What are Windows SharePoint Services?

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services is a versatile technology that organizations and business units of all sizes can use to increase the efficiency of business processes and improve team productivity. With tools for collaboration that help people stay connected across organizational and geographic boundaries, Windows SharePoint Services gives people access to information they need.

Built on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services also provides a foundation platform for building Web-based business applications that can flex and scale easily to meet the changing and growing needs of your business. Robust administrative controls for managing storage and Web infrastructure give IT departments a cost-effective way to implement and manage a high-performance collaboration environment. With a familiar, Web-based interface and close integration with everyday tools including the Microsoft Office system, Windows SharePoint Services is easy to use and can be deployed rapidly.

Collaborate Easily and Effectively
Windows SharePoint Services helps teams stay connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information they need to make more informed decisions and get the job done. Enhancements in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 make it easier than ever to share documents, track tasks, use e-mail efficiently and effectively, and share ideas and information.

• Provide a single workspace for teams to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions—within the organization and over the extranet.
• Easily author and manage documents, and help to ensure their integrity with enhanced features including the option to require document checkout before editing, the ability to view past revisions and restore to previous versions, and the ability to set document-specific security.
• Help people and teams stay on task with a variety of communication features that let users know when actions are required or important changes are made to existing information or documentation, including announcements, sophisticated alerts, surveys, and discussion boards.
• Provide creative forums for brainstorming ideas, building knowledge bases, or simply gathering information in an easy-to-edit format with new templates for implementing blogs (also known as weblogs) and wikis (Web sites that can be quickly edited by team members—no special technical knowledge required).
• Stay productive while mobile with enhanced support for offline synchronization through Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 that users can use to manage document libraries, lists, calendars, contacts, tasks, and discussion boards even offline, and to synchronize changes when reconnected to the network.
   

Get Started Quickly
As a built-in component of Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services makes it easy for IT departments to implement a dependable, scalable collaboration infrastructure with minimal administrative time and effort. Close integration of Windows SharePoint Services with familiar tools for authoring, publishing, organizing, and finding information, including the Microsoft Office system, helps users get up to speed quickly.

• Simplify the creation and navigation of workspaces with the improved user interface and site creation tools in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that provide easy-to-use templates, professional-looking site themes, and the ability to rearrange site navigation from within the browser.
• Make it easy for users to get up to speed quickly by providing integration with familiar productivity tools such as those found in the Microsoft Office system—users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office system files and programs.
• Track work and tasks more easily with enhanced integration with Office Outlook 2007 that helps users organize calendars, tasks, contact lists, discussion boards, and meetings.
• Customize workspaces with new application templates that provide custom scenarios for building workflows on the Windows SharePoint Services platform that address specific business processes or sets of tasks.
• Implement a collaboration environment with minimal administrative time and effort, and with the flexibility to change deployment settings.
   

Deploy a Manageable Infrastructure
Deployment of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 increases control over and enhances security of your organization’s data and information resources. Reduce the dependency of business units on your company’s IT department for site provisioning, implementation, backup, and support. Whether you’re a contributor to a team site, a site owner, or a server administrator, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides better administrative controls for managing content, users, and sites so that individuals and teams can operate more efficiently and effectively.

• Increase the security of business information with enhanced administrative controls that decrease cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, management, support, operations, and backup and restore.
• Give IT better control over your organization’s infrastructure with new and improved services for controlling access to information and setting policies for site creation that enable security to be set as deep down as the item level.
• Empower site managers and teams without compromising security by enabling them to initiate and control their own self-service workspaces and tasks, and manage the participation and access of others—all within parameters set by IT.
• Provide a more robust document storage environment with document storage, recycle bin item retrieval, and version-control features built in to team workspaces.
• Easily manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services by using a Web browser or command-line utilities, and enable a variety of custom and third-party administration solutions using the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Provide a Foundation for Web-Based Applications
With Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, IT professionals can tailor or extend the Windows SharePoint Services foundation to create new, efficient, Web-based tools and services specific to the organization, department, business process, or industry vertical. Through a highly customizable and extensible platform, companies can tie these new tools and services to existing line-of-business applications, capitalizing on existing IT investments and valuable information stored in back-end systems.

• Manage business documents more easily with enhanced document library support and a common repository for document storage.
• Use the Windows SharePoint Services platform to build rich, flexible, and scalable Web-based applications and Internet sites specific to the needs of your organization.
• Take advantage of integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 that expands the platform services and common framework for document management exposed by Windows SharePoint Services to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more.
• Use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to quickly and easily customize SharePoint sites and build reporting tools and applications tailored to specific tasks without writing or deploying new code.