SharePoint® 2007 and Office Development Expert Solutions

Chapter 1. What's New for Developers in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007?

Microsoft's SharePoint technologies provide the foundation for collaboration and communication for information workers. The first releases of SharePoint technologies in 2001 have undergone several substantial revisions, and the technology has moved from a productivity tool supporting a limited set of scenarios to a full-fledged platform for developers to build enterprise-class applications.

The core components of the SharePoint technology stack are Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. In this first chapter we cover what's new for developers in SharePoint and Office and focus on some key scenarios that developers are going to need to know about. This chapter will help to provide a roadmap for the rest of the book and help you envision some of the possible uses for the Office and SharePoint platforms as a developer. Because the integration between Microsoft Office 2007 and SharePoint is such a critical component of the technology, we discuss feature sets in Office that enable developers to build solutions on the platform. Most of these areas are new to the Office 2007 release.

To understand the SharePoint technology platform and the benefits to developers, this chapter covers the following key areas:

• Portal services in SharePoint

• Search

• Document and content management

• Workflow integration

In each of these areas we'll expand the topic to focus on integration ...