Top 10 benefits of using SharePoint

Microsoft Sharepoint Services is a powerful collaborative tool that allows users in your organization to easily create, manage, and build their own collaborative Web sites and make them available throughout the organization. Here are the top 10 benefits of Sharepoint Services 3.0.

• Improve team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools

  Connect people with the information and resources they need. Users can create team workspaces, coordinate calendars, organize documents, and receive important notifications and updates through communication features including announcements and alerts, as well as the new templates for creating blogs and wikis. While mobile, users can take advantage of convenient offline synchronization capabilities.

• Easily manage documents and help ensure integrity of content

  With enhanced document management capabilities including the option to activate required document checkout before editing, the ability to view revisions to documents and restore to previous versions, and the control to set document- and item-level security, Windows SharePoint Services can help ensure the integrity of documents stored on team sites.

• Get users up to speed quickly

  User interface improvements in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 include enhanced views and menus that simplify navigation within and among SharePoint sites. Integration with familiar productivity tools, including programs in the Microsoft Office system, makes it easy for users to get up to speed quickly. For example, users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office system files and programs.

• Deploy solutions tailored to your business processes

  While standard workspaces in Windows SharePoint Services are easy to implement, organizations seeking a more customized deployment can get started quickly with application templates for addressing specific business processes or sets of tasks.

• Build a collaboration environment quickly and easily

  Easy to manage and easy to scale, Windows SharePoint Services enables IT departments to deploy a collaborative environment with minimal administrative time and effort. Because deployment settings can be flexibly changed, less pre-planning time is required and companies can get started even faster.

• Reduce the complexity of securing business information

  Windows SharePoint Services provides IT with advanced administrative controls for increasing the security of information resources, while decreasing cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, site management, and support. Take advantage of better controls for site life-cycle management, site memberships and permissions, and storage limits.

• Provide sophisticated controls for securing company resources

  IT departments can now set permissions as deep down as the document or item level, and site managers, teams, and other work groups can initiate self-service collaborative workspaces and tasks within these preset parameters. New features enable IT to set top-down policies for better content recovery and users, groups, and team workspace site administration.

• Take file sharing to a new level with robust storage capabilities

  Windows SharePoint Services supplies workspaces with document storage and retrieval features, including check-in/check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata, and customizable views. New features in Windows SharePoint Services include enhanced recycle bin functionality for easier recovery of content and improved backup and restoration.

• Easily scale your collaboration solution to meet business needs

  Quickly and easily manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services using a Web browser or command-line utilities. Manage server farms, servers, and sites using the Microsoft .NET Framework, which enables a variety of custom and third-party administration solution offerings.

• Provide a cost-effective foundation for building Web-based applications

  Windows SharePoint Services exposes a common framework for document management and collaboration from which flexible and scalable Web applications and Internet sites, specific to the needs of the organization, can be built. Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 expands these capabilities further to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, personalized sites, and more.