Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Evaluation Guide
February 2007
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, along with descriptions of new and improved features in the areas of portal, search, content management, business forms and integration, 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 the SharePoint Products
and Technologies Web site. For other product information resources, refer to the ―For More
Information‖ section at the end of this guide.
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................1 Resources Available for Evaluating Office SharePoint Server 2007 ....................... 3 SharePoint Products and Technologies .........................................................3 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 ................................................................... 3 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 .......................................................... 3 There are also specialty SharePoint Products and Technologies for Search and Forms.
.................................................................................................................. 4 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search ........................................... 4 Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 ................................................................. 4 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 .................................................................5 Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Version Comparison.......................6 Office SharePoint Server 2007 Feature Areas ...............................................6 Collaboration ................................................................................................ 8 Portal .......................................................................................................... 9
Personalization ........................................................................................ 10
User Profiles and the Profile Data Store ...................................................... 13
Navigation and the Site Directory .............................................................. 15
Audience Targeting .................................................................................. 18
Web Parts to Make Content Easier to Find ................................................... 19
Site Content and Structure ....................................................................... 20
SharePoint Sites and Documents Roll-up Web Parts ..................................... 21
Portal Site Templates ............................................................................... 21 Enterprise Search ....................................................................................... 23
Relevance ............................................................................................... 24
People Search ......................................................................................... 25
Business Data Search............................................................................... 26
User Experience ...................................................................................... 27
Security ................................................................................................. 30
Search Extensibility ................................................................................. 31
Search Manageability and Scalability .......................................................... 31 Content Management .................................................................................. 32
Document Management ............................................................................ 33
Records Management ............................................................................... 39
Web Content Management ........................................................................ 41
Web Content Authoring ............................................................................ 45 Business Forms and Integration .................................................................... 48 Business Data Catalog ................................................................................. 51 Business Intelligence ................................................................................... 54
Web-Based Business Intelligence Using Excel Services ................................. 54 SharePoint Products and Technologies Interoperability .............................. 57 Interoperability ........................................................................................... 58 Web Services ............................................................................................. 59 Custom Development .................................................................................. 60 Office SharePoint Server 2007 Architecture ................................................ 61 Application and Services .............................................................................. 62 Platform Services ........................................................................................ 63 www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
Operating System Services .......................................................................... 64
Shared Services........................................................................................... 64 Installing an Evaluation Server ................................................................... 65 Hardware Requirements .............................................................................. 65 Software Requirements ............................................................................... 66 Database ................................................................................................... 67 Database Server ...................................................................................... 67 Operating System ....................................................................................... 68 Windows Components ................................................................................. 68 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 ...................................................................... 69 Install and configure Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Express Edition ........................................................................................... 69 Post-Installation Steps ................................................................................. 71 Product Walkthrough .................................................................................. 73 Exercise 1 – Getting Started ......................................................................... 73 Exercise 2 – Site Administration ................................................................... 76 Create a new group ................................................................................. 76 Exercise 3 – Web Parts ................................................................................ 78 Adding Web Parts .................................................................................... 78 Exercise 4 – Web Parts for Common Information ............................................ 80 Exercise 5 – Security ................................................................................... 81 Item level security ................................................................................... 81 Item version and history .......................................................................... 83 Recycle Bin ............................................................................................. 85 Exercise 6 – Notifications ............................................................................. 86 Alerts ..................................................................................................... 86 E-Mail Notifications .................................................................................. 87 RSS Feeds .............................................................................................. 88 Exercise 7 – Working with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 ................................. 90 Shared Calendars and Tasks ..................................................................... 90 Exercise 8 – Audience Targeting ................................................................... 93 Exercise 9 – People Profile and My Sites ........................................................ 97 Social Networking .................................................................................. 101 Exercise 10 – Create a SharePoint list to track reseller feedback from the Business
Data Catalog ............................................................................................ 105 Create the Reseller Feedback list ............................................................. 105 Exercise 11 – Workflow ............................................................................. 108 For More Information ................................................................................ 110
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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 along with application extensibility and interoperability.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently find organizational resources, access corporate knowledge, and leverage business insight to make better-informed decisions.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps you to:
; Get more out of your information Make better-informed decisions through centralized
access to information and improved abilities to locate relevant content; implement
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; submit work from collaborative sites to portals by 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.
; Streamline your business processes Accelerate internal and external shared business
processes, share business information within and outside of your organization; 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. ; Simplify the way people work together Simplify content reuse and information
repurposing; 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; focus on strategic, value-added tasks instead of redundant activities;
improve and extend team collaboration; enhance your relationships with customers,
partners, and suppliers by making forms-based business processes easily accessible to www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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them, even if they haven’t installed client software; have customized document
management policies enable item-level access rights, retention periods, expiration actions,
and document-auditing settings; see how policy integration with familiar client
applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees.
; Ease server administration, extensibility, and interoperability Use a single,
integrated platform with a consistent administrative interface to manage intranet,
extranet, and Internet applications; employ powerful programming APIs and XML Web
services to extend the reach and functionality of your portal implementation. The section below entitled ―Office SharePoint Server 2007 Feature Areas‖ details the new and
enhanced features for this release of Office SharePoint Server, including: ; Portals
; Search
; Content Management, including Documents, Records, and Web Content
; Business Forms and Integration
; 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. For more information about Microsoft Windows? SharePoint Services 3.0, go to the Windows
SharePoint Services Technology Guide. You may choose to review that document if you wish
to do a more-comprehensive evaluation of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This paper will briefly cover Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology and move beyond that topic to introduce the many additional capabilities introduced in Office SharePoint Server 2007.
One other note before continuing: the full spectrum of functionality and business value contained within Office SharePoint Server 2007 is immense, and a detailed accounting of each feature is well beyond the scope of this document. This document focuses on evaluating the capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a very broad way, highlighting the major functional areas that deliver the greatest business value. Many deeper features will become self-evident through the course of evaluating and using the software, while still other features demand deeper and more technical consideration. It is suggested that you review the resources listed in the next section for more information.
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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Resources Available for Evaluating Office SharePoint Server 2007
Many resources are available to help you evaluate Office SharePoint Server 2007, including the following:
; The Product Documentation will help you install Office SharePoint Server 2007. ; The SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site offers a variety of white papers and
other resources.
; The MSDN? SharePoint Web site offers numerous technical resources from a developer’s
perspective about Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies.
; The Microsoft TechNet Web site provides a clearinghouse of resources to help you deploy,
maintain, and support Office SharePoint Server 2007.
; The Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog is the official blog of the
SharePoint Products and Technologies Group.
Microsoft encourages you to use these resources as aids in installing and evaluating Office SharePoint Server 2007.
SharePoint Products and Technologies
SharePoint Products and Technologies address a range of business needs for the delivery of flexible, adaptable, and powerful Web applications and solutions. These products and technologies can be assembled in a variety of configurations tailored to an organization’s
specific Web application requirements.
The full range of capabilities of SharePoint Products and Technologies is delivered through the following products:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the solution platform for SharePoint Products and Technologies, delivering a wide range of functional capabilities that are exploited and extended by other SharePoint Products and Technologies. For a detailed description of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, see the section below titled Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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and Enterprise Search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability. The evaluation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the focus of this document. There are also specialty SharePoint Products and Technologies for Search and Forms. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search
The ability to search for information in enterprise Web sites is critical to the effective use and usability of those sites. Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a shared service that provides extensive and extensible content gathering, indexing, and querying. This service supports full-text searching by using Structured Query Language (SQL)–based query syntax,
and it provides new keyword syntax to support keyword searches. Search is covered in more detail elsewhere in this document, in the section titled Enterprise Search. You can also
learn more about search functionality by consulting the Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server 2007 Evaluation Guide.
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 provides scalable, standards-based electronic forms solutions with enhanced security that can help an organization to extend the reach of forms-driven business processes to anyone with a Web browser. It is a stand-alone server that delivers new Microsoft Office InfoPath? Forms Services, which is also available in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. This new technology uses server-based electronic forms to streamline business processes and make data collection, distribution, and integration more cost-effective than with paper-based forms.
It is important to understand the licensing options for these various products. You can learn more about the packaging and licensing at How to Buy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007. Please note that this product guide focuses on functionality provided by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Client Access License (CAL), Enterprise Edition. Some of the functionality described in this guide — for example, Business Forms and Integration and
Business Intelligence — is not available with only the Standard CAL.
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on and extends the functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 employs operating system and database services to support requirements ranging from a team site for a workgroup, to large enterprise portal solutions serving hundreds of thousands of employees and staff, to a corporate Internet portal supporting millions of users.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on top of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to provide a comprehensive solution with enterprise-scale capabilities to meet critical needs such as managing content and business processes, and simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the following security-enhanced, scalable, reliable, high-performance capabilities for site management:
; Storage Allowing content such as documents (Office documents, PDFs, custom binary
files), Web pages, lists, and other types of information to reside in a common data
repository (Microsoft SQL Server?) with full data management capabilities, version
control, metadata, and site-level search.
; Security Providing the essential elements of comprehensive security management by
employing a range of authentication providers (for example, Kerberos, NTLM, basic, the
Active Directory? directory service, LDAP, ASP.NET forms and Web single sign-on
authentication), policy management, group management, and permission levels ranging
from individual items in list to entire sites.
; Management Enabling centralized and delegated administrative facilities for Windows
SharePoint Services sites from operational and application perspectives, in addition to
ongoing site monitoring.
; Deployment Providing an architecture that supports flexible, distributed, and scalable
deployment architectures, across Web and database servers; enabling configuration and
site feature management.
; Site Model Providing a template-based infrastructure for deployment of custom sites,
providing automated navigation and a consistent user interface – while allowing for
extensive and flexible customization of site formatting and layout.
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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; Extensibility Providing a comprehensive application programming interface (API) that
allows custom applications to be built on the Windows SharePoint Services architecture,
employing use of XML Web services and SOAP, providing event handlers for cross-
integration with other applications, and providing methods for migrating content into
Windows SharePoint Services sites.
From a business perspective, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the following foundational collaboration features:
; Document collaboration
; Wikis and blogs
; RSS support
; Discussion boards
; Project task management
; Contacts, calendars, and tasks
; E-mail integration
; Integration with the 2007 Office system client applications
; Offline support for SharePoint lists and document libraries, by using Office Outlook? 2007 These collaboration features are essential elements for building rich business productivity applications; Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 employs and extends these features, while adding many more levels of capability in building rich business productivity solutions. It is these additional capabilities that are the primary focus of this paper. For a more detailed review and guidance on evaluation of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, please refer to the Evaluation Guide.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Version Comparison
For a detailed comparison of the range of features available in different SharePoint Products and Technologies (including the capabilities included in the different licensing models available for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007), there is a downloadable spreadsheet
with this information.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Feature Areas When considering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for enterprise Web solutions, there are six major feature areas to explore, as represented in the following figure: www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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