Introduction

In this appendix, we ll discuss Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Project Server 2007. We ll briefly discuss system requirements, installation, and configuration before moving on to performing common tasks.

Microsoft promotes the SharePoint Server as a platform to connect people, process and information. A key challenge of any large enterprise is to enhance communications among its employees. Often, the first few steps toward this goal are to implement telephony, mail services, and interoffice connectivity through a wide area network (WAN) or the Internet, and to deploy applications that employees can access. However, we have crossed the stage of basic networking and are moving on to an era of content management. Regular use of such business applications results in thousands of proposal documents, budget spreadsheets, presentations, and project files. Searching for a specific document across an enterprise is becoming a challenge often, multiple versions of documents exist without any version control, and information you are looking for is not available immediately. CIOs consider collaboration tools and workflow in an effort to improve communications among employees and enhance productivity.

SharePoint helps an organization to set up a powerful intranet built on the Windows Server platform, the Internet Information Services (IIS) Web Server platform, and a front-end comprising a simple Web interface or any of the popular Microsoft Office productivity tools, such as Word, Excel, and Project.

A project is defined as a set of interrelated activities and tasks required to create a product or service, or to achieve a specific result.