We'reinclined not to quibble. SharePoint Services gives you a lot of things you may havefound yourself wishing for, things you couldn't have because you'd have to goto the trouble of rolling your own or fiddling with your infrastructure inorder to achieve them. And some of them might not be immediately apparent:SharePoint Services is touted as a document management system, and there's abuilt-in problem with that concept, because we all have a pretty fixed andmundane idea of what a document management system is. SharePoint's Web-centricorientation, however, gives it some unexpected punch, and may change your thinking.Here are some points to consider.
1. SharePoint extends Exchange Server
If you'reusing Exchange Server to handle your email traffic, SharePointcan greatly simplify distribution. You can create a SharePoint site as asingular point for receiving Exchange traffic and, at a stroke, have de factodistribution of that traffic to a particular group or groups, with all thesecurity and membership built-in. By setting up a public folder for SharePointin Exchange, Exchange's work is done—SharePoint pulls from the folder and doesthe work.
2. SharePoint collaboration solutions are scalable
It'swell-publicized by Microsoft that SharePoint Services is essentially acollaborative solution toolkit. Creating sites for team interaction, sharingand management of project-specific documents and files, testing, and othercollaborative functions are a natural application of SharePoint.
A lesshyped aspect of SharePoint is that this collaborative utility is highlyscalable. What begins as a resource library shared by a team can be readilytelescoped out to accommodate the entire organization or an even broadercustomer community—SharePoint Services can be readily deployed across multiple serversin a server farm, enabling the creation of massive data stores.
3. SharePoint sites are highly customizable
SharePointServices comes fully integrated with FrontPage2003, so all of FrontPage's WYSIWYG Web editing tools are available for usein crafting SharePoint sites. (If your organization swims in the deep end,development-wise, all of this comes with ASP.NETas well.)
ViaFrontPage, you can leverage the utility of Web Parts, modular chunks of codeyou can re-use in SharePoint sites, to grab live data from a broad range ofpossible sources (Also see #8). You can allow users to control these modules ofcode by inserting Web Part zones in your sites, enabling sophisticateddrag-and-drop controls. You have complete control over style through XSLT,which you can manipulate either directly or through FrontPage—and you canemploy conditional formatting if it desired.
4. SharePoint extends InfoPath
InfoPath2003 is Microsoft's desktop application technology for integrated formsmanagement and data transport. InfoPath is a powerful and underrated technologyin itself, and both its XML backbone and forms-friendliness mesh well withSharePoint.
Specifically,you’ll find it useful to publish InfoPath forms directly to a SharePointlibrary. In such a library, forms can be stored and (more importantly) shared, andaccessible to working teams leveraging SharePoint as a collaborative tool. (Thebase form is stored in the library header; populated XML result sets make upthe library itself.)
And withSharePoint Portal, you can leverage SharePoint Portal Web services to enhancethe utility of InfoPath forms for your desktop community, by accessinginformation in other systems within your organization (or from outside, forthat matter) and populating forms with it as needed.
5. Metadata can be used to create dynamically parsed storage systems
Metadata iscritical to the SharePoint Server concept, and comes in several flavors. Withmetadata you can effectively create customized search arguments that permit youto organize information dynamically, and to use search criteria from onedocument library to retrieve information from another.
Put anotherway, you can forego the traditional hierarchical folders in organizing yourdocument libraries, if it's appropriate. Instead, you can create metadatalookups that can not only be used as organizational keys for documents in onelibrary, but can be used as search arguments to locate documents in otherlibraries. In this way, you can create searchable document pools witheffectively dynamic organization, not only searchable but re-organizablewithout any physical manipulation of the documents themselves.
6. SharePoint can be a data transport mechanism
SharePoint'sprimary features include the ability to set up shared distribution points fordata from a wide range of sources, moved by different modes of transport (see#1, #4). But its data transport role doesn't end there. Depending on what yourorganization's sites contain, content-wise, and the role(s) the sites areplaying in your system, you can actually distribute data from server to serverby means of SharePoint's site-moving utilities (see #10).
Forinstance, if you have SharePoint sites deployed internally to represent data indifferent workflow stages, the SharePoint content databases of those sites canbe rotated in a de facto batch process using these utilities (which are CommandLine programs and therefore scriptable).
7. Use the Task Pane to turn Word libraries into collaborative systems withbuilt-in administration
SharePointServices is primarily about document management. Saving Word documents toSharePoint, placing documents in libraries, and checking them in and out areSharePoint's most obvious functions.
But theextension of those functions into shared workspaces is where those featuresbecome really empowering, rather than simply utilitarian. You have a Task Panethat ties documents to libraries, and within it lie anumber of important features that take you from the simple management ofdocuments to real collaboration and administration. Through the Task Pane, youcan:
- track status and versioning of documents
- define and track who has site/document access
- do task monitoring
- create alerts
8. SharePoint can pull data from external databases and other data sources
Web Partsand Web Part architecture (available to your SharePoint development by way ofFrontPage 2003 or ASP.NET) can become a powerful component of your SharePointsites. In particular, Data View Web Parts allow you to add views to your sitesfrom a variety of data sources. You can create views specific to yourSharePoint sites and link views together. Data sources can be databases, Webservices, or any XML source (InfoPath documents, etc.).
9. Leverage Excel for data management
Exportingdata to Excel is well-supported in SharePoint and makes graphingand printing convenient (via the Print with Excel and Chart with Excel options).But it's also possible (and may often be desirable) to export data to Exceljust for the sake of manageability. The Excel Export function creates an Excel Webquery linking to the original data. In this way, you can create spreadsheetsthat will accept data, and then push that data to SharePoint.
This can bedone by generating an Excel spreadsheet, then linking the spreadsheet toSharePoint (by using Export and Link to Excel from a Datasheet Task Pane). Oncethis is done, data can be entered into the spreadsheet and pushed from thespreadsheet to Excel with the Synchronize List option.
10. Sites and entire site collections can be backed up in a singleoperation
The abilityto move a site, lock-stock-and-barrel (and even more so a site collection,which includes primary site, sub-sites and all their contents), should not beunder-appreciated. Anyone who's migrated sites the hard way knows it can bemaddeningly frustrating. SharePoint Services includes two utilities that willgreatly reduce the frustration: STSADM and SMIGRATE.
SMIGRATE began life as an upgrade utility,shepherding data from old SharePoint to new. Now it's for backup/restore andfor moving sites wholesale. It's a command line utility, so it's tailor-madefor scripting, and can simplify the process of moving a site and its contentsto the point that it can conceivably be a content distribution tool in somescenarios.
Itsweakness is that when a site is moved with the SMIGRATE utility, its security settings don't all move with it.Remember to check your settings after a move or restore.
And while SMIGRATE will not preserve your securitysettings, STSADM will. This utility will move notonly a site but a site collection, and does far more: you can use it to createsites, delete site collections, import templates, and move data (see #6).
Source: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/10-things-you-should-know-microsofts-sharepoint-services/5807000
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