MOSS in a nutshell

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

The Office SharePoint Servers can be broken down into 6 functional areas:

• Collaboration: Help keep teams connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information users need to make more well-informed decisions within their jobs. Windows SharePoint products and technologies include collaboration and community, document life cycle capabilities, alters, task notifications, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the basic Web-based user interface, and navigation.
• Portal: The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites.
• Search: The search component has been significantly enhanced in this release. The new features provide a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, new functions to search for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications, and improved manageability and extensibility.
• Enterprise Content Management: Windows SharePoint Services provides core document management functionality: major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the document library, folder, and individual document levels. Office 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.
• Forms Driven Business Process: Streamline forms-driven business processes with easy-to-use, intelligent, XML-based electronic forms that integrate smoothly with existing systems. This security-enhanced, client/server platform provides rapid solution creation and deployment, centralizes form management and maintenance, and helps to extend business processes to customers, partners, and suppliers.
• Business Intelligence: Provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control, and reuse business information in order to make better business decisions. The BI features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide Web and programmatic access to published Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets, programmatic reuse of critical line-fo-business data, and easy development of Web-based BI dashboards that can incorporate rich, data-bound key performance indicators (KPIs), Web Parts, and published spreadsheets.