Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2007 Bible

Exploring Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, or MOSS 2007 is the third release of Microsoft’s portal offering. You may have heard that Microsoft products hit their stride in the third release. Having worked with SharePoint since the first release (SharePoint Portal Server 2001), we believe that Microsoft has stayed true to form, releasing a robust, mature, and feature-rich portal platform in this version.

You can find many definitions of portal in the marketplace, but because this book is focused on Microsoft’s portal offering, we will share the Microsoft definition with you:

A portal is a central Web site that can be used to organize and distribute company information. The portal components in MOSS 2007 provide technology to facilitate connections between people within the organization who have the required skills, knowledge, and project experience. Some of the portal-specific features provided in MOSS are:

• User profiles: Each user has a set of attributes, such as a phone number or workgroup, which constitutes a user profile. Users can control which attributes in their user profile can be viewed by others. In addition, user profiles can be used when creating audiences to control content viewing.

• Audiences: An audience is a group of users defined based on their user profiles. Portal content can be targeted to specific audiences.

• Content targeting: The portal content that appears is customized depending on the group membership or SharePoint ...