SharePoint Portal Server: What is it?
The Microsoft Office System provides information workers with the tools they need to get their jobs done – not just desktop applications but servers, services, and solutions as well. Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 addresses servers.
SharePoint Portal Server is an application built on top of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Before we can look at SharePoint Portal Server, you need to understand Windows SharePoint Services.
Windows SharePoint Services is a technology you get in Windows Server 2003. It is an engine for serving up in a very scalable, very available, very self-serviced and extensible way, tens of thousands of Web sites to hundreds of thousands of users. The sites come to you without you doing anything extra out-of-the-box with document collaboration, information sharing, and team productivity tools. Using SharePoint sites for sharing-type applications or collaboration activities, instead of file shares, is sensible and effective.
From the point of view of a developer, SharePoint sites are not just collaboration sites. Windows SharePoint Services can deliver several different types of sites including the out-of-the-box Document Workspace sites for document editing and management, and Meeting Workspace sites for meeting management. You can use Windows SharePoint Services as a development platform to build additional sites on, and on which to create collaboration applications and information-sharing applications. Microsoft Office Project Web Access is a great example of an application built on top of Windows SharePoint Services.
Whereas Windows SharePoint Services is designed mainly for document and other collaboration, SharePoint Portal Server helps collect, organizes, and provides easy access to enterprise information. With SharePoint Portal Server, sites are personalized, and more accessible, discoverable, and searchable. It provides a single point of access for people, teams, knowledge and applications.
SharePoint Server 2007:
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds upon the Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 infrastructure to provide a true enterprise portal platform. This article describes the technologies that Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 delivers on the six major enterprise-focused themes for the 2007 Microsoft Office system: Individual Impact, Enterprise Content Lifecycle, Collaboration, Knowledge Discovery and Insight, Information Worker Solutions, and Fundamentals.
The Office SharePoint Server 2007 feature enhancements and new additions provide the components needed to build a fully integrated enterprise portal.
SharePoint Server Features:
Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduces new technologies, including the following:
- Business Data Catalog
Enables integration between enterprise portal and line-of-business (LOB) applications. - Document Management
Provides control, organization, publishing, offline capabilities, draft item security, rights management, and records management. - Web Content Management
Enables site branding, creation of custom converters, building of multilingual sites, and building of content deployment solutions. - Office SharePoint Server 2007 Excel Services
Enables interaction with your spreadsheets (view, calculate, create snapshots, extract values) through a Web browser or programmatically through a Web service. - Office InfoPath Forms Services Capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enables interaction with form templates designed with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 through a Web browser.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 also brings enhancements to existing technologies, including the following:
- Search Provides enhanced capabilities in portal sites, team sites, content management sites, and custom headless search applications.
- User Profiles and Audience Targeting
Provides improvements for property management, imports, privacy and security, and My Page, plus the addition of memberships, shared context, and colleague's quick links. - Single Sign-on
Provides enhancements to include a pluggable mechanism to allow alternate single sign-on providers.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 benefits
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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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.
