SharePoint Technologies provide a logical framework, based off web part technology, to easily create sites by non-programmers and developers to share critical business information easily and quickly. Microsoft's SharePoint Technologies are comprised of two different flavors: Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Both solutions bring its users the following benefits:
Team Collaboration
SharePoint is an easy to use medium to build collaborative sites based on web parts to share data, files, and information. Since everything is accessed and done through your web browser and other productivity tools like Microsoft Office 2007, work is made easier and familiar.
Alerts
Users can automatically mark documents, libraries, list items, or entire lists provide real-time alerts to send updates via email when content is added, deleted, or updated.
Audience Targeting
Both SharePoint technologies works with your existing Windows-based security schema and provides the ability to target specific pages, libraries, lists and web parts to a filtered audience.
Search
The SharePoint technologies search capabilities provide users with the ability to look for the information they request and find it quickly. This intuitive search mechanism checks for filenames, page content, external content sources, and even content within uploaded documents and files!
Web Part Framework
A web part is a Microsoft ASP.NET server control that serves a particular purpose, such as displaying data from a spreadsheet or streaming stock quotations from an online Web service. Web parts are inserted in web part zones within web part pages. Web part zones are containers for web parts that group and organize web parts and provide a set of properties that configure the web parts in that zone. Web part pages consolidate data and web content through web part zones to create dynamic information portals.
While custom web parts can be created, powerful existing web parts come out of the box including:
| § Document Libraries |
| § Picture Libraries |
| § Lists |
| § Calendar |
| § Wikis |
| § Blogs |
| § Surveys |
| § Discussion Threads | |