Reason 1 Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
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.
Reason 2 Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
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).
Reason 3 Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
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.
Reason 4 Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
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.
Reason 5 Simplify organization-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
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.
Reason 6 Connect people with information and expertise.
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.
Reason 7 Accelerate shared business processes across organizational boundaries.
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.
Reason 8 Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
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).
Reason 9 Enable people to make better-informed decisions by
presenting business-critical information in one central location.
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.
Reason 10 Provide a single, integrated platform to manage
intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
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.