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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and Enterprise Search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability. The evaluation of Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the focus of this document.
There are also specialty SharePoint Products and Technologies for Search and Forms.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
The ability to search for information in enterprise Web sites is critical to the effective use and usability of those sites. Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a shared service that provides extensive and extensible content gathering, indexing, and querying. This service supports full-text searching by using Structured Query Language (SQL)–based query syntax, and it provides new keyword syntax to support keyword searches. Search is covered in more detail elsewhere in this document, in the section titled Enterprise Search. You can also learn more about search functionality by consulting the Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=79614&clcid=0x409).
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007
Microsoft® Office Forms Server 2007 provides scalable, standards-based electronic forms solutions with enhanced security that can help an organization to extend the reach of forms-driven business processes to anyone with a Web browser. It is a stand-alone server that delivers new Microsoft® Office InfoPath® Forms Services, which is also available in Office SharePoint Server 2007. This new technology uses server-based electronic forms to streamline business processes and make data collection, distribution, and integration more cost-effective than with paper-based forms.
It is important to understand the licensing options for these various products. You can learn more about the packaging and licensing at How to Buy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=82566&clcid=0x409). Please note that this product guide focuses on functionality provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007 Client Access License (CAL), Enterprise Edition. Some of the functionality described in this guide — for example, Business Forms and Integration and Business Intelligence — is not available with only the Standard CAL.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on and extends the functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 employs operating system and database services to support requirements ranging from a team site for a workgroup, to large enterprise portal solutions serving hundreds of thousands of employees and staff, to a corporate Internet portal supporting millions of users.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide a comprehensive solution with enterprise-scale capabilities to meet critical needs such as managing content and business processes, and simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the following security-enhanced, scalable, reliable, high-performance capabilities for site management:
Storage Allowing content such as documents (Office documents, PDFs, custom binary files), Web pages, lists, and other types of information to reside in a common data repository (Microsoft SQL Server™) with full data management capabilities, version control, metadata, and site-level search.
Security Providing the essential elements of comprehensive security management by employing a range of authentication providers (for example, Kerberos, NTLM, basic, the Active Directory® directory service, LDAP, ASP.NET forms and Web single sign-on authentication), policy management, group management, and permission levels ranging from individual items in list to entire sites.
Management Enabling centralized and delegated administrative facilities for Windows SharePoint Services sites from operational and application perspectives, in addition to ongoing site monitoring.
Deployment Providing an architecture that supports flexible, distributed, and scalable deployment architectures, across Web and database servers; enabling configuration and site feature management.
Site Model Providing a template-based infrastructure for deployment of custom sites, providing automated navigation and a consistent user interface while allowing for extensive and flexible customization of site formatting and layout.
Extensibility Providing a comprehensive application programming interface (API) that allows custom applications to be built on the Windows SharePoint Services architecture, employing use of XML Web services and SOAP, providing event handlers for cross-integration with other applications, and providing methods for migrating content into Windows SharePoint Services sites.
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