Summary

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services each allow for a great deal of collaborative capabilities that enable organizations to extend the capabilities of the portal beyond the borders of SharePoint itself. Through integration with other systems such as Office 2003, BizTalk Server 2002, Exchange Server 2003, and many others, SharePoint allows for centralized access and control over many of the processes that take place in businesses.

In addition to integration and collaboration with other infrastructure components, SharePoint is highly flexible in its capability to mold itself to the needs of an organization. Whether it is deployed as a customer extranet, a corporate intranet, or a team collaboration solution, SharePoint provides the built-in tools necessary to achieve the increased integration and efficiencies required by businesses today.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services were specifically designed to be scalable, expandable applications. The ability to expand a SharePoint solution to fit the needs of various organizations is key in the adoption strategy Microsoft has for SharePoint, and features such as SharePoint farms, clustered back-end SQL database servers, NLB on front-end servers, and Distributed Services provide a great deal of flexibility for SharePoint administrators and designers. This flexibility allows SharePoint to scale to fit the current and future needs of organizations of many sizes.