Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services (MOSS)
This past week, I attended the Sharepoint Bootcamp at New Horizons in Sacramento. It was taught by Sharee English who is a Sharepoint consultant and trainer. You can check out her blog here. I have to say that I was very impressed by what Sharepoint can do. Not only is Sharepoint a way to house and store documents, but you can actually run your business off of a properly designed sharepoint installation. From Sharee’s blog, you can find all kinds of references to sites etc.. that are run from Sharepoint, or you can see a demo site (with great links of all kinds) here. I hope to get our Sharepoint server up and running in the next few weeks, although that will be dependent on us getting our virtual architecture up and running and the servers converted to virtual servers. But that is another story entirely.
For those of you running Small Business Server as the backend server, you already have a Sharepoint server running. If you go to http://companyweb from inside the network, you will be taken to your internal sharepoint site. Now that site is based off WSS (windows sharepoint services) which is the free version of the product, unlike the pay-for product that is call Micrsosoft Office Sharepoint Services, or MOSS, but you get the idea.
Basically with a MOSS or WSS install, you can replace that old network drive as the document storage location and get a more robust, more accessible file storage repository, that does versioning, etc.. I’ll be covering more of what you can do in a future blog. If you have Exchange 2007, and outlook 2007, you can get rid of public folders and use a Sharepoint backend to house that data. That way your data will be available to everyone you specify wether they have Outlook or not. And its all searchable. Very cool indeed.
Stay tuned for updates to our setup as I get it going.