Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server (MOSS) 2007, the third version of the popular SharePoint technology. MOSS 2007 offers extended collaboration and communication functionality, including support for the creation of blogs and wikis.

MOSS 2007 provides a range of functional services across the following categories ...

• Portal
• Collaboration
• Search
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Forms/Workflow
• Business Intelligence (BI)

These services combine with the client-side Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook etc) to help address a range of Information Management and Collaboration requirements.

SharePoint also leverages other enterprise services to incorporate the important people aspects to the collaboration process ... Identity and Presence.

• Identity : SharePoint leverages the users identity profile from the underlying directory services, in the instances of a Microsoft based environment, this will typically be Active Directory. These identity services function to provision and manage the users’ authority and access credentials, but can also be leveraged as the basis for knowledge discovery services.
• Presence : A key differentiator between traditional asynchronous content management and communication services and the synchronous services that support more dynamic collaborative activities is the capability to determine, in (near) real-time another users availability (to participate in a collaborative exchange). Presence services, layered on the identity and directory services of the infrastructure provide an indicator for the users state of availability (e.g. online, away, busy, in a meeting until 3pm, do not disturb, offline etc).

In the context of the collaborative process, the presence services surfaced through the SharePoint user interface provide a gateway to a broad range of asynchronous and synchronous communication services. This includes the capability to launch the following from the SharePoint interface ...

• Enquire on the users contact details (e.g. phone number, email address, office location etc);
• Access other knowledge discovery information from the users identity profile (e.g. role, skills, experience, subject matter expertise etc);
• View the users availability (from their calendar schedule);
• Schedule a meeting into the users calendar;
• Create an email;
• Start and instant messaging discussion;
• Place an IPTel call;
• Launch and online meeting;
• Subscribe to an alert for changes to this content area;
• etc.

It is the integrated, context sensitive bridging that these identity and presence services establish between the SharePoint environment and the end-user audience that transforms what can often be an disconnected communication process into an integrated information management oriented collaboration activity.