Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Guide February 2006
Abstract This evaluation guide is designed to give you a solid understanding of the design goals and feature set for Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and a familiarity with the product implementation. It provides an overview of the solutions and benefits provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007 as well as descriptions of new and improved features in the areas of portal, search, content management, business processes, and business intelligence.
Table of Contents Introduction ..................................................................................................1 Resources Available for Evaluating Office SharePoint Server 2007 ....................... 2 How to Use This Guide ..................................................................................2 Overview of This Guide .................................................................................. 2 Product Overview ...........................................................
Introduction Welcome to the evaluation guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The goal of this guide is to help you gain sufficient knowledge and understanding of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to evaluate this product from Microsoft. Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes, and access and share information.
Resources Available for Evaluating Office SharePoint Server 2007 Many resources are available to help you evaluate Office SharePoint Server 2007, including the following: • Documentation will help you install Office SharePoint Server 2007. • The SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint offers a variety of white papers and other resources. • The Microsoft MSDN® Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.
Installing Your Evaluation Server Provides step–by-step instructions for installing Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a singleserver environment so that you can evaluate product features. More information will be available in a future release of this document. Product Tour Provides step-by-step instructions for configuring and demonstrating each new feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007. More information will be available in a future release of this document.
Product Overview Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server applications that improves organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive control over electronic content; accelerating shared business processes; and facilitating better-informed decisions and information-sharing across boundaries.
Accelerate Internal and External Shared Business Processes Make business process initiation, participation, tracking, and reporting easy and flexible by providing a simple, consistent user experience through familiar client applications. Optimize the way people, content, and processes interact within and across organizations.
Quickly connect people and information SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data and information about people with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. Tools for query hit highlighting, duplicate collapsing, “did you mean” spelling correction, and alerts help users locate what they want within search results. Unlock business data Out-of-the-box (OOB) connectors provide accessibility to data in SAP and Siebel systems.
Enhance customer and partner relationships With smart, standards-based, electronic forms–driven solutions, you can collect business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration and support for other pluggable authentication providers makes it easier to implement extranet SharePoint environments, improving connectivity outside your organization.
Top 10 Benefits Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an integrated suite of easy-to-use server applications that boost organizational effectiveness and optimize the way that people, content, processes, and business applications interact. Here are the top 10 ways Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help your organization: 1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
document repositories help organizations store and organize business documents in one central location. 6. Connect people with information and expertise. SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data with information about people, documents, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Rich search functionality like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improves the relevance of the results and helps users easily find what they need within the search results. 7.
Features at a Glance Features at a Glance provides information that will help you understand, describe, and evaluate the new and enhanced features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. This section will be of interest to anyone who plans, builds, deploys, or manages business solutions using Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Feature Area Features Social Networking Office SharePoint Server 2007 has additional functionality that makes New it easier to discover social networking connections between employees. Public My Site pages can include Social Networking Web Parts that use information about your organization, communities, and electronic communications. This can help you identify colleagues with common interests and produce better, more relevant search results.
Feature Area Features Real-Time Presence and Communication The Real-Time Presence Smart Tag icon, displayed virtually Enhanced everywhere a person’s name appears in Office SharePoint Server 2007, tells you in real time whether a person is online and available for a telephone or audio conference call, instant messaging, or twoway video conversation.
Feature Area Features Profile Store The Profile Store is enhanced with: Enhanced • Multi-valued properties bound to a taxonomy or a list of values from Office SharePoint Server 2007. Profile Synchronization Enhanced Profile Directory Import Enhanced • Property-level security controls by person or group. • Open and closed vocabularies. • Per-site property extensions (federated property store).
Document Management With the new document management components of Office SharePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Products and Technologies no longer simply provide a platform for document collaboration. Office SharePoint Server 2007 becomes a full-featured solution for managing business documents. Enhanced document libraries in Windows SharePoint Services provide the foundation for the new document management features described below.
Feature Area Features workflow processes with the document management features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to help translators manage multiple translations of a document.
Feature Area Features Policy and Auditing The Policy and Auditing features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 New include: • Content-type and policy-based document retention and expiration schedules. • Auditing and reporting of policy-based actions. • Support for labeling and barcoding without physically modifying a document. • Integrated Windows Rights Management Services (RMS).
Feature Area Features E-mail Content as Records Office SharePoint Server 2007 records management features include New the ability for providing consistent, policy-based solutions for managing e-mail content across Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Web Content Management A key goal for Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the complete integration of Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 functionality, and further significant enhancement of the Web content management functionality, with the collaboration, portal, search, document management, and records management features of the new Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Feature Area Features Corporate Internet Presence Site Template Having a high-quality corporate presence Web site has become New a business imperative. It provides a means of communicating important company information to customers, partners, investors, and potential employees.
Feature Area Features Authoring and Approval Web content management includes tools, workflows, and Enhanced services for the end-to-end content management of content authoring and approval processes.
Search The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. The new features provide a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, new functions to search for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in LOB applications, and improved manageability and extensibility. Feature Area Features Consistent Search Experience While Windows SharePoint Services 2.
Feature Area Features Uniform, Scalable User Experience Microsoft Search provides a significantly enhanced user experience Enhanced including the following: • Improved rendering of search results • Hit highlighting • Duplicate and near-duplicate collapsing • Improved Best Bets keyword searching (including support for keyword definitions) • Automatic generation of “Do you mean” synonym search keywords • New Search Center for initiating queries and browsing search results • Enhanced query sy
Feature Area Features People and Expertise Searching Support for searching for people and what they know has been Enhanced • Support for indexing and searching any LDAP directory. • Dedicated Search Center tab for searching for people. • Returning SharePoint groups and Active Directory distribution lists in significantly enhanced. These features include: search results. • People search results grouped by “social distance” from you and your common interests.
Feature Area Features Indexing Management Improved Indexing Management controls provide better control over what Enhanced is to be indexed, how it is to be indexed, and when. These features include: • Improved crawl rules and crawl log. • One index per shared indexing service, removing the need to worry about managing discrete indexes. • Multiple start addresses per content source. • An entirely new browsable, filterable index log. • Explicit SharePoint content source type.
Business Processes Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 helps organizations 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.
Feature Area Feature Description Integrated Deployment Model for “No-code” Forms The Publish Wizard in Office InfoPath 2007 makes it easy to New a Windows SharePoint Services library, while making the form publish forms that do not have any managed code components to available as a browser-based form at the same time. Native Support for Web Services and Customerdefined Schemas Native support for Web services and customer-defined XML Enhanced form data with many back-end systems using Web services.
Business Intelligence Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organizations provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control, and reuse business information in order to make better business decisions.
Business Data Catalog The Business Data Catalog makes it possible to include data from New back-end systems in SharePoint lists, Web Parts, pages, and search results. The Business Data Catalog deeply integrates external data into the Office SharePoint Server 2007 user experience, gives access to external data exposed by ADO.NET and Web services, and permits the display and analysis of external data through Business Data Web Parts and Business Data SharePoint lists.
Report Center Web Sites Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes out-of-the-box Web sites New optimized for report access and management. These sites, hosted by the new Report Center, provide consistent management of reports, spreadsheets, and data connections. Excel Services Management New Excel Services Management is a centralized management service for configuring and managing Excel Services used by other components of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Architectural Overview This section describes the key components of Office SharePoint Server 2007, how they relate to each other and to the platform, and collaboration services provided by Windows SharePoint Services (version3). The high-level architecture is illustrated in Figure 1. Figure 1. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Architecture www.microsoft.
Operating System and Database Services Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on the technologies and services provided by Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and SQL Server 2005 (as well as SQL Server 2000). The core and development-platform operating system services include: • Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework which comprises: • ASP.NET 2.
In addition, Windows SharePoint Services, a feature of Windows Server 2003, implements the collaboration features of the 2007 release of Office SharePoint Products and Technologies: • Document collaboration • Wikis and Blogs • Really Simple Syndication (RSS) support • Discussions • Project task management • Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks • E-mail integration • Integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system client applications • Offline support for SharePoint lists and document libraries,
Shared Services Conceptually similar to Shared Services in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, the Shared Services component has been completely restructured and redesigned in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 using a new services provider model.
Installing Your Evaluation Server Consult the readme file included with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for information about installing your evaluation server. More information will be available in a future release of this document. www.microsoft.
Product Tour More information will be available in a future release of this document. www.microsoft.
An Administrator’s Perspective More information will be available in a future release of this document. www.microsoft.
A Developer’s Perspective Consult the Software Developer Kit (SDK) included with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for information about developing solutions with Office SharePoint Server 2007. More information will be available in a future release of this document. www.microsoft.
For More Information Visit the Microsoft Office 2007 Preview Center at http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx. This Web site features the latest news and information about the 2007 Microsoft Office system, including product information, case studies, white papers, information about related technologies, and more. Hardware and Software Requirements For complete system requirements, visit www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/sysreq.mspx.
