Microsoft ® Office 2007 Business Intelligence

5.1. What Is a SharePoint Portal?

SharePoint 2007, also known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS), is truly different than previous versions of SharePoint from Microsoft. Earlier versions of SharePoint required significant work by SharePoint programmers to get the site up and running, whereas SharePoint 2007 comes ready to do work out of the box. We are most interested in the new Reports site, which is really a dashboard that includes Excel spreadsheets (we'll call them reports in this chapter) and Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs for short.

But first, let's define what we mean when using the term SharePoint portal. A portal is really just an Internet (World Wide Web, external) or intranet (within your organization) web site location ...