information users need to make more well-informed decisions within their jobs. Windows SharePoint products and technologies include collaboration and community, document life cycle capabilities, alters, task notifications, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the basic Web-based user interface and navigation.
• Portal: The portal components of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites.
• Search: The search component has been significantly enhanced in this release. The new features provide a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, and new functionalities along with improved scalability, manageability, and extensibility.
• Enterprise Content Management: Windows SharePoint Services provides core document management functionality: major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the document library, folder, and individual document levels. Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on these capabilities to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.
• Forms Driven Business Process: Streamline forms-driven business processes with easy-to-use, intelligent, XML-based electronic forms that integrate smoothly with existing systems. This security-enhanced, client/server platform provides rapid-solution creation and deployment, centralizes form management and maintenance, and helps to extend business processes to customers, partners, and suppliers.
• Business Intelligence: Provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control, and reuse business information in order to make better business decisions. The BI features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide Web and programmatic access to published Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets, programmatic reuse of critical line-of-business data, and easy development of Web-based BI dashboards that can incorporate rich, data-bound key performance indicators (KPIs), Web Parts, and published spreadsheets.

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Features Comparison	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Standard site templates: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes the following standard collaboration site templates: Team site Document workspace Blank site Blog Wiki Meeting workspaces (five workspace types)
Wikis: A wiki is a site template in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that makes it easy to create, edit, link, and restore an individual Web page. Wikis can be used as creative forums to brainstorm ideas, manage knowledge bases, create designs as well as instruction guides or simply gather information in an easy-to-edit format. Key features include: Fast and easy page creation Easy and automatic linking Version differences What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) Web page editing
Blogs: Blogs provide a publishing-oriented experience for a single user or a team. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes a site template that supports: Article posting Reader comments Archive views RSS feed generation
People and Groups lists: People and Groups offer a unified place to find, communicate with, and manage people and their permissions.
Calendars: Calendars have been enhanced with richer calendar views, expanded support for recurring events, and all-day events.
E-mail integration: Document libraries, discussion boards, calendars, and announcements can be enabled to receive new postings via e-mail.
Task coordination: The Project Tasks list template provides lightweight task management functionality including Gantt charts for visualization of task relationships and status.
Surveys: Surveys include conditional branching as well as support for inserting page breaks in long surveys such as annual employee satisfaction or and customer surveys.
Document collaboration: SharePoint document libraries include: Article posting Reader comments Archive views RSS feed generation
Enterprise portal	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007: Office SharePoint Designer 2007, based in part on Microsoft FrontPage technology, will provide tools for rich customization of sites, and creating reporting tools and application templates, without any coding.
My Site personal site: The My Site personal site gives users an opportunity to aggregate information "for me," "by me," and "about me."
Content syndication: Use RSS feeds to syndicate content managed in a portal site.
Privacy and security: Use authorizations to control visibility of information in a My Site public view.
Site Directory: The Site Directory automatically creates a site map and presents it in an easy-to-use format. The enhanced directory now includes the option to scan for changed or deleted links to external content.
Audience targeting: Enables use of Web Part pages, Web Parts, and content to target distribution lists and groups in addition to SharePoint audiences.
Site Manager: Manage a SharePoint site’s navigation, security access, and general look and feel using this easy drag-and-drop tool. Site Manager unifies site management tasks for portals and Web sites, including management of areas, pages, listings, SharePoint site lists, and associated component parts.
Portal site templates: Preconfigured templates streamline creating, customization, and deployment of divisional portals, organization-wide intranet portal sites, and corporate Web sites.
Integration with Microsoft Office Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Word 2007
Integration with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007: With Office Outlook 2007, users can view calendars and contact lists stored on SharePoint sites, and create and manage sites for editing documents and organizing meetings.
Enterprise search	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Search results: Results are security trimmed so users only see what they can access. Results include user-friendly features such as hit highlighting, duplicate collapsing, and synonym suggestion. Optional integration with real-time communications tools allow users to easily contact content authors and experts.
Enterprise content sources: Searches over 200 file types in many enterprise content sources, including files shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Exchange Public Folders, and more.
People search: People search capabilities allow users to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests.
Business data search: Search data residing in your line-of-business applications using the Business Data Catalog.
Enterprise content management	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Business document workflow support: Automate document review, approval, signature collection, and issue tracking using workflow applications: Approval Collect Feedback Collect Signatures Disposition Approval
Integration with Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM): Helps ensure that access rights applied to Microsoft Office documents in a central library travel with the documents, even when they are downloaded from the library.
Records repository: Helps ensure the integrity of the files stored in the repository, and supports information management policies that consistently and uniformly enforce auditing, and expiration of records.
E-mail content as records: Provides consistent, policy-based solutions for managing e-mail content across Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
High fidelity Web sites with consistent branding: Provides the concept of Master Pages and Page layouts to enforce the branding and navigation of Web sites. CSS supports gives pixel level control on the look and feel of these sites.
Navigation controls: Out-of-the box navigation controls that can be easily customized by end users.
Content authoring: Provides the ability for information workers to create content rich Web pages using a Web browser.
Content publishing and deployment: Built in approval workflow allows Web content to be sent for approval prior to publishing. Content deployment to production sites can be scheduled by setting up jobs and a "live" time period for each page can be specified within which that page is viewable.
Site templates
Page Layouts: Page Layouts simplify content authoring and publishing - site administrators define a structure that guides authors through the publishing process; content contributors focus on doing their jobs rather than on the details of publishing and deployment.
WYSIWYG Web content editor: Extends the SharePoint user interface with additional commands and status indicators for in-context Web page authoring.
Policies, auditing, and compliance: Repositories in SharePoint support the following policy, auditing, and compliance features: Document retention and expiration policies Highly customizable policies Workflow process to define expiration Access control and security IRM policies applied on download to secure the functional access to documents Tracking and auditing Logging of all actions on sites, content, and workflows Official document-of-record repositories Site for storing or archiving enterprise approved content types
Forms-driven business processes	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Compatibility Checker: The Compatibility Checker helps forms designers validate those features that need to work across the broadest range of Web browsers.
Browser-based forms: Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services available in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 makes it possible to design Web-capable forms in Office InfoPath 2007 and distribute them on corporate intranets, extranets, or the Internet.
Centralized forms management and control: Office InfoPath Forms Services provide a administrator controlled centralized form solution catalog that makes it easy for users to find a form and minimize form solution downtime when upgrades are necessary. It also provides administrators with the tools to manage form solution security and accessibility.
Form Import Wizard: The designer in Office InfoPath 2007 provides an easy way to convert forms designed in Office Excel and Office Word into rich Office InfoPath 2007 forms. The Form Import Wizard handles the conversion of form fields, repeating tables, rich text boxes, and other elements, dynamically generating the underlying XML structure for the new form.
Business intelligence	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Web-based business intelligence using Excel Services: Excel Services empowers spreadsheet authors to easily and broadly share spreadsheets that use business intelligence (BI) functionality through the browser. Fully interactive, data-bound spreadsheets including charts, tables, and PivotTable views can be created as part of a portal, dashboard, or business scorecard, without requiring any development.
Data Connection Libraries: Data Connection Libraries are centralized SharePoint document libraries that store Office Data Connections (ODC); ODCs describe connections to external data. Centralizing Office Data Connections makes it easier to share, manage, and discover data connections that can be used by any Microsoft Office program.
Business Data Catalog: The Business Data Catalog (BDC) tightly integrates external data into the Office SharePoint Server 2007 user experience, providing access to external data residing within backed line-of-business applications, and enabling the display of and interaction with external data through a set of Business Data Web Parts.
Business Data Web Parts: Use SharePoint Business Data Web Parts for viewing lists, entities, and related information retrieved through the Business Data Catalog.
Report Center: An out-of-the-box site optimized for report access and management, including a report library, data connection library, and a dashboard template. These sites, hosted by the new Report Center, provide consistent management of reports, spreadsheets, and data connections.
Platform	WSS 3.0	MOSS 2007
Alert filtering: Filters are supported to highlight the more relevant alerts.
Alert customization: Additional platform features are provided for custom formatting, events, and alerts.
Task notifications: Task notifications are now sent automatically when a user is assigned a task. There is no need for the user to subscribe to the notification in advance.
RSS feeds: By integrating RSS feeds for each SharePoint list, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides an efficient mechanism for end users to retrieve the information using RSS-enabled programs such as Windows Internet Explorer 7 and Office Outlook 2007.
Rights trimmed user interface: Users are only allowed to see the features that they have the rights to use.
Automatic breadcrumb bar: Provides immediate navigational context for the user - creating a greater sense of "place" within a SharePoint site.
Quick launch bar: Available on all view pages and is more easily customizable.
Top navigation bar: Available on all view pages and is more easily customizable.
Recycle bin: Enables a user to easily restore an item that was deleted accidentally. Administration tools are also available to manage the lifecycle of deleted items in the recycle bin.
Document libraries: Document Library features: Checking out documents locally Offline document library support in Office Outlook 2007 Major and minor version numbering and tracking Support for multiple content type Policy, auditing, and workflow Tree view support
Content types: Content types are reusable definitions of document types across your organization. A single document library can store content with multiple document types.
Field types: Extensible field types allow you to use enterprise data structures within Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by creating your own controls, which are exposed as simple fields within a list or document library by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Site columns: Site columns provide a central, reusable model for column definition. When you create a site column, each list that uses this column has the same definition, and you do not have to do the tedious work of reproducing the column in each list.
Folders in lists: Folders allow further segregation of content within a single list, adding another level of versatility.
List indexing: By allowing a column to be indexed, and stored as a simple name/value pair in a separate database, access to specific items in large lists is significantly improved. These kinds of performance improvements allow SharePoint lists to become true data stores, capable of supporting external applications as well as simple team sites.
Change logs: The change log is a repository storage feature in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that provides item change tracking services that are useful, for example, for data synchronization between Windows SharePoint Services and external applications.
Job service: The Job service in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides facilities for setting up a timed job that executes either after a definable time interval or during a certain time period in the hour, day, week, month, or year.
Version history: Changes to the item are shown in the version history. In addition, support is provided for "append-only" comment fields.
Major and minor version tracking: Tracking of both major version numbers and minor version numbers are supported in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Folder-level and item-level access controls: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 extends group or role-based access controls from sites, document libraries, and lists to individual folders, documents, and list items.
Single Sign-On (SSO): Permits a person to enter one name and password to use a variety of back-end applications. SSO is used for integrating back-office systems and line-of-business applications that require separate credentials databases.
Common search technology and infrastructure: Provides a single indexing and search infrastructure that scales from the desktop, through team sites and divisional portal sites, to the largest corporate intranets, extranets, and Internet sites.

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) Demo

See Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 in action. This demo provides an overview of the technology and shows how Windows SharePoint Services enables people to share information and stay connected with innovative tools for collaboration. Find out how SharePoint sites and workspaces can help streamline business processes and increase team productivity.

Sanders Software SharePoint Services

Sanders Software provides SharePoint consulting services to companies with wide ranging requirements, from basic configuration and deployment of WSS, to developing and branding MOSS sites.

Our SharePoint consulting services include site branding and design, collaboration, search solutions, content management, and planning and deployment support.

• Defining overall strategy and requirements
• Implementing security policies based on business needs
• Configuring forms based authentication for access
• Design, development and deployment of extranet portals
• Providing tools for easy administration