In this article, Razi will go through the product offering from Sharepoint 2007. If you haved missed reading his previous series in this four part article, you can visit the following URL:

1. What's new in Sharepoint 2007 - Part I.
   
2. What's new in Sharepoint 2007 - Part II.

Portal

Portal provides users a place where they can visit and get the right information they are looking for from a single place, the main idea is that they don't have to go to other places or shuffle across to find the key information. Moreover portals should provide users ability to personalize the site both in terms of content and its presentation. Most of us interact with portals on daily basis, in fact if you simply browse to msn.com or my.yahoo.com you will get an idea what we are talking about (see figure 2.3.1 & 2.3.2)

Figure 2.3.1

 

Figure 2.3.2

Now when it comes to large organizations, it's much more difficult to develop and maintain a successful portal, and here you need support from a product that can bring its advance features to fulfill the requirements. MOSS even from its first version has the sleek concept of portal and with each release it's getting better. If you take a closer look at MOSS Portal Home page (see figure 2.3.3) you will quickly gather that it's not much different from msn or yahoo portal. This is a good news for those who are given task to implement MOSS in an organization , as this means the end users can adopt MOSS portal with much less hassle.

MOSS provide users with ability to personalize the portal page by customizing the components of page (web parts) for themselves, other than this they also have option to view what is called "My Site", this is a place solely allocated to a individual user .Think of like your personal web site where you can place useful information so that your colleagues and friends can view it. Portal along with Collaboration are essentially two most important things for both information workers and non-information workers (like business partners and other stake holders who access the portal) and initial success of most MOSS implementation depends highly on them.

Figure 2.3.3

 

The portal requires Developers and Designers to play very important role while designing and developing components for MOSS , every organization has its own branding and first thing they will point out is to make the look and feel consistent with their logo , organization brand color etc. The other things that are very common is development perspective are creating custom components (web parts, custom controls etc) for full filling the need of the organization. This is a huge area and the future installment of articles will cover designing and customizing the MOSS Portal in detail.

Business Process

This is one of the new welcome additions in MOSS, though Business Process can be described in many ways the bottom line is that , information workers and decision makers , should able to work on business processes electronically, and ideally by using same software clients/technologies that they are a accustomed to for performing their day to day tasks. Moreover these processes must be properly aligned with the business procedures, and any in case of any errors or exceptions during their execution, including both human and system should be gracefully handled. Take an example of Loan Approval Business Process, employee need to file an application for loan and then this application moves to his/her manager for approval, no matter what is the complexity of the business process, you can get an idea that for organization(s), this directly leads to many important decisions, that impact them financially and in some cases legally too. MOSS supports InfoPath forms and custom ASP.net pages to develop workflows. MOSS Enterprise Edition comes with InfoPath Forms Services, which are much like InfoPath Client but adding the fact that they run on server and can be consumed by a browser. This effectively removes the requirement of installing InfoPath locally on client machines.

MOSS uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) as its base workflow engine, and comes with several out of the box workflows, but most of them are limited to very basic business needs. It's more likely that you need to develop custom workflows in order to full fill your specific business scenarios. There are two options to do this, you can use SharePoint Designer 2007 for creating workflows (SharePoint Designer 2007 is a next version of Front Page 2003) usually this route is taken if you are creating workflows that are simple in nature and with no custom .NET code. On the other hand if you want to develop complex workflows which require debugging , use of InfoPath forms , custom code and custom activities, you have to use Visual Studio 2005 / 2008 to develop the workflows. Workflow development using Visual Studio 2005/2008 requires quite a bit of learning curve and its advice that you should allocate sufficient time for doing research and training on WF, before you move to actual development. Figure 2.4 provides a quick comparison for authoring workflows, using SharePoint Designer 2007 and Visual Studio 2005/2008.

 

Figure 2.4

Please note that MOSS alone (without any substantial development effort) is not a complete Business Process Management (BPM). This is very important to be keep in mind, when you are thinking of using MOSS as a BPM , there are times this seems intimating but fact remains that the vision and hence capabilities of MOSS is not aligned to be used as a BPM. You can however take a look at many Microsoft Partner / 3^rd party BPM products that integrate perfectly with MOSS.

Business Intelligence

 

The prime motive of Business Intelligence is to provide ways to use the business data in as much intuitive ways as possible. The idea is to get the business stake holders better picture of the current happening in the business, so that they can analyze the information and make better decision with help of this information. In order to provide this ability, features like Key Performance Indicators (KPI), reporting, charts, etc must be readily available. Business Intelligence was somewhat present in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in the form of Office 2003 web parts adding components and Business Score Card Manager 2005.MOSS take this to next level by provide much wider landscape for BI, for example with MOSS you have platform, with which you can create dash boards and integrate them, with other technologies like Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (see figure 2.5). One of the key components for BI in MOSS is Excel Services 2007 which allows better sharing of speared sheets, interactive GUI and better reusability of spread sheet models using server base calculation service.

We will present complete step by step usage of all the above mentioned features in the future articles. BI is one of most promising field and can give great results if setup and use properly.

What's Next

In the next article, we will provide overview of Search functionality in MOSS. In MOSS, search has been improved by great magnitude, not only in quality but the amount of data sources you can search.As Microsoft acquires FAST , and released Search Server 2008, the Search is MOSS, is by no doubt, one of the most talk about area.

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