How SharePoint and SOA Fit Together

What do you get when you take SharePoint, a wildly popular product, and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a widely misunderstood but sought after technique for improving the agility of an IT department, and put them into a single article? Hopefully you get a popular article where people poke their heads in to learn if this is another combination like peanut butter and chocolate, or if it's more akin to spinach and strawberries.

Top 10 Benefits of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 provides an integrated suite of easy-to-use server applications that boost organizational effectiveness and optimize the way that people, content, processes, and business applications interact. Here are the top 10 ways Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help your organization:

1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. Employees can easily use services to accomplish business activities without having to depend on IT staff.

2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
Take advantage of OOB workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business processes such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection—without any coding. Modifying and extending these OOB processes is made easy through tools like Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005/2008 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
Help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively—and reduce litigation risk for your organization—by specifying retention and auditing policies for business records in accordance with compliance regulations. IRM and the content control mechanisms help protect proprietary and confidential information, even when users aren’t connected to a server.

4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
Business users can easily author content for Web sites and submit it for approval and scheduled deployment to the Internet. Managing multilingual content is simplified in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 through new document library templates specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original and translated versions of a document.

5. Simplify organization-wide access to structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
Give users access to business data in common LOB systems like SAP and Siebel through OOB connectors in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized interactions with business systems by dragging predefined, configurable back-end connections. Managed document repositories help organizations store and organize business documents in one central location.

6. Connect people with information and expertise.
SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data with information about people, documents, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Rich search functionality like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improves the relevance of the results and helps users easily find what they need within the search results.

7. Accelerate business processes and maintain control of your electronic forms environment.
Use smart, electronic forms-driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser without coding any custom applications. Built-in data validation rules help you accurately and consistently gather data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems, avoiding redundancy and errors resulting from manual data re-entry.

8. Share business data while preserving its consistency and helping to protect sensitive information.
Give employees access to real-time, interactive Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central, up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents.

9. Facilitate better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
Make it easy to create live, interactive BI portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, KPIs, and business data connectivity technologies. Centralized Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.

10. Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has an open, scalable, services-oriented architecture that provides support for interoperability standards including XML and SOAP, which makes it easier to integrate with existing processes and applications. You also get powerful, IT-focused tools and templates for building and extending applications that incorporate business system information and integrated workflow.

Managing team based SharePoint development scenarios

If you are starting on a SharePoint development you will need to start thinking about how you will manage and provide a team based development environment for building and deploying solutions for SharePoint. Even in a scenario where you are about to deploy a medium SharePoint environment then you will need to address the following points in order to cater for a team based development approach. If you are a jack of all trades developer who does everything you can stop reading now. But in most cases organisations will have a number of developers working together to build and develop solutions to be deployed to SharePoint.

Team-Based Development in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Summary: Learn to properly conduct team-environment development of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites and assemblies (Web Parts, site templates, custom list templates), as well as develop Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer artifacts (master pages, workflows, CSS sheets). (13 printed pages)

Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites (Part 1 of 3): Understanding Web Content Management and the Default Features

Summary: This article discusses topics that you should understand before you use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create sites that support Web content management (WCM) and gives a general overview of the various artifacts that are available in the product. (11 printed pages)

The Case for SharePoint Applications

I have been spending some time on the idea of using SharePoint as an application hosting platform, as opposed to using regular ASP.NET applications. Some solutions are a great fit for this, others are not. My main goal is to describe some pros and cons, in order to help make the decision between the two frameworks. Please note that, although I have invested some time on looking into this, this is not an official Microsoft position on the matter, just my personal view.

Automate Web App Deployment with the SharePoint API

In this article, we will show you how to automate custom SharePoint application deployments by taking advantage of the SharePoint API. Following this approach allows you to avoid having to create and maintain a custom site definition. You benefit from a more modular set of components to deploy and manage in your source control system, which is an essential part of a continuous integration effort. Finally, you are following a model that Microsoft will continue to improve in the coming years.

Integrating SharePoint with other portals and applications

As more and more companies get past the pilot stage with their SharePoint 2007 deployments and start broad roll-outs in early 2008, there will likely be a significant increase in the need to integrate SharePoint with other portals and applications. We've already seen an increase of integration and interoperability related inquiries and escalations from our customer teams in the field. I was just about to draft a blog entry, outlining the various integration options provided by SharePoint, when a few people pointed out to me that there was already an excellent post by Jose Barreto, who was an Enterprise Systems Architect prior to taking his current role as Technical Evangelist for the Microsoft Storage Partners Team. Although you can find some fairly useful content by doing a search for "sharepoint integration" or visiting our Interoperability Center for MOSS 2007, I like the way that Jose has laid out all of the integration options in a logical and succinct fashion in his blog entry, which he has given me permission to repost in its entirety below.

Windows security groups vs. SharePoint groups

Often the SharePoint security discussions often go about Windows security groups vs. SharePoint groups. Essentially they both have a different meaning.

SharePoint and Cascading Style Sheets: How to update, change and reference

One of the more powerful tools in user interface (UI) customization is cascading style sheets (CSS). CSS allows you to control the display of numerous items from one central location or central group of files. Through a series of selectors and corresponding declarations, the display of nearly any item can be modified on screen.

Branding Sharepoint Portal Server for your own company

Branding a SharePoint Portal Server

SharePoint Branding - How CSS works with master pages

Deploying ASP.NET Web Applications in the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 _layouts Folder

Google Sites the Next Sharepoint? Maybe Not....Why Google Apps Could Lose the Enterprise Market

Branding in SharePoint Technologies

With SharePoint Technologies (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 collectively referred to as) entering the mainstream development arena on the Microsoft platform, it is imperative for decision-makers to decide upon a strategy for adopting this technology.

Web Content Management Links and Resources

This page contains links and resources specific to Web Content Management (WCM). WCM part of a larger Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy that's part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. MOSS is built on top of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3.

SharePoint Resources

This is an index of resources for SharePoint products and technologies

Windows SharePoint Services Resource Center Map

Use the Windows SharePoint Services Resource Center Map to find links to Resource Centers with how-to, community, and developer information aboutSharePoint features, common tasks, and issues.

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	Administration Find articles, how-to topics, references, downloads, blog and forum entries, and other resources for administration-oriented development in Windows SharePoint Services.
	Pages and User Interface Find technical articles, developer documentation, multimedia presentations, blog entries, and download content to support user interface customization in Windows SharePoint Services.
	Provisioning Find technical articles, developer documentation, multimedia presentations, blog entries, and download content to support the services included in Windows SharePoint Services that help you customize the provisioning of SharePoint sites and lists.
	Security Find articles, webcasts, references, code samples, downloads, blog entries, forum entries, and other resources for Security development in Windows SharePoint Services.
	Web Parts Find technical articles, developer documentation, multimedia presentations, blog entries, and download content to support the Web Parts included in Windows SharePoint Services.