InfoWorld: The Great Office Server smorgasbord: SharePoint 2007

Very good read …

Microsoft’s five new Office Servers give Office 2007 users a wealth of new features and capabilities. We examine how in this four-part series, starting with SharePoint 2007

2005. A good year made more pleasant because we were still living under certain illusions. For one, we thought Paris Hilton headlines were in a decline. I was still 39 and therefore didn’t have to worry about not being married. And Microsoft leaked that Office 2007 was going to have “a server component.” Foolish technology journalists that we are, we assumed this meant ‘a’ server. As in one. As in single. As in my Friday night.

But Microsoft wasn’t building a lonely-heart wallflower of an Office server. They were building a swinging frat party of servers; the

Alpha Beta RTM fraternity complete with hazing ritual and a kegger on release day. Five Office servers is the final tally — almost as many servers as there are front-facing productivity apps. We were tempted to have Dean Yager simply close down this Animal House with some light-hearted comments on fixing things that aren’t broken, or vast complexity designed mainly to squeeze ever more revenue out of an already starving customer base. …

… Remember, SharePoint is a vast Las Vegas buffet of truly useful (and thus potentially dangerous) collaboration features. That’s what makes it scary. But Microsoft has done a decent job of allowing administrators to limit access to these features, meaning you can roll them out when you’re ready rather than causing feature chaos at the outset. So take advantage.

Bottom Line: Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a platform that offers amazing new potential to Microsoft Office users, and it does so without loads of new training for IT. However, the platform is so powerful, that administrators will need to be careful when planning architecture and hardware distribution as well as when and in what order they’ll roll out certain features. …

Source: InfoWorld.com
Author: Brian CheeOliver Rist
Date originally published: Mon,13Aug 2007