Office SharePoint Server 2007 is the basis for an integrated suite of server applications that improves organisational effectiveness by:

• Managing content comprehensively, to derive increased business value from information assets.
• Accelerating internal and external shared business processes.
• Efficiently finding and accessing information to drive better-informed decisions.
• Sharing business information with greater confidence within and outside organisational boundaries.
• Providing IT with a single, integrated, extensible platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the organisation

Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on the Windows SharePoint Services platform to help organisations integrate business processes and applications through a full set of collaboration and personalization features for information workers. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, companies can aggregate, search, share, and target content in a more efficient way.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.

• Business users gain greater control over the storage, security, distribution, and management of their electronic content, with tools that are easy to use and tightly integrated into familiar, everyday applications.
• Organisations can accelerate shared business processes with customers and partners across organisational boundaries using Forms Services-driven solutions.
• Information workers can find information and people efficiently and easily through the facilitated information-sharing functionality and simplified content publishing. In addition, access to back-end data is achieved easily through a browser, and views into this data can be personalized.
• Administrators have powerful tools at their fingertips that ease deployment, management, and system administration, so they can spend more time on strategic tasks. Using the Office SharePoint Server 2007 out-of-the-box workflows frees IT staff from having to write server-side code. 

Here are 10 ways Office SharePoint Server 2007 can help your organisation.

1. Provide a simple, familiar, and consistent user experience.
   Office SharePoint Server 2007 is tightly integrated with familiar client desktop applications, e-mail, and Web browsers to provide a consistent user experience that simplifies how people interact with content, processes, and business data. This tight integration, coupled with robust out-of-the-box functionality, helps you employ services themselves and facilitates product adoption.
2. Boost employee productivity by simplifying everyday business activities.
   Take advantage of out-of-the-box workflows for initiating, tracking, and reporting common business activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. You can complete these activities without any coding. Tight integration with familiar client applications, e-mail, and Web browsers provide you with a simple, consistent experience. Modifying and extending these out-of-the-box workflow processes is made easy through tools like Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 (the next release of Microsoft Office FrontPage).
3. Help meet regulatory requirements through comprehensive control over content.
   By specifying security settings, storage policies, auditing policies, and expiration actions for business records in accordance with compliance regulations, you can ensure your sensitive business information can be controlled and managed effectively. And you can reduce litigation risk for your organisation. Tight integration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 with familiar desktop applications means that policy settings are rendered onto client applications in the Microsoft Office system, making it simpler for employees to be aware of and comply with regulatory requirements.
4. Effectively manage and repurpose content to gain increased business value.
   Business users and content authors can create and submit content for approval and scheduled deployment to intranet or Internet sites. Managing multilingual content is simplified through new document library templates that are specifically designed to maintain a relationship between the original version and different translations of a document.
5. Simplify organisation-wide access to both structured and unstructured information across disparate systems.
   Give your users access to business data in common line-of-business systems like SAP and Siebel through out-of-the-box connectors in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can also create personalized views and interactions with business systems through a browser by dragging and dropping predefined, configurable back-end connections. Enterprise-wide Managed Document Repositories help your organisations store and organise business documents in one central location.
6. Connect people with information and expertise.
   Office SharePoint Enterprise Search incorporates business data along with information about documents, people, and Web pages to produce comprehensive, relevant results. Features like duplicate collapsing, spelling correction, and alerts improve the relevance of the results so you can easily find what you need.
7. Accelerate shared business processes across organisational boundaries.
   Without coding any custom applications, you can use smart, electronic forms-driven solutions to collect critical business information from customers, partners, and suppliers through a Web browser. Built-in data validation rules help you gather accurate and consistent data that can be directly integrated into back-end systems avoiding redundancy and errors that result from manual data re-entry.
8. Share business data without divulging sensitive information.
   Give your employees access to real-time, interactive Microsoft Office Excel 2007 spreadsheets from a Web browser through Excel Services running on Office SharePoint Server 2007. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one central and up-to-date version while helping to protect any proprietary information embedded in the documents (such as financial models).
9. Enable better-informed decisions by presenting business-critical information in one central location.
   Office SharePoint Server 2007 makes it easy to create live, interactive business intelligence (BI) portals that assemble and display business-critical information from disparate sources, using integrated BI capabilities such as dashboards, Web Parts, scorecards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and business data connectivity technologies. Centralised Report Center sites give users a single place for locating the latest reports, spreadsheets, or KPIs.
10. Provide a single, integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet, and Internet applications across the enterprise.
    Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on an open, scalable architecture, with support for Web services and interoperability standards including XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The server has rich, open application programming interfaces (APIs) and event handlers for lists and documents. These features provide integration with existing systems and the flexibility to incorporate new non-Microsoft IT investments.