Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs like managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling better informed decisions. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all of the intranets, extranets, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems.

Improve Business Insight
Effectively monitor business drivers, empower better informed decisions throughout the organization, and proactively respond to important business events.
• Present business-critical information in one central location. Create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business information from disparate sources by using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies.
• Instantly connect people with information. SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates people and business data along with documents and Web pages to provide more comprehensive results.
• Share business data broadly while helping to protect sensitive information. Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides access to data and analytics in real time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser.
• Leverage your unstructured business networks to drive better decisions. Employees can use new knowledge management tools to get the most from their powerful unstructured business networks, both inside and outside their organizations, thereby connecting with people more quickly and efficiently.
• Unlock business data. Out-of-the-box connectors provide accessibility to data in SAP and Siebel systems. The Business Data Catalog allows structured data from line-of-business applications to be integrated into SharePoint in multiple ways through Web Parts, lists, people profiles, and search.

Simplify Internal and External Collaboration
Share knowledge, find information, and collaborate more easily and securely both within and across organizational boundaries. Leverage your partners and customers and utilize your personal people-networks to connect to other people effectively.
• Enhance customer and partner relationships. With smart, standards-based, electronic-forms-driven solutions, you can collect business information from customers and partners through a Web browser.
• Ubiquitous Enterprise Search. Enterprise Search in Office SharePoint Server 2007 has great relevance and incorporates enterprise content such as people and business data, along with documents and Web pages, to provide more comprehensive results.
• Work when and where you want. With offline access to Office SharePoint Server 2007 lists and document libraries, you can free yourself from limitations of corporate network connectivity.
• Connect and share knowledge. New knowledge management tools empower employees to create and leverage people networks, both inside and outside their organizations, so they can connect and share knowledge more quickly and efficiently with other people.
• Personalize operations. My Sites provide a totally personalized experience for users, with a dedicated site for each user. Each site can be used to store, present, view, and manage content, information, and applications in a controlled fashion.

Empower IT to Make a Strategic Impact
Increase responsiveness of IT to business needs and reduce the number of platforms to maintain by supporting all intranets, extranets, and Web applications across the enterprise with one integrated platform.
• Get enhanced interoperability support. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on a scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Office SharePoint Server 2007 also has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents.
• Enable IT to focus on more strategic tasks. Users can now create sites, initiate workflows, self-provision applications, access back-end data, define security at a per-item level, restore deleted items, and complete other tasks without involving IT.
• Simplify deployment, management, and system administration. Managing a Web server farm, deploying new pieces of content, and managing synchronization across those sites is now much simpler.
• Robust system monitoring, usage tracking, and monitoring tools. These tools help isolate and solve problems faster and improve the operational efficiency of the system infrastructure.