Manage content and processes:

Simplify compliance efforts and keep business information more secure through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity by using electronic forms and out-of-the-box workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail or Web browsers.

Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management helps ensure that proprietary and confidential information is better protected even if it is not connected to a server.

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 Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative site to a portal), or to cost-effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites.

Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services–driven solutions make it possible to more securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.

Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.


Improve business insight:

Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business information from disparate sources by using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized sites give users a single place to find the latest spreadsheets, reports or KPIs.

Quickly connect people with information. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 incorporates people and business data along with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. This provides a single integrated location for employees to find content, processes, people, and business data relevant to their specific needs. It, also, enables people and organizations to make decisions based on the latest information and facts more quickly.

Share business data broadly while helping to protect sensitive information. Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to data and analytics in real time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one centralized and up-to-date version while helping to protect any sensitive or proprietary information embedded in documents (such as financial models).

Take advantage of 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, thereby connecting with people more quickly and efficiently. By exploring these undocumented business relationships and finding subject-matter experts, individuals are able to make better decisions more quickly.

Unlock business data. The Business Data Catalog enables structured data from line-of-business applications, such as SAP and Siebel systems, to be integrated into Office SharePoint Server 2007 through Web Parts, lists, people profiles, search, or programmatically. Centrally managed connections to back-end systems can be defined once and then reused by end-users to access back-end data without writing any code — easily making business data part of portal content. The Business Data Catalog also provides the ability for Enterprise Search to integrate back-end business data into the search experience, without having to write any protocol handlers, iFilters or custom code.

Simplify internal and external collaboration:

Share knowledge, find information, and collaborate more easily and more securely both within and across organizational boundaries. Leverage your partner and customer network, and use your personal networks to connect to other people effectively.

Empower IT to make a strategic impact:

Directory sources. Out-of-the-box WSRP Consumer Web Part enables integration with other WSRP-compliant portal solutions.


Enable IT to focus on more strategic tasks. Users can now create sites, initiate workflows, self-provision applications, access back-end data, define security at a per-item level, restore deleted items, and complete other tasks without involving IT. This reduced user dependence on IT improves productivity and also enables the IT department to focus on providing real value-added services to the organization. With the Business Data Catalog, you can define and deploy business application configurations to access data residing in back-end systems. This feature can be reused by business users to create personalized views of business data without having to develop any custom code.

Simplify deployment, management, and system administration. Managing a Web server farm, deploying new pieces of content and managing synchronization across those sites is now much simpler. Deployment can be done in “top-down” or “bottom-up” fashion. Simplify site staging through out-of-the-box Site-starter Templates for common Web sites, with Area and Page Layout templates and preconfigured navigation. And enhanced capabilities to back up and restore content helps IT professionals schedule backups, back up multisite collections, and then restore each one individually.

Robust system monitoring, usage tracking, and monitoring tools. These tools help isolate and solve problems faster and improve the operational efficiency of the system infrastructure.