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Differentiating the Business Value of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services

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Microsoft customers and partners have asked for more information that differentiates and more clearly articulates the business value of Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Prior to the release of solutions like Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server, many Microsoft customers relied on traditional file servers for working on documents, long-term document storage, and software distribution. While file servers enabled basic file sharing, file servers created a number of problems such as discoverability, security and policy management.

Windows SharePoint Services addresses the problems with file servers by providing project teams with secure, easy-to-customize solutions for collaborating on documents, tasks, team calendars and custom lists – all of the data and information for a project; not only the ability to share documents. Windows SharePoint Services includes SharePoint site templates for creating team and project-based collaboration sites, document workspace sites and meeting workspace sites that are easily customized and deeply integrated with Microsoft Office 2003 applications such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft FrontPage, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server is an intelligent, enterprise portal solution that connects people, teams, and information. SharePoint Portal Server provides a central place for a person to access, manage, share and interact with relevant information, documents, applications and other people. It enables quicker and better decisions, more effective sharing across teams and more streamlined business processes.

The primary goal of SharePoint Portal Server is to aggregate or bring together, in a role and task relevant way, all of the diverse sources of knowledge and information available inside and outside an organization. This includes connecting people, teams and projects with the knowledge, information and data they've created in a way that makes them easy to find, retrieve and re-use in a familiar way.

SharePoint Portal Server delivers unique business value by enabling information workers to seamlessly connect users, teams, projects, knowledge and information by means of a familiar, integrated user experience and mainstream platform. The key benefit is enabling people to work more efficiently across an organization.

SharePoint Portal Server delivers business value that reaches across an enterprise to make the overall organization operate more effectively and more efficiently. This is different from the business value that Windows SharePoint Services provides to a person working to complete an individual task or a team working to complete the deliverables for a project.

To better understand and appreciate SharePoint Portal Server's unique business value, it is best to consider the following enterprise scenarios that SharePoint Portal Server was designed to support:

  • Organizing, finding and using knowledge and information – making it easier to locate and re-use knowledge and information wherever it might be stored
  • Collaborating across teams – enabling people to make decisions and complete project deliverables more easily and in less time
  • Streamlining business processes – through common access to back-end enterprise applications and integration of data and information across those applications

When organizations deploy SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services, some organizations choose to deploy Windows SharePoint Services first followed by SharePoint Portal Server ("bottom up) while organizations with established practices for encouraging and managing the creation and re-use of knowledge by their employees will deploy SharePoint Portal Server as an integrated solution with Windows SharePoint Services ("top down").

SharePoint Portal Server supports the ability to deploy a "top down" solution especially in the case where an organization has existing corporation taxonomies for organizing people, information and documents, Web sites and any other information or source of information inside or outside the organization. Alternatively, organizations can choose a "bottoms up" strategy where Windows SharePoint Services is deployed first and the sites and content are aggregated into SharePoint Portal Server as a second phase of the project.

Built on top of Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 delivers unique business value when compared to Windows SharePoint Services as well as other systems for organizing, indexing, searching, accessing, reporting and working with all the information in your organization – regardless of whether the information is stored on file servers, Web sites, other document storage systems or line-of-business applications. SharePoint Portal Server also provides unique features for locating people with specific domain knowledge and expertise.

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