Technology » Sharepoint - MOSS

Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server 2007 or “MOSS” is an integrated suite of easy-to-use server applications that provides a single platform to manage intranet, extranet and website applications across an organization.

Brief description of the main features

• Content Management - SharePoint sites store information such as event calendars, contacts, Web links, discussions, issues lists, and announcements. In addition to using the rich set of built-in lists, one can create custom lists in one’s team site that meet specific information-sharing needs. Document and record management, Web content management with policies and workflow.
• Business Process – Managing business processes is critical to every organization's success. This can be achieved using document and forms management, custom forms, custom workflows or use built-in workflow templates to automate approval, review, and archiving process. Using Integration services like Business Data Catalog, forms can be connected to multiple Line of Business (LOB).
• Business Intelligence – Business Intelligence allows information workers to easily access critical business information, analyze and view data, and publish reports to make more informed decisions.
• Collaboration - Collaboration allows teams to work together effectively, collaborate on and publish documents, maintain task lists, implement workflows, and share information through the use of wikis and blogs.
• Portal – Portals create a personal MySite portal to share information with others and personalize the user experience and content of an enterprise Web site based on the user’s profile.
• 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. This enables people to look for the information they need wherever they navigate within the portal. Enterprise Search has the capability to search through business data, and the search results can be customized.

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 organization. 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 organization-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 personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organizations store and organize 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 organizational 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 business-critical 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. Centralized 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.