Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a product installed on one or more servers that provides the basis for a series of solutions. These solutions, if correctly designed and implemented, help information workers to meet business requirements. Office SharePoint Server 2007 combine several technologies and features that have so far only been offered as separate products in one highly scalable, highly available offering. This combination of technologies has proven very successful, and SharePoint Server 2007 has become one of the most popular offerings in the knowledge support and collaboration markets.
We can summarize the mission of the SharePoint Server 2007 as this: SharePoint technologies are intended to organize the content in your environment and then present that content so it is relevant, and allows users to interact with the content in a dynamic and collaborative manner. It is not designed to meet a specific business objective, but to provide a platform of functionality that users request for many different business reasons. Now, as with all mission statements, this one is very general. To meet this mission, Microsoft launched the public beta of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 which will be available in November, and it will feature an improved developer platform that makes it easier to build rich content and collaboration applications to meet businesses’ needs.
SharePoint Server 2010 will also have enhanced website capabilities that help businesses drive revenue and retain customers on a single platform, according to Microsoft’s announcement at its SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. Additionally, it will feature the choice of on-premises and cloud solutions, giving organizations the flexibility to scale their applications.
SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date. When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business.”
At the SharePoint Conference, Microsoft showcased the breadth of SharePoint Server 2010, which ranges from wikis to work flows. SharePoint makes it easier to provide enterprise portal solution and build dynamic websites with its built-in support for rich media such as video, audio and Silverlight. Its new ribbon-based user interface helps end users customize their SharePoint sites easily and be more productive. Also, new web content management features offer built-in accessibility through Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, multilingual support and one-click page layout that let anyone access SharePoint Server sites.
New SharePoint tools in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 give developers more tools, as well as rich APIs and support for Silverlight, representational state transfer (or REST) and Language-Integrated Query (or LINQ), to help developers rapidly build applications on the SharePoint platform. Business Connectivity Services allow developers to connect capabilities to line-of-business data or web services in SharePoint Server and the Office client.
There are also enterprise features such as Excel Services and InfoPath Forms Services, which make it simple to use, share, secure and manage interactive forms across an organization.
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is part of the next wave of Microsoft Office-related products, which includes Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Project 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Microsoft Visio 2010, that are designed to give people the best productivity experience across PCs, phones and browsers. The public betas of SharePoint Server 2010, Office 2010, Project 2010 and Visio 2010 will be available in November 2009, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 will be available in the first half of 2010.