One of the challenges of an IT manager is to provide collaboration and document management services for employees.
Many years ago, Lotus Notes had an impressive package for document management, email and other services. However, today's advanced databases, Web applications, faster server hardware and affordable mass storage have created an even more powerful infrastructure for storing data and documents as well as information about people and other resources.
If you haven't considered document management or collaboration services for your organization lately, it's worth the time to investigate them. There is a good selection of collaboration, document management and enterprise search tools out there. Google has some products and there are open source products as well.
A simple Internet search on keywords like "collaboration software" or "document management software" yields links to a lot of other products that might meet your needs, but you might not find a suite of products as complete as Microsoft's SharePoint suite of products.
With SharePoint, Microsoft is positioning itself to provide services to other applications, such as Microsoft Exchange 2007, where SharePoint is attempting to replace Public Folders. The company has made other connections to SharePoint across its product line. Its System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is an enterprise-class backup and recovery product that is intelligent enough to back up SharePoint databases.
A
To continue reading for free, register below or login
To read more you must become a member of SearchWinIT.com
lthough people often think of SharePoint as a single product, it actually consists of two products: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The latter is commonly known as MOSS or SharePoint Server 2007.
SharePoint has a variety of functions for collaboration and document control via a series of Web interfaces. Figure 1 shows a simple SharePoint page offering various documents for download.
[IMAGE]
Figure 1: A simple SharePoint page offers various documents for download. (Click on image for enlarged view.)
Here are some SharePoint features that might have some value in your enterprise:
Setting up a basic site is fairly straightforward, but keep in mind that you'll need to use a SQL database. There are a lot of good templates as well as a SharePoint Designer 2007 package that allows advanced customization.
If you think SharePoint is worth looking at, get yourself an evaluation copy. Here are some places to find it:
In terms of licensing, SharePoint services can be installed on Windows Server 2003 Web Edition to function as front-end Web services, and the data storage component cannot be installed on Web Edition.
Gary Olsen is a systems software engineer for Hewlett-Packard in Global Solutions Engineering. He wrote Windows 2000: Active Directory Design and Deployment and co-authored Windows Server 2003 on HP ProLiant Servers. Olsen is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Server-File Systems.
