Microsoft Solutions: Competencies - Portals & Collaboration

Portal sites connect your people to business critical information, expertise, and applications. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) is a world class Enterprise Portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business.

1. Connect your people to information and expertise

Quick, easy access to critical information and expertise means better decisions and more rigorous execution.

• A comprehensive portal framework makes it easy to build portal sites that meet the specific requirements of your audience. A flexible, highly scalable architecture supports personal, divisional, intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.
• Integrated web content management makes customizing site look-and-feel easy. Powerful authoring features simplify content contribution. Centrally managed site design, publishing and deployment capabilities seamlessly integrate cutting-edge web content management into the overall portal platform.
• Cutting-edge social networking technology makes finding and managing expertise easier than ever before.

2. Connect your people to key business applications

Consolidated access to existing business applications drives consistent performance of common business tasks. Streamlined development of new composite applications can lead to order of magnitude improvements in important business processes.

• A sophisticated application development environment shortens development time for highly customized business applications.
• A comprehensive application integration framework allows you to quickly assemble composite applications from existing systems.
• State-of-the-art application governance features provide fine-grained control over the application execution environment.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server delivers a rich development environment for assembling composite
application from services provided by line-of-business systems.

3. Connect your people to role-specific resources

Personalized information delivery increases the relevance and value of information.

• Audience targeting features allow information owners to decide how, when and where specific audiences consume their information.
• The My Site personal site pulls together summary views of personal information, providing full control over information "for me, by me, and about me".
• Personalized information rollup allows users to create customized summaries of important information in the portal.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps your organization get more done by providing a platform for sharing information and working together in teams, communities and people-driven processes. Office SharePoint Server is an important part of the overall Microsoft collaboration vision and integrates with other collaborative products to offer a comprehensive infrastructure for working with others.

1. Improve team productivity

High performing teams are a key to better business results.

• Give users the ability to create and control their own collaborative workspaces. Make it easy for teams to adapt workspaces to the needs of the project.
• Manage projects more efficiently with the project task list template. Visualize task relationships and project status with automated Gantt charts.
• Coordinate teamwork with shared calendars, alerts and notifications. Connect team calendars to the desktop with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.
• Communicate with team members in context using presence and instant messaging.
• Make it easy to include and work with team members from outside the organization.

2. Author, review, and publish documents

Improvements in key document-centric processes produce better content in less time.

• Use document workspaces to streamline the document creation process.
• Enable disconnected participation with offline support.
• Manage the document lifecycle with integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities.

3. Streamline people-driven business processes

Improved communication and coordination in people-driven processes means more rigorous execution in traditionally hard-to-reach parts of the business.

• Deploy standard site templates to improve common people driven processes like issue tracking.
• Drive out process variation with workflow.
• Create collaborative applications using integrated application development capabilities.

4. Create, capture, and share community knowledge

Sharing best practices in expert communities drives awareness and adoption of business process innovation.

• Broadcast information with blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
• Capture community knowledge with wikis.
• Encourage dialogue with surveys and discussions.