Download a PDF of the description of Custom Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 Solutions
Scope - Design, build, and deploy a custom line of business application that uses the features of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Key Potential Activities (Tier One)
Developing a Custom InfoPath Forms Services Solution
Definition and Benefits - Office Forms Server 2007 can help teams and organizations efficiently publish and manage forms in a central location. This service is a key area for customizing SharePoint and building custom solutions. The forms that are created can be accessed and filled out using a Web browser. The information collected in these forms can be reused easily throughout organizations and across business processes because InfoPath forms support industry-standard XML and can use any customer-defined schema. Office Forms Server 2007 was developed for organizations that need to collect and use information from customers, citizens, partners, and suppliers who only have access to the Internet. This provides a way to collect data from inside and outside of the firewall. This allows for browser-based data entry by allowing the ability to quickly create forms. With the addition of workflow into SharePoint these forms can be used in company’s business processes.
Developing a Custom Excel Services Solution
Definition and Benefits - With Excel Services users can now interact with workbooks using only a web browser from within portal sites. These workbooks are designed to be a scalable, robust, running from enterprise-class server functionality. In the past one of the biggest problems users had when trying to run Excel as a server product was the lack of ability to display the workbooks to end users. Now when you are using SharePoint 2007 this functionality can be built right in to the same infrastructure that provides the portal and document management functions. Excel Services support workbooks that are connected to external data sources. Excel Web Services allows for programmatic access. You can use Excel Web Services to load workbooks, set values into cells and ranges, refresh external data connections, calculate worksheets, and extract calculated results.
Integrating Data with the Business Data Catalog
Definition and Benefits - The business data catalog is tool within SharePoint 2007 to provide business integration to other backend applications. These back end systems could be other third party vendors or applications that were written internally. We can enable SharePoint to bring in key data for use with other information stored in SharePoint such as sites, lists, search, and user profiles. Line of business applications are registered with SharePoint so external data can be easily consumed in SharePoint. A key component to registering applications in the BDC is through a markup known as the Business Data Catalog metadata model. This model provides developers with a way to describe the data they are interested in and import that data into SharePoint. Once the data has been imported into SharePoint, users can quickly use this data in lists and through specific web parts. To create this connection now takes minimal coding effort. The primary development requirement is creating an xml file. To import the data the business data catalog provides methods for connecting to other applications with web services or through a database connection. Some common business applications that the business data catalog can connect to are SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, as well as other databases in SharePoint.
Creating Dashboards and BI Reports
Definition and Benefits - There are products from Microsoft that just focus on Business Intelligence reporting and have a rich set of features to address involved performance tracking. In particular, the current product for Microsoft is PerformancePoint Server 2007 a successor to Business Scorecard Manager 2005. Although, with SharePoint there are some decent Business Intelligence features built into MOSS 2007 that we can help configure and customize. Built-in Lists for analyzing performance data, like the KPI lists. Within MOSS you have templates for Sites, Pages, and Lists that giving you strong reporting capabilities when tracking key performance data.
Other Activities (Tier Two)
- Designing Portals
- Creating Public Web Sites
- Creating Enterprise Content Solutions
- Documents and Record Management Solutions
- Creating Custom Information Rights Management Policies
- Implementing User Profiles
- Implementing Single Sign On
- Extending the Search Engine
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