So why are people flocking to SharePoint 2007?

May 12, 2008

By flocking, I mean that “the vast majority of enterprises — 96% — are considering, planning on, in the process of, or have already completed deploying at least some part of Microsoft Office System server software. And most of those — 87% — plan to implement or upgrade to Microsoft Office System server software within the next 12 months” and that’s from Forrester (see the free Forrester research document titled “Topic Overview: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007”, by Kyle McNabb and Rob Koplowitz, dated April 24, 2008)!

It’s easy to see why SharePoint 2007 is such a strong contender in the enterprise collaboration space, when you realize that it combines messaging, social computing, real time collaboration and virtual team workspaces.

I am currently working on developing a plan and strategy for collaboration for a client and it’s all about leveraging the power of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (SharePoint 2007) to increase employee productivity and connect seamlessly to people, knowledge and data to help employees make better informed decisions so that they can serve their customers more effectively.

SharePoint 2007 provides blogs and wikis as site templates so that you can easily create those as needed. The People Finder can help you locate people based on different directory level attributes and the neat thing is you can find people based on skills or expertise that they have specified in their user profiles. People and group lists are readily accessible depending on user privileges and presence information is available as well. Real Time Presence and Communication is enabled wherever the real-time presence smart tag icon displays. In conjunction with Live Meeting 2007, Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, this makes for a very powerful collaboration tool.

In the messaging space, the tight integration between Outlook 2007, Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007 allows you to take offline an entire library so you can work disconnected from the network. Also your SharePoint tasks can display right alongside your Outlook tasks. Alerts that you set up on your SharePoint site automatically send you email notifications. Discussion boards are email enabled so users can save their email as part of a threaded discussion. Also, lists and libraries can be email enabled so as to allow users to email a document directly into a library. There is an RSS viewer web part with which you can subscribe to an RSS feed. Furthermore, every list and library in SharePoint 2007 is RSS enabled, so you can subscribe to the contents of a list or library via RSS.

When it comes to virtual team workspaces, SharePoint 2007 provides several different site templates out of the box. Apart from this, Microsoft has released 40 site templates that cater to commonly used functionality such as vacation scheduling, contacts list management, etc. Furthermore, it is very easy to create a custom site template – once you configure your site to work just the way you want, you can easily save that as a site template so you can now reuse that as needed. These virtual team workspaces provide a repository for lists of items, libraries of documents, announcements, online calendars, surveys, task and issue lists, project tasks list with Gantt chart functionality, and task coordination using simple workflows. Lists and libraries can enforce security at the item level and they also provide versioning, explicit check in/check out, content approval before publishing, etc. These team workspaces can be also be secured at an individual or group level. SharePoint 2007 makes it possible to easily create no-code, declarative, sequential workflows based on business rules using the SharePoint Designer 2007 tool. Combine SharePoint 2007 with Groove 2007 for collaborating across organizational boundaries, whether connected or offline and now you have an even more compelling scenario of use.

So all in all, it makes sense that the adoption of SharePoint 2007 is so pervasive!

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