Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, more commonly abbreviated as MOSS 2007, is one of the critical business intelligence tools available today. According to Microsoft itself, MOSS 2007 can be used to "facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes (1)." As such, this is a product that is important to understand in today's business world and that can be used by both large and small enterprises.

What is MOSS 2007?

MOSS 2007 is a cohesive integration of business intelligence tools established by Microsoft to ease collaboration by using specialized websites, or portals. These portals can host documents, files, and even run programs and services such as blogs and wikis. Multiple users can be granted access to these portals and to all or some of the items hosted there. Users can then log in and make changes directly to these items in a centralized space.

The business intelligence tools offered by SharePoint are of particular use to companies that have employees in multiple offices around the world or employees that telecommute, but it can also be used within a single location when collaboration on a single document is critical.

The Six Pillars of MOSS 2007

The biggest selling point for MOSS 2007 when it comes to its business intelligence tools is that it enables easy collaboration between users, whether they are in a single office or located around the world. It is commonly accepted that the MOSS 2007 system is based on six pillars (2):

• Business intelligence

• Collaboration
• Portals
• Enterprise search
• Enterprise content management
• Business processes and forms

These pillars work together to create a comprehensive system of business intelligence tools that enables an entire enterprise to work together as a team. MOSS 2007 is extremely useful to any business that has to collaborate with its employees via documents or e-mail, printed or voice communication. It hosts all of this information in a single space and allows for information gathering and updates without major hassles. SharePoint is installed quickly and easily on a server and replaces many free utilities (Joomla or Mambo, for example).

Business Intelligence Tools that Seamlessly Integrate with Microsoft Office

One of the key benefits of MOSS 2007 is its ability to integrate with Microsoft Office, a system that many businesses already use on a daily basis. This program offers an assortment of business intelligence tools and processes that allow employees to quickly and easily collaborate with one another. Through SharePoint Portals, a website can be established to which Microsoft Office files can be uploaded and distributed outside of an e-mail setting. An online task list can also be established for all users to utilize, and templates are available as well. Users can either log into the portal site via a standard web browser or can open up the Office application from within MOSS 2007 directly.

MOSS 2007 has the greatest benefit with its business intelligence tools when people are dealing with Microsoft Excel. For example, a user can upload an Excel spreadsheet to a SharePoint website. The original user can choose to make all or just part of the spreadsheet accessible by others. The benefit of this is that proprietary formulas and other data can be kept confidential while still allowing outside users to provide the necessary new information for the spreadsheet.

In addition, with MOSS 2007, there is a single spreadsheet that all users are accessing. If e-mail had been used to distribute the same spreadsheet, then various users would have different versions and it would require extra time to find out who was in control of the "latest and greatest." If different users were

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