Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies | Microsoft Windows Sharepoint Services Version 3. 0 Step by Step

Windows SharePoint Services, SharePoint Server 2007, and SharePoint Designer 2007-known together as SharePoint Products and Technologies-facilitate collaboration both within an organization and with partners and customers. However, each of these products has a different set of capabilities.

Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Server 2007

As mentioned earlier, Windows SharePoint Services technology is a collection of services for Windows Server 2003 that you can use to share information and collaborate with other users. It provides a common framework for document management, a common repository for storing documents of all types, and a platform for collaboration applications.

SharePoint Server 2007 is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services. It extends Windows SharePoint Services by providing flexible organization and management tools for SharePoint sites and by making it possible for teams to publish information to the entire organization. Because SharePoint Server 2007 requires Windows SharePoint Services, all features of Windows SharePoint Services are available in SharePoint Server 2007. However, SharePoint Server 2007 provides significant additional enterprise-level capabilities, as detailed in the following list.

Collaboration The collaboration components build on Windows SharePoint Services collaboration functionality to help keep teams connected and productive by providing easy access to people, documents, and information.
Portal The portal components of SharePoint Server 2007 include features for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet-presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites.
Enterprise Search The search components provide a consistent search experience, relevance of search results, functions to search for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications, and extensibility.
Enterprise Content Management Windows SharePoint Services provides core document management functionality including major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based permissions at the document library, folder, and individual document levels. 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.
Business Process and Forms This component provides a platform for rapid creation and deployment of XML-based electronic forms, centralizes form management and maintenance, and helps to extend business processes to customers, partners, and suppliers.
Business Intelligence (BI) The BI features of SharePoint Server 2007 provide Web and programmatic access to published Excel spreadsheets, programmatic reuse of critical line-of-business data, and development of Web-based BI dashboards.

Depending on the components included, there are several editions of SharePoint Server 2007. These are Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 editions, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search editions, and Microsoft Office Forms Server editions. To decide whether you need Windows SharePoint Services by itself or an edition of SharePoint Server 2007, you need to assess how your requirements are met by the particular features and functionality of these products.

Important

A detailed comparison between different editions of SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services is provided in the SharePointProductsComparison.xls spreadsheet on the book’s companion CD.

Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Designer 2007

While SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services provide the technology and platform, SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the tools with which to tailor SharePoint sites. SharePoint Designer 2007, based in part on Microsoft Office FrontPage technology, provides tools for rich customization of sites, as well as the creation of reporting tools and application templates, without any coding.