1     Provides a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience

SharePoint 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 integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ services themselves and facilitates product adoption.

2     Boosts 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 to 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 (the next release of Microsoft Office FrontPage).

3     Helps meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive content control

Specify security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, to ensure your sensitive business information is controlled and managed effectively. Reduce litigation risk for your organisation! Tight integration of SharePoint 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.

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  specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.

5     Simplify organisation-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 SharePoint. 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.

6     Connect people with information and expertise

Enterprise Search in SharePoint 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.

7     Accelerate shared business processes across organisational 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.

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 SharePoint. Use these spreadsheets for maintenance and efficient sharing of one central up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents (such as financial models).

9     Enable people to make better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location

SharePoint 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. Centralised 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 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.