SharePoint Templates: Helpful tools in Hosted SharePoint Web Sites

Providing a starting point for the developers and the partner who look forward to build deeper solutions based on SharePoint hosting, the SharePoint Templates caters to the different business process needs in organization (irrespective of the size of the organizations). Fully compatible with the Microsoft office SharePoint designer 2007, the SharePoint Templates can actually be divided into two separate groups namely server admin templates and site admin templates. Providing out-of-the-box custom scenarios, the SharePoint Templates in SharePoint WSS 3.0 hosting can be applied in certain business tasks like sales campaign tracking or managing the helpdesk. Site admin templates are custom SharePoint Templates which can be easily installed into the template gallery by a SharePoint site administrator without requiring access to server administration. Server admin SharePoint Templates are site definitions. They enable tighter integration and increased functionality within Windows SharePoint Services platform. As against the Site admin templates their installation requires a server administrator.

The Application Templates which are out-of-the-box options and are pre-created can help you to start with your hosted SharePoint web site, or pages inside SharePoint Hosting Site. Easily applicable to the new pages, the SharePoint Templates and can be easily manipulated and changed, just like you do while building a SharePoint page from right from the scratch. The application templates also help to create web based applications which are capable of increasing the overall efficiency.

There are in total 40 SharePoint Templates created by Microsoft. These templates do not only save time but also increases the overall efficiency and also helps in the manipulation of the web parts (which are used to construct the SharePoint pages). The SharePoint templates are added or removed or can be edited according to your needs. All that you need to do is to identify your needs… You have a solution to your problem!

Source:- hostreview.com/

Microsoft Launches Online Exchange, SharePoint

Microsoft on Monday officially launched hosted versions of Exchange and SharePoint, two of its biggest on-premise cash cows, and continued to drive home the message that channel partners have nothing to fear from Microsoft's plan to move all its enterprise apps to the cloud.

Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are part of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which also includes Live Meeting and Office Communications Server, although the latter is still in beta and won't be available until next spring.

At a launch event in San Francisco, Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, said companies can reap cost savings of between 10 and 50 percent by moving to Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange services.

Microsoft's launch last month of the Windows Azure cloud-based development platform marked a significant step forward for Microsoft's Software Plus Services strategy, which blends on-premise software with Microsoft-hosted apps delivered over the Web from Microsoft's data centers, Elop said.

Microsoft has already sold more that 500,000 seats of Exchange Online since making it available to enterprises last year, but has also seen "a tremendous amount of interest" in BPOS from companies of all sizes, Elop said. More than 1500 companies have signed up for the Microsoft Partner Program for Microsoft Online Services since its launch in July, he added.

In July at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference, some solution providers were upset by the commission structure for BPOS as well as by Microsoft's revelation that it would take over control of billing customers.

Exchange Online is priced at $10 per user/month, SharePoint Online per user/month is $7.25. Office Communications Server Online will be $2.50 per user/month, and LiveMeeting will be $4.50 per user/month. Microsoft will offer these services in one-year automatically renewing agreements.

At the Monday launch event, Elop insisted that Microsoft has maintained "a deliberate dependence" on its partner ecosystem by offering VARs the chance to develop recurring revenue streams.

To illustrate what Elop described as the "absolutely overwhelming" channel response to Exchange and SharePoint Online, Microsoft had several partners on hand to discuss deployment scenarios. These case studies helped underscore Microsoft's mantra that VARs can adapt their business models by focusing on value-added migration and customization services.

"The whole world is changing. It requires change, but it's representative of what's going on in the market today," said Elop.

Adam Smith, director of marketing at Phase 2 International, a Honolulu, Hawaii-based solution provider, says in the current economic environment, his customers are finding it easier to pay a monthly subscription as opposed to a major one-time capital expenditure.

Smith admits that the Microsoft's WPC announcement was initially ominous for Microsoft hosting partners, but said the practical realities of deploying on-premise Microsoft apps quickly dissolved those fears.

"We've never had a customer who was satisfied with an out-of-the-box, Microsoft application," Smith said. "Every customer, without exception, has required some level of support, training, integration, or customization."

Source:- crn.com/

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.

Manage content and processes

Simplify compliance efforts and keep business information more secure through a comprehensive set of tools to manage and control electronic content. Streamline the everyday business processes that are a drain on organizational productivity by using electronic forms and out-of-the-box workflow processes that users can initiate, track, and participate in through familiar Microsoft Office applications, e-mail, or Web browsers.

* Control documents through detailed, extensible policy management. Define customized document management policies to control access rights at a per-item level, specify retention period and expiration actions, and track content through document-auditing settings. Policy integration with familiar client applications makes compliance transparent and easy for employees. Integration with Information Rights Management helps ensure that proprietary and confidential information is better protected even if it is not connected to a server.
* Centrally store, manage, and access documents across the enterprise. Organizations can store and organize all business documents and content in one central location, and users have a consistent mechanism to navigate and find relevant information. Default repository settings can be modified to add workflow, define retention policies, and add new templates and content types.
* Simplify Web content management. Provide easy-to-use functionality to create, approve, and publish Web content. Master Pages and Page Layouts provide reusable templates for a consistent look and feel. New functionality enables enterprises to publish content from one area to another (for example, from a collaborative site to a portal), or to cost-effectively manage multilingual delivery of content on multiple intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.
* Extend business processes across the organization. Forms Services–driven solutions make it possible to more securely and accurately collect information both inside and outside the organization without coding any custom applications. This information can then be integrated easily into line-of-business systems, stored in document libraries, used to start workflow processes, or submitted to Web services, thus avoiding duplicate effort and costly errors resulting from manual data entry.
* Streamline everyday business activities. Take advantage of workflows to automate and gain more visibility into common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. Integration with familiar Microsoft Office client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers simplifies the user experience. Organizations can easily modify the out-of-the-box processes or define their own processes using familiar Microsoft tools such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next generation Microsoft Office FrontPage) or Microsoft Visual Studio development system.

source:- office.microsoft.com/

Microsoft SharePoint gets search, file sharing features

Data capture vendor Captaris and security software developer Epok have developed add-ons to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007 that let users search on document images and securely extend file creation and sharing across corporate boundaries.

Captaris, best known for its RightFax software for distributing faxes, recently introduced the TIFF iFilter for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

The iFilter takes an image, scans it using optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and then stores it in SharePoint along with all its meta data. The resulting file is then available for discovery by SharePoint’s search engine.

IFilter components are used by Microsoft Indexing Service and other Microsoft Search-based products, such as SharePoint Portal Server, Windows SharePoint Services, Exchange Full Text Search and SQL Server FTS.

Captaris, which is in the process of being acquired by OpenText, thinks paper-centric industries benefit the most from its TIFF iFilter such as insurance, governments, health care and financial services.

The iFilter supports Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and works on both 32- and 64-bit versions of the Windows OS, SharePoint Server, and SQL Server.

The Captaris TIFF iFilter comes in three editions: Standard (for two core systems), Pro (four core systems) and Enterprise (unlimited cores).

Standard is priced starting at $299. Pro starts at $499, and Enterprise pricing will be announced before the end of the year.

SharePoint is Microsoft’s fastest growing enterprise software in its history and the company counts 100 million licenses and more than a $1 billion in revenue, according to figures released this summer. The platform also is attracting third-party vendors driven to plug some of the gaps in the platform.

Earlier versions of SharePoint had support for TIFF images, but it was dropped in the 2007 version of SharePoint. Microsoft released a Filter Pack for SharePoint in Dec. 2007, and specifically made apologies for the absence of the TIFF filter in the release.

Experts have also said that SharePoint has gaps in its access control story.

Epok in particular is attacking that need with an update to its cross-organization access management software called Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4. The platform extends user authentication to a company’s partners.

The 2.4 version breaks the restriction that only a user within a SharePoint domain can use Microsoft Office to create, edit, and then save documents directly into SharePoint.

Epok extends that capability to any Office user in any domain as long as they have the needed access rights.

The upgrades also include a reporting system that can show such facts as who has access to a document and when the document expires. And a mouse over feature on user icons shows additional access details and expiration dates.

Epok can automatically enforce those expiration data on a user’s access to certain documents while maintaining the user’s overall access rights.

“SharePoint is creating a control problem and what we see is a huge demand wave for extranet access,” says Nigel Simmons, vice president of product management.

Epok also takes maintenance of permissions for access controls out of the hands of IT and put them in the hands of business users.

In addition, the system can be configured to require users to view and/or acknowledge certain contractual obligations related to data such as non-disclosure agreements.

The Epok Edition for SharePoint version 2.4 is priced at $25,000 per server.

Source:- networkworld.com/