A sneak preview of SharePoint 2007 Server

Earlier, I tried my hands playing little bit with SharePoint 2001. Not really satisfied with it, I finally settled with SharePoint 2003 server. After creating lot of portals, customizing these portals with SharePoint SDK; I realized that there are some missing features in it. With these features in my mind, I tried to evaluate SharePoint 2007 server. And I was not at all surprised when I found that all these features are present in SharePoint 2007. In addition to this, it adds so many promising features in it which we have not dreamt still. Yeah, I mean it. :)
So, let’s look at some of the promising key features offered by SharePoint 2007.

It is called as Office SharePoint Portal 2007 Server. It is essentially a suite of server applications. It actually gives you a single integrated platform to manage intranet, extranet and internet applications of your organization.
1.Portals:
It includes lot of new project templates and drag-n-drop kind of tool to manage sites. It is called as Site Manager. It has introduced lot of new web parts like Social Networking for instance. It helps social networking within the organization and it can be also integrated with Active Directory. Some other web parts are: membership web parts, document roll-up web part, privacy control web part etc.
Liberal use of Smart Tags for real-time communication indicates which users are online and available with which communication modes. In addition to enhancements in user profiles and notification services, it also provides LDAP pluggable provider.
2.Mobile Device Support
By default, all the SharePoint portal sites can be also rendered on both International and North American mobile devices
3.Content Management:
With the new components for Document Management, you can now easily define and enforce document workflow. It can be easily integrated with Office 2007. This component provides various built-in templates for document management.
SP 2007 introduces new features and capabilities to maintain records in your organization. Audit and Policy features allows you to interact with record repository and do lot of other stuff which still needs to be explored. :(
4.Workflows:
It allows you to streamline form based business processes. It uses InfoPath 2006. The new server called as Office Forms Server 2007, allows you to design web-enabled forms in Office InfoPath and distribute it. There are lot of other features with respect to forms in it.
5.Search:
The search component available with SP2007 seems to be revamped completely in altogether a new form. You can now search for people or their expertise. It is possible to search data in LOP applications. And yes as always, you can also extend the search capabilities by adding your own cent to it. ;)
6.Business Intelligence:
Just like Reporting Services, you can access the Excel workbooks on the web. One can have these workbooks interactive with the usage of macros if you want. What is more interesting is that Excel services provide model based on web service. There are tones of new features added in to this section. Other features include: Report Center sites, Excel Service management, dashboards etc.

Charged up? Good. Now, if you want to install it on your machine then check out the OS. Bad luck for W2K users as it is not supported on W2K. But if you want you can try installing Virtual Servers if you want. It requires XP with SP2 or Windows.NET Server..oops I mean Widnows 2003 server.

So, with latest version of ASP.NET, liberal use of AJAX and support for cool features (some of them are mentioned above), be prepared to experiece the cold breeze of air in the hot summer. ;)

Cheers,
Amol.