SharePoint 2007: Getting to Know SharePoint: Page 8

A great deal of confusion exists over which version of SharePoint 2007 is right for particular circumstances. In a great number of cases, a small, free deployment of WSS 3.0 would satisfy many of the needs of an individual project or project team. It is therefore critical to understand which features are present in each edition of this product. Check the index of this book to find the individual chapter that discusses each feature in more detail. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes the following features:

• Document Management functionality, up to 500,000 documents

• Email-enabled content capabilities

• Basic search capabilities

• Alerting capabilities

• RSS feeds

• Wikis

• Blogs

• Mobile device support

• Direct integration with Office 2003/2007 clients

• Capability to serve as a public folder replacement for Exchange environments

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds all of WSS 3.0’s features plus the following:

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• My Site personal sites

• Additional built-in web parts, such as the Social Networking and Document Roll-up web parts

• Search capabilities across enterprise content sources, including file shares, web sites, Lotus Notes databases, and other third-party content sources

• People search

• Workflow support

• Support for ASP.NET pluggable authentication and forms-based authentication

• Single sign-on support

• Content syndication

• Site directory

• Audiences (targeted site content)

• Enterprise content search capabilities

• Search relevance

• Indexing controls

• Security-trimmed search results

• People search

• Site templates

• IRM support

• Retention and auditing policies

• Master pages and page layouts

• Web content editor

• Navigation controls

Adding the Enterprise CAL to a MOSS 2007 environment maintains all the WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 Standard CAL features, and adds the following:

• Excel services

• Business intelligence features

• Business process and business forms support

• Business data search

As organizations examine more feature-rich versions, they will find that these versions are also more expensive to license, particularly because WSS 3.0 starts as a free product. It is therefore critical to identify which specific features are required from the SharePoint product and to make a licensing decision made from that discovery. It is important to remember that migrating an environment from WSS 3.0 to MOSS 2007 is relatively straightforward and changing from standard CALs to enterprise CALs in MOSS 2007 is exceedingly easy, but there is no easy way to downgrade from one version to the next. This is an important factor to take into account when deciding on the SharePoint 2007 version to use.

Integrating Office 2007 Components with SharePoint 2007

Using Office 2007 applications with SharePoint 2007 is ideal because they provide the most complete level of integration, whereas using Office 2003 and earlier versions provides only limited levels of integration and compatibility. It is worth noting that support and training are more involved and complex when there is more than one version of Office products in use, so standardize on one version as much as possible.

Integrating Outlook 2007

Outlook 2007 integrates with SharePoint 2007 in a number of different ways. To begin with, Outlook receives many of the alerts and messages from SharePoint, so users can receive significant amounts of information without leaving the comfort of their email client. In addition, it is possible to configure SharePoint libraries to accept incoming emails and publish RSS data. Outlook 2007 can receive RSS feeds directly. Outlook 2007 users can chose Connect to Outlook as shown in Figure 1.18. This enables users to synchronize and take files offline with them when they don’t have access to the SharePoint environment, make changes, and synchronize back to the SharePoint document library when they again have connectivity. Chapter 7 discusses the links between certain lists and Outlook, and Chapter 11 provides additional information about connectivity between the applications.

Using Word 2007 with SharePoint Sites

Word 2007 enables users to access data stored in the SharePoint 2007 document library in a number of ways, several of which are visible in Figure 1.19. The document properties ribbon is below the standard ribbon and circled in the figure. It shows metadata that the library administrator has chosen to publish to Word 2007. Users with sufficient privileges can update this information without leaving Word 2007.

In this example, the document is part of a workflow and it is possible to edit the workflow task from within Word 2007. This sample workflow is an approval workflow, so the user can add comments, approve, reject, reassign the task, or request a change. In addition, the Document Management task pane is open on the right side of the page. SharePoint 2003 users will recognize this task pane, and its functionality is similar to that of the earlier version. It provides information such as which other users and groups have access to the document, any tasks listed in the Primary Tasks list on the site that houses the document, other documents in the same library, and links listed in the Primary Links list on the same site.

Without even leaving Word 2007, a user can update metadata, edit workflows, change access rights to the document, and see important task information. Chapter 10 provides additional information about using Word 2007 with SharePoint 2007, along with other new enhancements in Word 2007 that can enhance document security and collaboration when used with SharePoint 2007.