Microsoft Computer Accessories 2007 User Manual

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. It also provides a hands-on tour of the product’s main feature areas and

concludes with useful information for administrators and developers.

The ultimate goal of this guide is to aid the reader in performing a thorough and effective

evaluation of Office SharePoint Server 2007. This guide is intended for anyone who is

interested in learning more about Office SharePoint Server 2007 and wants hands-on

experience.

For the latest information about Office SharePoint Server 2007, go to

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview. For other product information resources, refer

to the “For More Information” section at the end of this guide.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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 .......................................................................................... 4

Effectively Manage and Repurpose Your Information Assets ............................... 4

Accelerate Internal and External Shared Business Processes .............................. 5

Make Better-Informed Decisions through Centralized Access to Information ......... 5

Share Business Information Within and Outside Your Organization ...................... 6

Use a Single, Integrated Platform to Manage Intranet, Extranet, and Internet

Applications ................................................................................................. 7

Top 10 Benefits ............................................................................................. 8

Features at a Glance .................................................................................... 10

Portal ........................................................................................................ 10

Content Management .................................................................................. 13

Document Management ............................................................................ 14

Records Management ............................................................................... 15

Web Content Management ........................................................................ 18

Search ....................................................................................................... 21

Business Processes ..................................................................................... 25

Business Intelligence ................................................................................... 27

Architectural Overview ................................................................................ 30

Operating System and Database Services ...................................................... 31

Windows SharePoint Services ....................................................................... 31

Office SharePoint Server 2007: Applications and Services ................................ 32

Server Applications .................................................................................. 32

Shared Services ...................................................................................... 33

Installing Your Evaluation Server ................................................................ 34

Product Tour ............................................................................................... 35

An Administrator’s Perspective ................................................................... 36

A Developer’s Perspective ........................................................................... 37

For More Information .................................................................................. 38

Hardware and Software Requirements ........................................................ 38

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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. In addition,

Office SharePoint Server 2007 gives IT professionals the tools they need for server

administration and application extensibility and interoperability. Office SharePoint Server

2007 helps you to:

• Get more out of your information.

• Streamline your business processes.

• Simplify the way people work together.

• Ease server administration, extensibility, and interoperability.

These benefits are further described in the Product Overview section of this guide. The Top

10 Benefits section highlights the most important ways Office SharePoint Server 2007 can

help your organization make better use of its business information and processes.

Features at a Glance details the new and enhanced features for this release of Office

SharePoint Server including:

• Portal

• Search

• Content Management, including Document, Records, and Web Content

• Business Processes

• Business Intelligence

With this knowledge, you will be able to properly evaluate these new features and readily

describe their capabilities to your colleagues, clients, and business partners.

An evaluation guide is also available for Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services (version 3).

However, solution developers, IT professionals, technical business decision makers,

journalists, and analysts can read the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Guide without

referring to the Windows SharePoint Services Evaluation Guide.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.com/sharepoint/ offers numerous

technical resources from a developer’s perspective about SharePoint Products and

Technologies.

• The Microsoft TechNet Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/ provides a

clearinghouse of resources to help you deploy, maintain, and support Office SharePoint

Server 2007.

Microsoft encourages you to use these resources as aids in installing and evaluating Office

SharePoint Server 2007.

How to Use This Guide

Overview of This Guide

This guide has the following sections. For best results, review them in order, as each section

builds on concepts presented in preceding sections.

Product Overview

Highlights key features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and describes how these features

can benefit organizations that build and manage content-rich Web sites.

Top 10 Benefits

Identifies the top 10 business and technical benefits that Microsoft customers can realize

through their deployment and use of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Features at a Glance

Provides information to 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.

Architectural Overview

Describes the logical architecture of Office SharePoint Server 2007.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

Installing Your Evaluation Server

Provides step–by-step instructions for installing Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a single-

server 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.

An Administrator’s Perspective

Provides information needed to plan, build, deploy, and manage an Office SharePoint Server

2007 solution. More information will be available in a future release of this document.

A Developer's Perspective

Introduces the tools that developers use to design and develop custom solutions using Office

SharePoint Server 2007. More information will be available in a future release of this

document.

For More Information

Provides links to sources of further information about Office SharePoint Server 2007, such as

white papers, community sites, and the Windows SharePoint Services Support Web site.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.

Effectively Manage and Repurpose Your Information Assets

Get more value from your content by providing comprehensive control over the storage,

security, distribution, reuse, and management of documents and other electronic content

such as Web pages, PDF files, and e-mail messages.

Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management

Define customized document management policies to control item-level access rights,

retention period, expiration actions, and document-auditing settings. Policy integration with

familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Extensible

design helps organizations to modify product behavior to suit their unique business needs.

Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise

Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central

location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information.

Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and

add new templates and content types.

Simplify content reuse and information repurposing

Submit work from collaborative sites to portals using tools that simplify content reuse and

publishing. Simplify management of multilingual content through document library templates

designed to maintain a relationship between original and translated versions of documents.

Use slide libraries as an easy way to share and reuse Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2007

slides.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.

Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities

Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business

activities like document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection.

Integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user

experience. End users can easily define and model their own processes using familiar

Microsoft tools.

Extend business processes across the organization

Enhance your relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers by making forms-based

business processes easily accessible to them, even if they haven’t installed client software.

Built-in validation rules and integration with Microsoft information rights management (IRM)

help to ensure that critical business information can be collected with enhanced security and

accuracy.

Focus on strategic, value-added tasks instead of redundant activities

Information gathered using electronic forms can be integrated easily into line-of-business

(LOB) systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted

to Web services. This helps users avoid duplicate efforts and costly errors from manual data

entry, and it helps ensure they have access to accurate, real-time data.

Make Better-Informed Decisions through Centralized Access to Information

Provide a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently find organizational

resources, access corporate knowledge, and leverage business insight in order to make

better-informed decisions.

Present business-critical information in one central location

Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business

information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web

Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies.

Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place to find the latest reports,

spreadsheets, or KPIs.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.

With the Business Data Catalog, IT can create a pool of connections to business systems,

which can be reused easily by business users to create personalized, interactive views into

back-end data from browsers—all without writing any code.

Leverage your unstructured business networks to drive better decisions

Employees can use new knowledge management tools to get the most from their powerful

unstructured business networks, both inside and outside their organizations, by connecting

with people more quickly and efficiently. By exploring these undocumented business

relationships and finding subject matter experts, individuals can make better decisions more

quickly.

Work when and where you want

With offline access to SharePoint lists and document libraries, you can free yourself from the

limitations of corporate network connectivity.

Share Business Information Within and Outside Your Organization

Simplify and help boost the security and efficiency of collaboration and knowledge sharing

within and across organizational boundaries.

Broadly share business data while helping to protect sensitive information

Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to real-time,

interactive Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these

spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central, up-to-date version, while helping

to protect any proprietary information, such as financial models, embedded in documents.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.

Effectively manage and share business insight

Report Center provides a centralized location to access business-critical information. It

simplifies control and sharing of reports, Office Excel spreadsheets, KPIs, and dashboards

within organizations and teams. Users can define personalized reports and dashboards,

browse reports by category, or view a calendar of upcoming reports and subscribe to ones

that are relevant.

Use a Single, Integrated Platform to Manage Intranet, Extranet, and Internet Applications

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a scalable enterprise platform that can grow with

your business without the need for costly add-ons. IT staff can spend more time on the

strategic tasks only they can perform and help drive enhanced business value and positive

change throughout your organization.

Boost employee productivity through innovative, enterprise-wide solutions

Make use of powerful development tools and an open, scalable architecture with support for

Web services and interoperability standards, including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol

(SOAP), to build and extend applications that incorporate business system information and

integrated workflow.

Simplify site staging and content deployment

Use OOB site-starter templates for common Web sites, with Area and Page Layout templates

and preconfigured navigation. Configure content deployment paths between different

computers or the same computer. Schedule processes that define the scope of content and

the frequency of recurring deployments.

Get the tools you need to ease deployment, management, and system administration

Robust system-monitoring and usage-tracking tools help to isolate and solve problems faster,

and improve the operational efficiency of the system infrastructure.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client applications, e-mail,

and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact

with content, processes, and business data. Employees can easily use services to accomplish

business activities without having to depend on IT staff.

2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.

Take advantage of OOB workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business

processes such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection—

without any coding. Modifying and extending these OOB processes is made easy through

tools like Microsoft Visual Studio® and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next

release of Microsoft Office FrontPage® 2003).

3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.

Help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively—

and reduce litigation risk for your organization—by specifying retention and auditing policies

for business records in accordance with compliance regulations. IRM and the content control

mechanisms help protect proprietary and confidential information, even when users aren’t

connected to a server.

4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.

Business users can easily author content for Web sites and submit it for approval and

scheduled deployment to the Internet. Managing multilingual content is simplified in Office

SharePoint Server 2007 through new document library templates specifically designed to

maintain a relationship between the original and translated versions of a document.

5. Simplify organization-wide access to structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.

Give users access to business data in common LOB systems like SAP and Siebel through OOB

connectors in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized interactions

with business systems by dragging predefined, configurable back-end connections. Managed

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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. Accelerate business processes and maintain control of your electronic forms environment.

Use smart, electronic forms-driven solutions to collect critical business information from

customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser without coding any custom

applications. Built-in data validation rules help you accurately and consistently gather data

that can be directly integrated into back-end systems, avoiding redundancy and errors

resulting from manual data re-entry.

8. Share business data while preserving its consistency and helping to protect sensitive information.

Give employees access to real-time, interactive 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, up-to-date version while helping

to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents.

9. Facilitate better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.

Make it easy to create live, interactive BI portals that assemble and display business-critical

information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web

Parts, scorecards, 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 has an open, scalable, services-oriented architecture that

provides support for interoperability standards including XML and SOAP, which makes it

easier to integrate with existing processes and applications. You also get powerful, IT-focused

tools and templates for building and extending applications that incorporate business system

information and integrated workflow.

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

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.

Portal

The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially

useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet

presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites.

The portal components also make it easy to connect to people within the organization that

have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience. Office SharePoint Server 2007

simplifies the way in which people work together.

Feature Area Features

Portal Site Templates

New

Site Manager

New

Preconfigured site templates are included for quickly creating,

customizing, deploying, and managing divisional portals, organization-

wide intranet portal sites, and corporate Internet presence Web sites.

Site Manager, which replaces the Portal Site Map administration page,

is a Web-based drag-and-drop tool for managing a SharePoint site’s

navigation, security access, and general look and feel.

Site Manager unifies site management tasks for portal and Web sites,

including management of areas, pages, listings, SharePoint site lists,

and their component parts.

Site Manager supports the bulk creation, editing, reorganization, and

deletion of areas, as well as the viewing of relationships between

pages.

My Site Personal Sites

Enhanced

www.microsoft.com/office/preview/servers/sharepointserver

My Site personal sites has several significant enhancements including:

• Social networking

• Privacy controls

• SharePoint Sites and Documents roll-up Web Parts

• Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts

+ 28 hidden pages