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Should you care about SharePoint?

By Michael Osterman 27 Apr 2005 | SearchExchange.com Digg This!     StumbleUpon     Del.icio.us

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint comes in two flavors:

• Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) is a group of services for Windows Server 2003 that provides document collaboration, information-sharing, list creation, Web page creation and related services. It is intended primarily for workgroups, departments and other small groups of users to collaborate on a set of documents, share information and otherwise collaborate.

• SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is a superset of WSS that allows an enterprise to create a portal for aggregating information from various sources and share applications. It also provides single sign-on capabilities, as well as indexing and search functionality, across a wide variety of servers and applications. It is designed for larger enterprises at which there might be several WSS sites that need to exchange information, and where users are part of different workgroups.

WSS is available at no cost for users of Windows Server 2003; a license for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with five client access licenses (CALs) is $5,619 at retail. In volume, the server license is $3,999 per server plus $71 per CAL. A connector license designed for an unlimited number of non-employees is $30,000 per server. However, Microsoft is known to heavily discount, so these prices should be regarded as the high end of what you'd have to pay.

In a nutshell, SharePoint is Microsoft's vision for how users should share documents, maintain version control for these documents, receive customized and relevant information specific to individual users' needs, publish Web-based documents and access a variety of intranet- and extranet-based resources.

Should you care about information-sharing and collaboration?

Many companies can benefit from the ability for users to collaborate electronically and share information more effectively.

Traditional information-sharing processes are becoming more expensive and problematic. Maintaining version control for documents, a perennial problem, is also becoming more difficult to manage. And having access to the right information at the right time is increasingly critical.

Collaboration technologies that allow users to share information and documents, maintain version control for these documents, and create information sources for teams and workgroups, are extremely valuable and critical to business function. Adding presence -- the ability to collaborate and share information in real time -- is also a major benefit.

For example, let's say a marketing team is working on a product launch. That marketing team would need to work with:

Reference Center: SharePoint tips and resources

Tags: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server,  VIEW ALL TAGS

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