Welcome to the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 Bible. We are so excited about this release of the SharePoint technologies as there is a great deal that is included with this product that the realm of what is possible is enormous. Web content management, records management, workflow, and business intelligence as well as scenarios for collaboration, Internet publishing, document lifecycle management, and reporting are all available on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 platform. But such a wide range of capabilities can also make it hard to define how you want to install, configure and use SharePoint for your needs.

Although the word has been dropped from the product title, SharePoint is still a portal product. A portal that is the window to the workings of your company. As with any other window, what you see through it will vary whether it be an outdated, untidy, difficult to enter room (or stagnant, poorly organized, hard to use data) or a vibrant, active, well-informed community (or dynamic, informative, well-organized, easy to use data). The first vision will result in a portal that is not used and will be replaced in an organization sooner or later. The second vision is what SharePoint is all about and our goal in writing this book is to help you find that vision for your organization.

SharePoint is also a technology platform that can be configured and customized to play a number of roles in your organization. For Microsoft, SharePoint has been a fast growing product in terms of revenue and number of seats sold since the release in 2001, which means that there is a good chance that SharePoint is available as a toolset for you to use as an information worker, systems architect or developer. Once you have established that you have SharePoint at your fingertips, you know that you have an extensible platform with which you can wow your audience and achieve many objectives. In this book, we have tried to not only provide a reference for the SharePoint components but also implementation examples for how you might want to use SharePoint. Whether you are deploying SharePoint in a small or large organization or as an Internet, intranet or extranet deployment, we hope that you will find the answers to your questions as well as be inspired by examples of what SharePoint can do for you within these pages.