Chapter One
Introducing SharePoint Products and Technologies
IN THIS CHAPTER
Exploring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Comparing product versions
Choosing between WSS 2007 and MOSS 2007
Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies are server applications that facilitate collaboration, provide comprehensive content management, implement business processes, and provide access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes. They provide an integrated platform to plan, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications.
Some applications appeal to particular groups of users. For example, SAP, Excel, and Lotus 123 are targeted at CFO's, accountants, and bookkeepers. Powerpoint PowerPoint has always been an essential tool for sales people and professional speakers on many topics.
SharePoint, in contrast, is a set of technologies that has applicability to everyone in an organization. For example: CEOs can use SharePoint KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to see the health of their business or divisions at a glance. Accountants can use Excel services to publish live financial data to a Web page. Knowledge managers and librarians can use SharePoint's document management features to make information discoverable and accessible, while the legal team can breathe easier knowing that their corporate records management policies are being followed. And finally, the thousands of workers in an organization can use search to find people and information quickly, and to discover valuable relationships and information that they may not have realized existed using the knowledge network and a well-organized portal taxonomy.
This chapter describes Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides a high-level feature comparison between the previous 2003 and new 2007 product versions, and helps the reader choose between Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server.
Exploring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, or MOSS 2007 is the third release of Microsoft's portal offering. You may have heard that Microsoft products hit their stride in the third release. Having worked with SharePoint since the first release (SharePoint Portal Server 2001), we believe that Microsoft has stayed true to form, releasing a robust, mature, and feature-rich portal platform in this version.
You can find many definitions of portal in the marketplace, but because this book is focused on Microsoft's portal offering, we will share the Microsoft definition with you:
A portal is a central Web site that can be used to organize and distribute company information. The portal components in MOSS 2007 provide technology to facilitate connections between people within the organization who have the required skills, knowledge, and project experience. Some of the portal-specific features provided in MOSS are:
* User profiles: Each user has a set of attributes, such as a phone number or workgroup, which constitutes a user profile. Users can control which attributes in their user profile can be viewed by others. In addition, user profiles can be used when creating audiences to control content viewing.
* Audiences: An audience is a group of users defined based on their user profiles. Portal content can be targeted to specific audiences.
* Content targeting: The portal content that appears is customized depending on the group membership or SharePoint audience of the person accessing the portal. This increases productivity by ensuring that users get information that is relevant to them.
* My Site: Each user can have his or her own personal site named My Site. This site allows users to store their own content and can serve as a central starting point when they are looking for information. Content in My Site can be designated as private or public to control whether other users have access to the content.
* Enhanced notification services: Basic notifications can be sent by e-mail to inform users about changed items in lists or document libraries. Users participating in a workflow automatically receive e-mail notifications related to the workflow. Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds the ability to be notified when the results of a search query change.
* Enterprise search: Enterprise content such as documents, PDF files, SQL databases, Exchange e-mail files, Lotus Notes, and other types of content can all be crawled by the portal server and exposed by using a search query from any page in the portal.
MOSS 2007 improves organizational effectiveness by providing an extensive set of technologies and features that address a diverse set of business-critical needs that are often classified in the following categories:
* Portals: Including, but not limited to:
* Knowledge: Collections of organizational knowledge and information
* Enterprise: Aggregation points for enterprise applications and data
* Business intelligence: Utilizes OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing) and other analytic techniques to provide a dashboard view of trends and data comparisons that shorten the time needed to make decisions
* Intranet/extranet: Internal and externally facing portals and Web sites
* Partner: Provides a business partner-facing Web presence
* Sales and marketing: Web site focused on sales and marketing materials
* Enterprise search: Indexing of many types of enterprise documents and data, providing users the ability to issue one query with results returned by relevance regardless of location and format of content
* Content management: Web-content organization, publishing, and editing capabilities
* Document management: Version control, security, check in/check out, indexing, and archival capabilities
* Policy and records management: Regulatory and compliance management using a rules disposition engine and records vault with auditing capabilities
* Collaboration: Working with teams or projects in geographically dispersed locations using document libraries, lists, blogs, wikis, discussions, and real-time collaborative tools
* Process automation: Adding business rules, approvals, and forms to business process
Many of these scenarios are possible with the out-of-the-box configuration, and others are developed as composite applications or third-party solutions that use MOSS 2007 as a set of backend services and functionality.
SharePoint 2007 continues to integrate well with Microsoft's products. By exposing collaborative Web-based functionality in Microsoft Office applications, end users can take advantage of advanced features with minimal training in the context of what they are working on. Microsoft Office XP has basic integration with SharePoint, Office 2003 provided many integration enhancements, and Office 2007 provides the most comprehensive and deepest integration with the platform.
CROSS-REF
The integration between MOSS 2007 and Office 2007 is discussed in detail in Chapter 13. The integration points include how Office 2007 applications make using MOSS easier as well as how MOSS 2007 can publish Office 2007 content.
Comparing Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and MOSS 2007
Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003) added collaborative team sites and enterprise scalability to the SPS 2001 platform, in addition to adding ASP.NET development extensions and many other features. MOSS 2007 builds on this foundation by adding popular new functionality such as RSS subscriptions, blogs, and wikis as well as combining the features that were previously provided by Content Management Server 2003 (CMS).
The features are listed in Table 1.1. This table does not list every feature available in SharePoint, but instead lists the most popular features as well as compares and contrasts the differences between the 2003 to the 2007 products.
Choosing between MOSS and WSS
Windows SharePoint Services 2007 (WSS 2007) is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 that can be used to share information, collaborate with other users via document libraries, blogs, wikis, and discussions, as well as provide the ability to create lists and Web part pages. In addition to off-the-shelf functionality, WSS 2007 is used as a development platform for creating collaboration and information-sharing applications. WSS is very popular and often virulently adopted at the department level in organizations because it is included at no additional charge with the purchase of Windows Server 2003 user licenses.
Comparing MOSS and WSS
MOSS 2007 is built on top of WSS 2007 and therefore all WSS features are available in a MOSS deployment. Table 1.2 compares the two products from a feature perspective.
Comparing features is useful to help understand and delineate the two products, but business size and requirements are also important additional criteria to consider.
Considering organizational size
Most small businesses (5 to 500 information workers) can benefit from a WSS deployment. If an organization is creating and reviewing documents, tracking contacts, customers, and events, or collaborating with other organizations, they are good candidates for WSS. Perhaps there is the need to quickly create Web sites to communicate with internal employees or external customers. Again, WSS is a great solution for rapid Web site deployments.
Small business owners will want to consider starting with or upgrading to MOSS if they will be creating a large number of team sites. For example, many small consulting firms will create a new team site for each project. It doesn't take long to recognize the value of having a site directory structure to help organize those sites by project type or category. In addition to the organizational benefits of a site directory, small businesses may want to perform a company-wide search across all sites and other data sources.
Generally, we do not recommend deploying just WSS in an organization larger than 500 users if the intent is to allow users to create their own team sites for collaboration. If you have ever worked with Lotus Notes or WSS 2003, you know that this type of technology spreads virally with the potential to quickly become unmanageable. The exception to this would be the organization that provisions the team sites and document repositories centrally. In this scenario, WSS can scale and provide valuable functionality for any size organization.
Meeting the requirements
Business requirements can help determine which SharePoint product is appropriate for your organization. The WSS requirements usually center on team-level collaboration and support of easy Web publishing, and MOSS requirements are focused on enterprise knowledge management and centralization.
Typical WSS requirements
The following requirements can be met with a standard WSS deployment:
* Template-based Web sites to manage meetings, teams, and project documents
* Blogs and wikis provide RSS aggregation
* Share contact lists, event calendars, and announcements with teams, customers, and partners
* Post documents for review and approval
* Provide self-service site creation for end users
* Provide administration for unused Web sites
* Ability to archive project e-mails
* Document management
* Content notification
* Desire to pilot collaboration and knowledge management software to gain acceptance in the organization
If your business requirements are one or more of the above and your organization falls within the organization size considerations, choosing to deploy WSS is appropriate.
Typical MOSS requirements
The common MOSS business requirements are enterprise scenarios where it is important to categorize, find, and administer data across a large department or at the enterprise level. The common MOSS requirements are
* Provide enterprise content management
* Records management and compliance solutions
* Use enterprise search to easily find posted content
* Ability to create business intelligence (BI) portals
* Provide business process automation
* Provide single sign-on to multiple internal applications
* Desire to push targeted content to users based on their profile within the company
* Provide personal sites and the ability to locate subject matter experts in the organization
If your requirements align with any of these MOSS requirements, you should deploy MOSS as your portal and collaboration product.
NOTE
For most organizations that deploy WSS, we recommend central control of team site creation. WSS does not have a central site directory, nor does it provide cross-site search. Sifting through dozens of sites to find what you are looking for can be a frustrating experience for users and administrators. In general, wait until you have deployed MOSS to enable self-service site creation.
Summary
The SharePoint products are a powerful set of tools to enable collaboration and publishing for organizations. After reading this chapter, you should be familiar with the feature set provided by both MOSS and WSS and be able to decide which SharePoint product works best in your organization.
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Excerpted from Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 Bibleby Wynne Leon Wayne Tynes Simeon Cathey Copyright © 2007 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Excerpted by permission.
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