Collaboration, Portal and Document Management Solution Quick Starts

SharePoint has taken the world by storm, becoming the fastest growing server product in Microsoft history and the most widely used platform for enterprise collaboration, portal and document management solutions.

With the release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS), this integrated set of technologies is emerging as a core delivery platform for business productivity solutions.

MOSS is unique in its “all inclusive” approach that combines six software tools and services into one integrated platform for a very low price.

The diagram on the right illustrates some of the key components of MOSS.

Business Benefits
MOSS is enjoying a surge in popularity due to the unparalleled business benefits it provides to companies in the areas of productivity, knowledge and information management and operational efficiency. Some of these benefits include:

• Improved Information Worker Productivity: We all know how much time is wasted each day by employees looking for information and documents, figuring out where they are stored and if they have the latest version. MOSS search and document management features make it easy to store manage and find information. The Portal allows for a central location where all documents and links can be found and personal and team dashboards provide great time saving access to tools and information.
• Improved Communications and Collaboration: Communicating with employees and teams is a constant challenge in small and large organizations. Mass emails and printed memos are one way communications and are not very efficient. MOSS provides easy tools for dissemination of information like news, events, and announcements and for collaborative discussions in a way that is archived and visible by all.
• Empowering Business Users to Manage Sites and Content: MOSS content and document management features allow for a distributed management of site content and documents increasing speed of publishing and removing IT bottlenecks
• Help Meet Regulatory Requirements through Comprehensive Control Over Content:
  By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for
  business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can help ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively reducing litigation risk for your organization.
• Accelerate Shared Business Processes across Organizational Boundaries: Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic forms–driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems to avoid redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.
• Provide a Single, Integrated Platform to Manage Intranet, Extranet, and Internet
  Applications across the Enterprise: MOSS is built on an open, scalable architecture, with
  support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The server has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.

To make the process simple, we grouped the most commonly requested services together to allow for a phased implementation according to the following three base Quick Start Packages:

• Bronze Package: Includes the Plan phase
• Silver Package: Includes Plan, Launch and Leverage for one solution
• Gold Package: Includes everything in the Silver Package plus the following additional services: custom branding and design, content migration of up to 200 documents into the new system, two (2) additional training days and a short user manual