Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Evaluation Guide
February 2006
Table of Contents
Introduction..................................................................................................1
Resources Available for Evaluating Office SharePoint Server 2007.......................2
How to Use This Guide ..................................................................................2
Overview of This Guide..................................................................................2
Product Overview..........................................................................................4
Effectively Manage and Repurpose Your Information Assets ...............................4
Accelerate Internal and External Shared Business Processes ..............................5
Make Better-Informed Decisions through Centralized Access to Information.........5
Share Business Information Within and Outside Your Organization......................6
Use a Single, Integrated Platform to Manage Intranet, Extranet, and Internet
Applications .................................................................................................7
Top 10 Benefits .............................................................................................8
Features at a Glance....................................................................................10
Portal ........................................................................................................10
Content Management ..................................................................................13
Document Management............................................................................14
Records Management...............................................................................15
Web Content Management........................................................................18
Search.......................................................................................................21
Business Processes .....................................................................................25
Business Intelligence...................................................................................27
Architectural Overview................................................................................30
Operating System and Database Services ......................................................31
Windows SharePoint Services.......................................................................31
Office SharePoint Server 2007: Applications and Services................................32
Server Applications..................................................................................32
Shared Services ......................................................................................33
Installing Your Evaluation Server................................................................34
Product Tour ...............................................................................................35
An Administrator’s Perspective ...................................................................36
A Developer’s Perspective...........................................................................37
For More Information..................................................................................38
Hardware and Software Requirements........................................................38
ii
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 and application extensibility and interoperability. Office SharePoint Server
2007 helps you to:
•
•
•
•
Get more out of your information.
Streamline your business processes.
Simplify the way people work together.
Ease server administration, extensibility, and interoperability.
These benefits are further described in the Product Overview section of this guide. The Top
10 Benefits section highlights the most important ways Office SharePoint Server 2007 can
help your organization make better use of its business information and processes.
Features at a Glance details the new and enhanced features for this release of Office
SharePoint Server including:
•
•
•
•
•
Portal
Search
Content Management, including Document, Records, and Web Content
Business Processes
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.
An evaluation guide is also available for Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services (version 3).
However, solution developers, IT professionals, technical business decision makers,
journalists, and analysts can read the Office SharePoint Server 2007 Evaluation Guide without
referring to the Windows SharePoint Services Evaluation Guide.
1
Resources Available for Evaluating Office SharePoint Server
2007
Many resources are available to help you evaluate Office SharePoint Server 2007, including
the following:
•
•
Documentation will help you install Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site at
resources.
•
technical resources from a developer’s perspective about SharePoint Products and
Technologies.
•
clearinghouse of resources to help you deploy, maintain, and support Office SharePoint
Server 2007.
Microsoft encourages you to use these resources as aids in installing and evaluating Office
SharePoint Server 2007.
How to Use This Guide
Overview of This Guide
This guide has the following sections. For best results, review them in order, as each section
builds on concepts presented in preceding sections.
Product Overview
Highlights key features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and describes how these features
can benefit organizations that build and manage content-rich Web sites.
Top 10 Benefits
Identifies the top 10 business and technical benefits that Microsoft customers can realize
through their deployment and use of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Features at a Glance
Provides information to help you understand, describe, and evaluate the new and enhanced
features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. This section will be of interest to anyone who
plans, builds, deploys, or manages business solutions using Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Architectural Overview
Describes the logical architecture of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
2
Installing Your Evaluation Server
Provides step–by-step instructions for installing Office SharePoint Server 2007 in a single-
server environment so that you can evaluate product features. More information will be
available in a future release of this document.
Product Tour
Provides step-by-step instructions for configuring and demonstrating each new feature of
Office SharePoint Server 2007. More information will be available in a future release of this
document.
An Administrator’s Perspective
Provides information needed to plan, build, deploy, and manage an Office SharePoint Server
2007 solution. More information will be available in a future release of this document.
A Developer's Perspective
Introduces the tools that developers use to design and develop custom solutions using Office
SharePoint Server 2007. More information will be available in a future release of this
document.
For More Information
Provides links to sources of further information about Office SharePoint Server 2007, such as
white papers, community sites, and the Windows SharePoint Services Support Web site.
3
Product Overview
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server applications that improves
organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive control over electronic content;
accelerating shared business processes; and facilitating better-informed decisions and
information-sharing across boundaries.
Effectively Manage and Repurpose Your Information Assets
Get more value from your content by providing 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.
Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management
Define customized document management policies to control item-level access rights,
retention period, expiration actions, and document-auditing settings. Policy integration with
familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Extensible
design helps organizations to modify product behavior to suit their unique business needs.
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 content reuse and information repurposing
Submit work from collaborative sites to portals 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.
4
Accelerate Internal and External Shared Business Processes
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.
Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities
Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business
activities like document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection.
Integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user
experience. End users can easily define and model their own processes using familiar
Microsoft tools.
Extend business processes across the organization
Enhance your relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers by making forms-based
business processes easily accessible to them, even if they haven’t installed client software.
Built-in validation rules and integration with Microsoft information rights management (IRM)
help to ensure that critical business information can be collected with enhanced security and
accuracy.
Focus on strategic, value-added tasks instead of redundant activities
Information gathered using electronic forms can be integrated easily into line-of-business
(LOB) systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted
to Web services. This helps users avoid duplicate efforts and costly errors from manual data
entry, and it helps ensure they have access to accurate, real-time data.
Make Better-Informed Decisions through Centralized Access
to Information
Provide a single, integrated location where employees can efficiently find organizational
resources, access corporate knowledge, and leverage business insight in order to make
better-informed decisions.
Present business-critical information in one central location
Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business
information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web
Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies.
Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place to find the latest reports,
spreadsheets, or KPIs.
5
Quickly connect people and information
SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data and information about people with
documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results. Tools for query hit
highlighting, duplicate collapsing, “did you mean” spelling correction, and alerts help users
locate what they want within search results.
Unlock business data
Out-of-the-box (OOB) connectors provide accessibility to data in SAP and Siebel systems.
With the Business Data Catalog, IT can create a pool of connections to business systems,
which can be reused easily by business users to create personalized, interactive views into
back-end data from browsers—all without writing any code.
Leverage 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, by connecting
with people more quickly and efficiently. By exploring these undocumented business
relationships and finding subject matter experts, individuals can make better decisions more
quickly.
Work when and where you want
With offline access to SharePoint lists and document libraries, you can free yourself from the
limitations of corporate network connectivity.
Share Business Information Within and Outside Your
Organization
Simplify and help boost the security and efficiency of collaboration and knowledge sharing
within and across organizational boundaries.
Broadly share business data while helping to protect sensitive information
Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to real-time,
interactive Microsoft Office Excel® 2007 spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these
spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central, up-to-date version, while helping
to protect any proprietary information, such as financial models, embedded in documents.
6
Enhance customer and partner relationships
With smart, standards-based, electronic forms–driven solutions, you can collect business
information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Lightweight
Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) integration and support for other pluggable authentication
providers makes it easier to implement extranet SharePoint environments, improving
connectivity outside your organization.
Effectively manage and share business insight
Report Center provides a centralized location to access business-critical information. It
simplifies control and sharing of reports, Office Excel spreadsheets, KPIs, and dashboards
within organizations and teams. Users can define personalized reports and dashboards,
browse reports by category, or view a calendar of upcoming reports and subscribe to ones
that are relevant.
Use a Single, Integrated Platform to Manage Intranet,
Extranet, and Internet Applications
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a scalable enterprise platform that can grow with
your business without the need for costly add-ons. IT staff can spend more time on the
strategic tasks only they can perform and help drive enhanced business value and positive
change throughout your organization.
Boost employee productivity through innovative, enterprise-wide solutions
Make use of powerful development tools and an open, scalable architecture with support for
Web services and interoperability standards, including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP), to build and extend applications that incorporate business system information and
integrated workflow.
Simplify site staging and content deployment
Use OOB site-starter templates for common Web sites, with Area and Page Layout templates
and preconfigured navigation. Configure content deployment paths between different
computers or the same computer. Schedule processes that define the scope of content and
the frequency of recurring deployments.
Get the tools you need to ease deployment, management, and system
administration
Robust system-monitoring and usage-tracking tools help to isolate and solve problems faster,
and improve the operational efficiency of the system infrastructure.
7
Top 10 Benefits
Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides an integrated suite of easy-to-use server applications
that boost organizational effectiveness and optimize the way that people, content, processes,
and business applications interact. Here are the top 10 ways Office SharePoint Server 2007
can help your organization:
1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client applications, e-mail,
and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact
with content, processes, and business data. Employees can easily use services to accomplish
business activities without having to depend on IT staff.
2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Take advantage of OOB workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business
processes such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection—
without any coding. Modifying and extending these OOB processes is made easy through
tools like Microsoft Visual Studio® and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next
release of Microsoft Office FrontPage® 2003).
3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
Help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively—
and reduce litigation risk for your organization—by specifying retention and auditing policies
for business records in accordance with compliance regulations. IRM and the content control
mechanisms help protect proprietary and confidential information, even when users aren’t
connected to a server.
4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
Business users can easily author content for Web sites and submit it for approval and
scheduled deployment to the Internet. Managing multilingual content is simplified in Office
SharePoint Server 2007 through new document library templates specifically designed to
maintain a relationship between the original and translated versions of a document.
5. Simplify organization-wide access to structured and unstructured information
across disparate systems.
Give users access to business data in common LOB systems like SAP and Siebel through OOB
connectors in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized interactions
with business systems by dragging predefined, configurable back-end connections. Managed
8
document repositories help organizations store and organize business documents in one
central location.
6. Connect people with information and expertise.
SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data with information about people,
documents, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Rich search
functionality like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improves the relevance
of the results and helps users easily find what they need within the search results.
7. Accelerate business processes and maintain control of your electronic forms
environment.
Use smart, electronic forms-driven solutions to collect critical business information from
customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser without coding any custom
applications. Built-in data validation rules help you accurately and consistently gather data
that can be directly integrated into back-end systems, avoiding redundancy and errors
resulting from manual data re-entry.
8. Share business data while preserving its consistency and helping to protect
sensitive information.
Give employees access to real-time, interactive 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, up-to-date version while helping
to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents.
9. Facilitate better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in
one central location.
Make it easy to create live, interactive BI portals that assemble and display business-critical
information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web
Parts, scorecards, KPIs, and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized 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 has an open, scalable, services-oriented architecture that
provides support for interoperability standards including XML and SOAP, which makes it
easier to integrate with existing processes and applications. You also get powerful, IT-focused
tools and templates for building and extending applications that incorporate business system
information and integrated workflow.
9
Features at a Glance
Features at a Glance provides information that will help you understand, describe, and
evaluate the new and enhanced features of Office SharePoint Server 2007. This section will
be of interest to anyone who plans, builds, deploys, or manages business solutions using
Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Portal
The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially
useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet
presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites.
The portal components also make it easy to connect to people within the organization that
have the right skills, knowledge, and project experience. Office SharePoint Server 2007
simplifies the way in which people work together.
Feature Area
Features
Portal Site Templates Preconfigured site templates are included for quickly creating,
New
customizing, deploying, and managing divisional portals, organization-
wide intranet portal sites, and corporate Internet presence Web sites.
Site Manager
New
Site Manager, which replaces the Portal Site Map administration page,
is a Web-based drag-and-drop tool for managing a SharePoint site’s
navigation, security access, and general look and feel.
Site Manager unifies site management tasks for portal and Web sites,
including management of areas, pages, listings, SharePoint site lists,
and their component parts.
Site Manager supports the bulk creation, editing, reorganization, and
deletion of areas, as well as the viewing of relationships between
pages.
My Site Personal
Sites
My Site personal sites has several significant enhancements including:
•
•
•
•
Social networking
Enhanced
Privacy controls
SharePoint Sites and Documents roll-up Web Parts
Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts
10
Feature Area
Social Networking
New
Features
Office SharePoint Server 2007 has additional functionality that makes
it easier to discover social networking connections between
employees.
Public My Site pages can include Social Networking Web Parts that use
information about your organization, communities, and electronic
communications. This can help you identify colleagues with common
interests and produce better, more relevant search results.
In addition, Social Networking helps establish personal connections by
finding people you work or communicate with as well as people who
have something in common with you, such as common distribution
lists, group and SharePoint site memberships, or common
responsibilities and skills.
Social Networking gives you the option of using user profile
information from Microsoft Active Directory®, LOB applications, or e-
mail and other forms of electronic communication.
Privacy Controls
Enhanced
Privacy Controls are used to control visibility of information in a My
Site public view. Authorizations to view selected public content on a
My Site personal site include “My Manager,” “My Workgroup,” “My
Colleagues,” and “Everyone.”
SharePoint Sites and
Documents Roll-up
Web Part
The new SharePoint Sites roll-up Web Part lists all the SharePoint sites
that you are a member of.
New
The new Documents roll-up Web Part lists the documents you have
published across a collection of SharePoint sites. This Web Part also
supports more general capabilities for querying and filtering the
documents stored in a collection of SharePoint sites.
Colleagues and
Memberships Web
Parts
The new Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts lists people you
know, or who have interests in common with you, and people who
belong to common distribution lists and groups.
New
Site Directory
Enhanced
An important new Site Directory feature is the “Scan for Broken Links”
button that locates changed or deleted links to external content.
11
Feature Area
Features
Real-Time Presence
and Communication
The Real-Time Presence Smart Tag icon, displayed virtually
everywhere a person’s name appears in Office SharePoint Server
2007, tells you in real time whether a person is online and available
for a telephone or audio conference call, instant messaging, or two-
way video conversation.
Enhanced
Notification Service
Enhanced
Office SharePoint Server 2007 enhances several Notification Service
features:
•
•
•
Filtering conditions can trigger more relevant alerts to users.
An extensible platform sends customizable e-mail alerts to users.
Users participating in a workflow automatically receive e-mail
alerts without subscribing in advance to workflow notifications.
•
Users can send content of a changed item in a SharePoint list or
document library along with details of what was changed.
LDAP Pluggable
Authentication
Provider
Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes an LDAP pluggable provider for
authenticating users of Office SharePoint Server 2007. This is in
addition to the Active Directory provider included with Windows
SharePoint Services.
New
User Profiles
Enhanced
User profiles are significantly enhanced with these updated features:
•
•
•
Profile Store
Profile Synchronization
Profile Directory Import
In addition to defining audiences using Active Directory–based
properties, audiences can now be defined using properties imported
from LOB applications such as human resources (HR) or professional
services automation (PSA) solutions.
User profile information is also used by the Notification Service to
target alerts, by Social Networking to deduce common interests and
other properties, and by the Memberships Web Part to display
distribution list and group membership information.
12
Feature Area
Profile Store
Enhanced
Features
The Profile Store is enhanced with:
•
Multi-valued properties bound to a taxonomy or a list of values
from Office SharePoint Server 2007.
•
•
•
Property-level security controls by person or group.
Open and closed vocabularies.
Per-site property extensions (federated property store).
Profile
Synchronization
Profile Synchronization supports the extended capabilities of the
Profile Store with enhanced scalability and performance.
Enhanced
Profile Directory
Import
Profile Directory Import supports the extended capabilities of the
Profile Store with enhanced scalability and performance.
Enhanced
Audience Targeting
Enhanced
Web Part pages, Web Parts, and content can be targeted to
distribution lists and groups in addition to SharePoint audiences.
Audiences in Office SharePoint Server 2007 benefit from the richer
collections of properties available in the Profile Store.
Mobile Device
Support
By default, all Office SharePoint portal, team site, and list pages
render on both International and North American mobile devices
(including Web-enabled mobile phones) using a simplified text-only
format.
New
Content Management
The new and enhanced content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall
within three areas:
•
•
•
Document management
Records management
Web content management
Windows SharePoint Services provides core document management functionality: major and
minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow,
content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the document
library, folder, and individual document levels.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on these capabilities to deliver enhanced authoring,
business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records
management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.
13
Document Management
With the new document management components of Office SharePoint Server 2007,
SharePoint Products and Technologies no longer simply provide a platform for document
collaboration. Office SharePoint Server 2007 becomes a full-featured solution for managing
business documents.
Enhanced document libraries in Windows SharePoint Services provide the foundation for the
new document management features described below.
Feature Area
Features
Business Document
Workflow
Business document processing is a series of workflow applications
included with Office SharePoint Server 2007:
Enhanced
•
•
•
•
•
•
Document review
Document approval
Signature collection
East Asian document approval
Issue tracking
Custom routing for review and approval
Document
Management Site
Templates
Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes enhanced document
management site templates that can be used right away without
further customization:
New
•
•
•
Managed Document Library site template
Divisional Library site template
Translation Library site template
Managed Document
Library Site Template
Managed document libraries are large-scale document management
sites capable of storing the documents for an entire organization.
With managed document libraries, all business units can organize and
categorize information consistently.
New
Divisional Library Site The key features of the Divisional Library site template include:
Template
•
•
Managed document libraries
New
Dashboards, KPIs, and other reporting
Translation Library
Site Template
The Translation Library site template is valuable for multinational and
public-sector organizations that need to translate documents into
multiple languages. The translation library integrates customizable
New
14
Feature Area
Features
workflow processes with the document management features of
Office SharePoint Server 2007 to help translators manage multiple
translations of a document.
2007 Microsoft Office
system Client
Application
Office SharePoint Server 2007 has significantly enhanced document
management and related workflow features, including:
Integration
•
•
Document Information Panel
Document Action Bar
Enhanced
Document
Information Panel
The Document Information Panel makes editing document properties
an integral part of the Microsoft Office system document authoring
experience. InfoPanel encourages users to enter and update the
properties associated with each type of business document.
New
Document Action Bar
New
The Document Action Bar in the 2007 Microsoft Office system client
applications tells users that the current document is governed by a
business policy or workflow and what action they are expected to
take. For example, “Not for distribution outside the company” or “You
have a task assigned to you.”
Records Management
Every organization, whether privately held, publicly traded, or not-for-profit, needs a
disciplined approach to record keeping. Proper records management is vital to an
organization’s knowledge management, legal defense, and regulatory compliance.
Records management is the process of collecting, managing, and disposing of corporate
records (information deemed important for the history, knowledge, or legal defense of a
company) in a consistent and uniform manner based on the company’s policies. These
policies are shaped by the type of work the organization does, the kinds of legal risks it faces,
and the laws and regulations that govern it.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 introduces a new set of features for creating and supporting
formal records management capabilities in your organization.
15
Feature Area
Policy and Auditing
New
Features
The Policy and Auditing features of Office SharePoint Server 2007
include:
•
Content-type and policy-based document retention and
expiration schedules.
•
•
Auditing and reporting of policy-based actions.
Support for labeling and barcoding without physically modifying
a document.
•
Integrated Windows Rights Management Services (RMS).
Records Repository
New
The core of the records management implementation in Office
SharePoint Server 2007 is a stable, scalable, and efficient repository
built on Windows SharePoint Services.
The Records Repository in Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes
several important features:
•
•
Specialized Records Repository site template
A records vault with capabilities that help ensure the integrity of
the files stored in the repository
•
•
Information management policies that consistently and uniformly
enforce the labeling, auditing, and expiration of records
Hold capabilities that make it possible for IT, lawyers, and
records managers to apply one or more holds that suspend the
records management policies on items to help ensure that they
remain unchanged during litigation, audits, or other
investigations
•
Records Collection Interface that helps people and automated
systems easily submit content to a records repository—
supporting “write only” access without requiring direct access to
the records in the repository
•
Record routing that enables automated routing of content to its
proper location within the records management system, based
on its content type
•
Extensibility for solutions requiring additional capabilities beyond
those available in Office SharePoint Server 2007
16
Feature Area
Features
E-mail Content as
Records
Office SharePoint Server 2007 records management features include
the ability for providing consistent, policy-based solutions for
managing e-mail content across Microsoft Office Outlook® 2007,
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
New
This is accomplished through two new features:
•
•
Managed mail folders
Mail management policies
Managed Mail Folders
New
Working in conjunction with Exchange Server 2007, managed mail
folders help records managers and compliance officers manage the
e-mail in individual mailboxes more effectively by defining a set of
standard folders, each with an explicit business purpose, in which
individual employees can file their e-mail.
These folders can be deployed to individual information workers
based on their roles within the organization, so people who fill
equivalent roles across a company can have similar top-level filing
structures in their mailboxes.
Mail Management
Policies
Behind each managed mail folder is a set of rules and mail
management policies, in addition to a written policy statement.
New
Policies can be applied to any e-mail folder—such as Inbox, Drafts,
and Sent Items—and a default policy can be applied to other folders
that are not explicitly named.
Policy statements appear at the top of each folder view in Office
Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Outlook Web Access. These statements
help records managers, compliance officers, and IT to communicate
the policies associated with folders in a way that makes sense to
employees and that no one can claim they never saw.
17
Web Content Management
A key goal for Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the complete integration of Microsoft Content
Management Server 2002 functionality, and further significant enhancement of the Web
content management functionality, with the collaboration, portal, search, document
management, and records management features of the new Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Feature Area
Site Modeling
Enhanced
Features
Building on the Site Model platform services in Windows
SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes
support for several new enterprise site templates:
•
•
•
•
Enterprise portal
Corporate Internet presence site
Application portal
Roll-up portal
Enterprise Portal Site
Template
Enterprise portals provide a means for a business unit to create
and share content that is relevant to the ongoing operation of
an enterprise, division, or business unit. This content usually
consists of a relatively small amount of static content on the
operations of the division and a large amount of internally
created content that is a byproduct of the ongoing operations of
the business unit.
New
The key features of the enterprise portal or divisional portal site
templates include:
•
•
•
Managed document libraries
Dashboards, KPIs, and reports
Team and project collaboration sites
18
Feature Area
Features
Corporate Internet
Having a high-quality corporate presence Web site has become
Presence Site Template
a business imperative. It provides a means of communicating
important company information to customers, partners,
investors, and potential employees.
New
Some of the key features of the corporate Internet presence
site template are tools and workflow to create and manage Web
content for:
•
•
•
•
Products and services descriptions
Company news
Annual reports and public filings
Career information
Application Portal Site
Template
Application portals are SharePoint sites that bring together all of
the tools and information related to a particular LOB application
such as HR, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer
relationship management (CRM), or professional services
automation (PSA).
New
The application portal site template includes features for:
•
•
Searching and finding information in LOB applications.
Security-enhanced, authenticated access to data and
content stored in these systems.
•
The ability to quickly and easily analyze, report, and
summarize data from LOB applications.
Roll-up Portal Site Template Roll-up portals are used to consolidate data and content from
New
several applications or locations and present it in an integrated
format that’s easy to understand.
The Roll-up portal site template includes a feature that
consolidates information from:
•
•
•
•
Search
Global site directory
Personalization and My Site personal sites
Knowledge and expertise found anywhere in the
organization
19
Feature Area
Features
Authoring and Approval
Enhanced
Web content management includes tools, workflows, and
services for the end-to-end content management of content
authoring and approval processes. These include:
•
•
•
•
Check-in/checkout
Content moderation
Content routing, review, and approval workflows
Publishing schedules
Web Publishing and
Deployment
The goal of the Web content publishing and deployment
features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 is to support
environments where distinct authoring, staging, and production
workflows are part of the formal Web publishing processes.
Enhanced
WYSIWYG Web Content
Editor
The Web-based authoring experience extends the SharePoint
user interface with additional commands and status indicators
for in-context Web page authoring.
Enhanced
Rather than entering content in an edit form, the author
remains in the context of the Web page and enters new content
using a feature-rich no-install Web content editor.
The editor supports cascading style sheets (CSS) extended with
custom styles, tables, and spelling checker with automatic
language detection. The editor also integrates with the built-in
pickers for images and links.
20
Search
The search component of Office SharePoint Server 2007 has been significantly enhanced by
this release of SharePoint Products and Technologies. The new features provide a consistent
and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, new functions to search
for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in LOB applications, and improved
manageability and extensibility.
Feature Area
Features
Consistent Search
Experience
While Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint
Portal Server 2003 used common Microsoft Search technology, users
found the two search environments to be quite different from one
another. In addition, administrators needed to use different tools to
configure and manage each environment.
New
Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services now use
a common implementation of Microsoft Search. Both users and admini-
strators use a common set of tools to configure and use Microsoft Search.
Relevance
Enhanced
Microsoft Search includes a revamped ranking engine developed in
collaboration with Microsoft Research and MSN Internet Search. It is
specifically tuned for the unique requirements of searching enterprise
content and LOB application data. These requirements include:
•
•
•
Searching document content and LOB application data in addition to
Web content.
Producing high-relevance search results despite the lack of rich linking
information available in document content and LOB application data.
High security and content access controls.
Specific new content relevance algorithms include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Click distance
Hyperlink anchor text
URL surf depth
URL text matching
Automated metadata extraction
Automatic language detection
File type relevancy biasing
Enhanced text analysis
21
Feature Area
Features
Uniform, Scalable
User Experience
Microsoft Search provides a significantly enhanced user experience
including the following:
Enhanced
•
•
•
•
Improved rendering of search results
Hit highlighting
Duplicate and near-duplicate collapsing
Improved Best Bets keyword searching (including support for keyword
definitions)
•
•
•
Automatic generation of “Do you mean” synonym search keywords
New Search Center for initiating queries and browsing search results
Enhanced query syntax including support for implicit industry
standards for full text and property-based searching
•
•
Ability to subscribe to a search query and receive e-mail alerts when
changes occur in the results of a persisted search query
Ability to reuse and adapt the query and search results Web Parts to
more easily create customized search solutions for your organization
Content Sources
Enhanced
Microsoft Search permits many additional types of enterprise content and
LOB application data to be searched, including:
•
LOB application data and reports indexed and retrieved through the
Business Data Catalog.
•
•
Enhanced user profile or people-based search.
People-based searching for colleagues and other people who share a
set of common interests.
•
•
Improved threaded-discussion searching.
Continued support for third-party repositories using custom protocol
handlers and IFilters.
More information about Business Data Catalog can be found in the BI
functions in the Features at a Glance section.
22
Feature Area
Features
People and
Expertise
Searching
Support for searching for people and what they know has been
significantly enhanced. These features include:
Enhanced
•
•
•
Support for indexing and searching any LDAP directory.
Dedicated Search Center tab for searching for people.
Returning SharePoint groups and Active Directory distribution lists in
search results.
•
•
People search results grouped by “social distance” from you and your
common interests.
Search result refinement by properties such as department.
Business Data
Search
The Business Data Search feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes
it easy to index and search any relational database or other information
store accessible by ADO.NET or a Web service; for example, data in a
CRM system.
New
There is no need to write custom protocol handlers or IFilters or create
searchable HTML representations of information in a database.
Search results from Business Data Search can be highly customized and
fully integrated with search scopes and other Search Center features.
Search
Manageability
Microsoft Search includes an expanded and improved administration user
interface that makes the following possible:
Enhanced
•
•
•
•
Broad support for all search and indexing scenarios
Central control of resource-intensive operations
SharePoint sites that subscribe to a central search service
Easy configuration and management of indexing and search by
corporate IT operations staff
•
Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports the centralized management
of distributed indexing and search services within a SharePoint server
farm. This makes it possible for very large collections of business data
and document content to be indexed and searched without
significantly increasing operations overhead.
23
Feature Area
Features
Indexing
Improved Indexing Management controls provide better control over what
Management
is to be indexed, how it is to be indexed, and when. These features include:
Enhanced
•
•
Improved crawl rules and crawl log.
One index per shared indexing service, removing the need to worry
about managing discrete indexes.
•
•
•
•
•
Multiple start addresses per content source.
An entirely new browsable, filterable index log.
Explicit SharePoint content source type.
Decoupling of content sources from scopes.
From a performance perspective, Microsoft Search indexes Windows
SharePoint Services sites more efficiently using the change log feature
in Windows SharePoint Services platform services.
Content Scopes
New
Content Scopes help users broaden or narrow the scope of their content
search. Office SharePoint Server 2007 search scopes are now decoupled
from content sources and can be based on arbitrary content properties
such as URL, type, and author. Search scopes can be based in simple or
multiple rules such as “All Marketing Plans on the North American Sales
Web Site.”
In addition, search scopes can be defined globally over the entire
SharePoint environment, or on an individual SharePoint site basis.
Extensibility and
Programmability
Microsoft Search includes three categories of application programming
interfaces (APIs):
Enhanced
•
•
Data access: protocol handlers and IFilters
Query object model, APIs, Web services, and reusable Search Center
Web Parts
•
Administration object model and APIs
These APIs provide coherent, comprehensive, and backward-compatible
programmable access to the Microsoft Search features.
Common Search
Technology and
Infrastructure:
Desktop to Server
Microsoft Search provides a single indexing and search infrastructure that
effectively scales from the desktop, through team sites and divisional
portal sites, to the largest corporate intranets, extranets, and Internet
presence Web sites.
Enhanced
24
Business Processes
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 helps organizations streamline forms-driven business
processes with easy-to-use, intelligent, XML-based electronic forms that integrate smoothly
with existing systems. This security-enhanced, client/server platform provides rapid-solution
creation and deployment, centralizes form management and maintenance, and helps to
extend business processes to customers, partners, and suppliers.
Feature Area
Feature Description
Built on the XML Industry Forms created with Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007 are based on
Standards
XML schemas that you define to control the structure of the data
Enhanced
captured by the form. A completed form is an XML file that
complies with that structure, making it highly actionable.
Browser-based Forms
New
Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 makes it possible to design
Web-capable forms in Office InfoPath 2007 and distribute them
on corporate intranets, extranets, or the Internet. Users can fill
out forms in a browser with no download or client components
needed.
“Design Once”
Development Model
Forms designers can design their forms once and deploy them for
use both within the rich Office InfoPath 2007 client program and
through a Web browser. Office Forms Server 2007 automatically
converts the form into ASP.NET Web forms, with no additional
work from the designer.
New
Form Import Wizard
New
The designer in Office InfoPath 2007 provides an easy way to
convert forms designed in Microsoft Office Excel and Microsoft
Office Word into rich Office InfoPath 2007 forms. The Form
Import Wizard handles the conversion of form fields, repeating
tables, rich text boxes, and other elements, dynamically
generating the underlying XML structure for the new form.
Advanced “No-code”
Form Features
The designer in Office InfoPath 2007 helps forms designers define
validation, calculations, conditional formatting, and rules
declaratively, without having to write any code.
Enhanced
25
Feature Area
Feature Description
Integrated Deployment
Model for “No-code”
Forms
The Publish Wizard in Office InfoPath 2007 makes it easy to
publish forms that do not have any managed code components to
a Windows SharePoint Services library, while making the form
available as a browser-based form at the same time.
New
Native Support for Web
Services and Customer-
defined Schemas
Native support for Web services and customer-defined XML
schemas in Office Forms Server 2007 makes it easy to integrate
form data with many back-end systems using Web services. This
is true for forms filled out in both Office InfoPath 2007 and the
browser.
Enhanced
Multiple Form Views
Enhanced
Forms designed with Office InfoPath 2007 support multiple views,
which can be made available selectively in either the browser or
Office InfoPath 2007. For example, a loan application form might
include a main view for an applicant to fill in data using a
browser, and another view visible only to the loan officer, who
uses the rich Office InfoPath 2007 client to review and approve
the application.
Compatibility Checker
New
The Compatibility Checker helps forms designers validate those
features that need to work across the broadest range of Web
browsers.
Rich Administrative Tool
for Forms Deployment
and Management
For forms that have managed code, Office Forms Server 2007
provides a centralized administrative tool for deploying and
managing forms for use in the browser.
New
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Enhanced
The single sign-on feature permits a person to enter one name
and password to use a variety of back-end applications. It is used
for integrating back-office systems and LOB applications that
require separate credentials database.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 single sign-on services support the
use of custom as well as third-party pluggable credential
providers.
Note: Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers an additional
pluggable authentication provider model for authenticating user
access to Office SharePoint Server 2007 features.
26
Business Intelligence
Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organizations provide business intelligence (BI)
capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control, and reuse business information in
order to make better business decisions. The BI features in Office SharePoint Server 2007
provide Web and programmatic access to published Office Excel spreadsheets, programmatic
reuse of critical LOB data, and easy development of Web-based BI dashboards that can
incorporate rich, data-bound KPIs, Web Parts, and published spreadsheets.
Feature Area
Feature Description
Web Access to Published
Spreadsheets
Office Excel 2007 Services help information workers publish
spreadsheets to SharePoint sites, including spreadsheets that
incorporate powerful new client capabilities such as data
visualization and richer PivotTable views and PivotChart views.
Users require no additional software to access these interactive
spreadsheets in a Web browser, and all calculations are
performed on the server.
New
Integrated, Flexible
Publishing
Office Excel 2007 provides an integrated publishing experience
that helps information workers easily choose what they want to
show and how users can interact with their published
spreadsheets.
New
Programmatic Access to
Published Spreadsheets
Excel Services provide a Web services model for
programmatically accessing published spreadsheets. Custom
applications can send data to Excel Services for server-side
calculation, and the results are returned to the custom application
without exposing the spreadsheet’s business logic.
New
Data Connection Libraries Data Connection Libraries are new SharePoint document libraries
New
in which organizations can centrally publish connection files to
make it easy for users to find and use the data sources they
need. Data connection files are easy to create and update, and
solution designers can easily reuse them from within the 2007
Microsoft Office system client applications, such as forms in Office
InfoPath 2007.
27
Business Data Catalog
New
The Business Data Catalog makes it possible to include data from
back-end systems in SharePoint lists, Web Parts, pages, and
search results.
The Business Data Catalog deeply integrates external data into
the Office SharePoint Server 2007 user experience, gives access
to external data exposed by ADO.NET and Web services, and
permits the display and analysis of external data through
Business Data Web Parts and Business Data SharePoint lists.
External data was formerly used to enhance the information
available in user profiles, for example, information from a human
resources application or employee skills database. External data
added to User Profiles can be automatically indexed and searched
in the same manner as user directory information.
External data can also be used in custom applications using the
Business Data Catalog runtime and administration APIs.
Business Data SharePoint Business Data SharePoint Lists and Web Parts store, analyze, and
Lists and Web Parts
display LOB application data retrieved through the Business Data
New
Catalog.
Business Data Actions
New
Business Data Actions are links that appear beside business
objects from the Business Data Catalog. These links can, for
example, open Web pages, display the user interfaces of LOB
applications, or launch Office InfoPath 2007 forms. These actions
are easy to create with no custom coding.
Business Data Actions menus also appear in SharePoint lists and
search results.
Data Connection Libraries Data Connection Libraries centralize storage of Business Data
New
Catalog connections to external data making it easy to discover
new sources of data.
Dashboards
New
Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it easy to create rich BI
dashboards that incorporate dynamic KPIs, Office Excel 2007
workbooks, and Microsoft SQL™ Server Reporting Services
reports.
28
Report Center Web Sites
New
Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes out-of-the-box Web sites
optimized for report access and management. These sites, hosted
by the new Report Center, provide consistent management of
reports, spreadsheets, and data connections.
Excel Services
Management
Excel Services Management is a centralized management service
for configuring and managing Excel Services used by other
components of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
New
Office SharePoint Server 2007 can refresh external data,
recalculate a workbook, and render it with a high-fidelity, Web-
based user interface in an Excel Services Web Part. Based on
publishing parameters, it will render a complete Office Excel 2007
workbook, selected worksheets, or a region within a worksheet.
Developers can leverage Excel Services Web services to calculate
a complex model built in Office Excel 2007 and display the results
to a user working on a Web-based user interface or custom
desktop application.
29
Architectural Overview
This section describes the key components of Office SharePoint Server 2007, how they relate
to each other and to the platform, and collaboration services provided by Windows SharePoint
Services (version3).
The high-level architecture is illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Office SharePoint Server 2007 Architecture
30
Operating System and Database Services
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on the technologies and services provided by Microsoft
Windows Server™ 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and SQL Server 2005 (as well as SQL Server
2000).
The core and development-platform operating system services include:
•
Microsoft .NET 2.0 Framework which comprises:
•
ASP.NET 2.0 master pages, content pages, and Web Parts
Pluggable service-provider models for personalization, membership, navigation, and
enhanced security
•
•
•
•
•
Database access services
Internet Information Services
Windows Workflow Foundation
Windows desktop indexing and search services
SQL Server is the relational database used for storing all content, data and configuration
information used by Office SharePoint Server 2007. SQL Server 2005 is recommended; SQL
Server 2005 Express is included as a default part of the installation. SQL Server 2000 can be
used as an alternative.
Windows SharePoint Services
Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) builds on the operating system and database
services to support requirements ranging from a team site for a workgroup, to large
enterprise portal solutions serving over 100,000 employees and staff (such as Office
SharePoint Server 2007), to a corporate Internet portal supporting millions of users.
Windows SharePoint Services platform services provide the following security-enhanced,
scalable, reliable, high-performance capabilities:
•
•
•
•
•
Storage
Management
Deployment
Site Model
Extensibility
31
In addition, Windows SharePoint Services, a feature of Windows Server 2003, implements the
collaboration features of the 2007 release of Office SharePoint Products and Technologies:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Document collaboration
Wikis and Blogs
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) support
Discussions
Project task management
Contacts, Calendars, and Tasks
E-mail integration
Integration with the 2007 Microsoft Office system client applications
Offline support for SharePoint lists and document libraries, using Office Outlook 2007 as
the offline client application.
Office SharePoint Server 2007: Applications and Services
Architecturally, Office SharePoint Server 2007 consists of a common set of Shared Services
that support five server application components.
Server Applications
Office SharePoint Server 2007 comprises five application components:
•
•
•
•
•
Portal
Search
Content management
Business process
Business intelligence
Each of these is built upon the platform services and collaboration components of Windows
SharePoint Services and the Shared Services components of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
32
Shared Services
Conceptually similar to Shared Services in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, the Shared
Services component has been completely restructured and redesigned in the Office
SharePoint Server 2007 using a new services provider model.
Shared Services include virtually all of the services that are used by multiple applications in
Office SharePoint Server 2007:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Full-text and property indexing and search services
Business Data Catalog
Notification service for generating alerts
User profile store
Audiences
Usage reporting
Single sign-on services
33
Installing Your Evaluation Server
Consult the readme file included with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for information about
installing your evaluation server.
More information will be available in a future release of this document.
34
Product Tour
More information will be available in a future release of this document.
35
An Administrator’s Perspective
More information will be available in a future release of this document.
36
A Developer’s Perspective
Consult the Software Developer Kit (SDK) included with Office SharePoint Server 2007 for
information about developing solutions with Office SharePoint Server 2007.
More information will be available in a future release of this document.
37
For More Information
Visit the Microsoft Office 2007 Preview Center at
http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx. This Web site features the latest
news and information about the 2007 Microsoft Office system, including product information,
case studies, white papers, information about related technologies, and more.
Hardware and Software Requirements
For complete system requirements, visit
This document is developed prior to the product’s release to manufacturing, and as such, we cannot guarantee that all details included herein
will be exactly as what is found in the shipping product. The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft
Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, this document
should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information
presented after the date of publication. The information represents the product at the time this document was printed and should be used for
planning purposes only. Information is subject to change at any time without prior notice.
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS DOCUMENT.
© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft, Excel, InfoPath, Microsoft Press, the Office logo, OneNote, Outlook, PivotChart, PivotTable, PowerPoint, Visual Studio, Windows,
Windows Server, and Windows Vista are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other
countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
38
|