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SharePoint 2003/2007 Feature Comparison

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 feature comparison


Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.


In this article




1. Collaboration
2. Enterprise portals
3. Enterprise search
4. Enterprise content management
5. Forms-driven business processes
6. Business intelligence
7. Management
8. Platform capabilities




The Office SharePoint Servers can be broken down into 6 functional areas:

• Collaboration: Help keep teams connected and productive by providing easy access to the people, documents, and information users need to make more well-informed decisions within their jobs. Windows SharePoint products and technologies include collaboration and community, document life cycle capabilities, alters, task notifications, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the basic Web-based user interface, and navigation.
• Portal: The portal components of Office SharePoint Server 2007 include features that are especially useful for designing, deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet presence Web sites, and divisional portal sites.
• Search: The search component has been significantly enhanced in this release. The new features provide a consistent and familiar search experience, increased relevance of search results, new functions to search for people and expertise, ability to index and search data in line-of-business applications, and improved manageability and extensibility.
• Enterprise Content Management: Windows SharePoint Services provides core document management functionality: major and minor versioning, check-in/check-out document locking, rich descriptive metadata, workflow, content type–based policies, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the document library, folder, and individual document levels. Office SharePoint Server 2007 builds on these capabilities to deliver enhanced authoring, business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management, policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.
• Forms Driven Business Process: Streamline forms-driven business processes with easy-to-use, intelligent, XML-based electronic forms that integrate smoothly with existing systems. This security-enhanced, client/server platform provides rapid solution creation and deployment, centralizes form management and maintenance, and helps to extend business processes to customers, partners, and suppliers.
• Business Intelligence: Provide business intelligence (BI) capabilities to every employee, so they can share, control, and reuse business information in order to make better business decisions. The BI features of Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide Web and programmatic access to published Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets, programmatic reuse of critical line-fo-business data, and easy development of Web-based BI dashboards that can incorporate rich, data-bound key performance indicators (KPIs), Web Parts, and published spreadsheets.

Additionally, all servers inherit a set of shared platform and management capabilities from Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The following tables are broken down into functional areas and provide a comparison of features previously available in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 when used with an Enterprise Client Access License (CAL).

Collaboration

KEY:

= Feature Included

= Improved in Office SharePoint Server 2007

 = New in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Features	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
Real-time presence and communication The enhanced real-time presence smart tag icon, displayed virtually everywhere a person’s name appears in the system, tells users whether a person is online and available for a telephone or audio conference call, instant messaging, or two-way video conversation.
Social Networking Web Part Include Social Networking Web Parts that use information about your organization, communities, and electronic communications in Public My Site pages to help establish connections between colleagues with common interests.
Standard site templates Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes the following standard collaboration site templates: Team site Document workspace Blank site Blog Wiki Meeting workspaces (five workspace types)
Wikis A wiki is a new site template in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 that makes it easy to create, edit, link, and restore an individual Web page. Wikis can be used as creative forums to brainstorm ideas, manage knowledge bases, create designs as well as instruction guides or simply gather information in an easy-to-edit format. Wikis are easy to create, modify, and annotate; in addition to tracking contributions and changes.   Key features include: Fast and easy page creation Easy and automatic linking Version differences What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) Web page editing Wikis leverage existing SharePoint functionality including search, navigation, alerts, and custom fields.
Blogs Blogs provide a publishing-oriented experience for a single user or a team. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 includes a site template that supports: Article posting Reader comments Archive views RSS feed generation
People and Groups lists People and Groups offer a unified place to find, communicate with, and manage people and their permissions, including support for custom fields such as Department, “Office #” and Area of Focus; in addition to the new Person field type. The Person field type creates rich displays of lists of people including support for a People Picker for browsing a list of users. Member Group provides: Re-use of groups across sites Distribution list for the members of the site
Calendars Calendars have been enhanced with richer calendar views, expanded support for recurring events, and all-day events.
E-mail integration Document libraries, discussion boards, calendars, and announcements can be enabled to receive new postings via e-mail. In addition, extensible support is provided for custom e-mail handlers in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Similar to the functionality provided by public folders in Microsoft Exchange Server, e-mail enabled discussion boards support: A highly scalable, topic-based architecture New “super rich-text” field type Unified experience for both e-mail and Web-based discussions One-step creation of Active Directory distribution lists as part of the site creation process Unified SharePoint group and Active Directory directory service management functions
Task coordination The new Project Tasks list template provides lightweight task management functionality including Gantt charts for visualization of task relationships and status.
Surveys Surveys now include conditional branching as well as support for inserting page breaks in long surveys such as annual employee satisfaction or and customer surveys.
Document collaboration Improvements to SharePoint document libraries include: Checking out documents locally Offline document library support in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Major and minor version numbering and tracking Support for multiple content types Policy, auditing, and workflow Tree view support
Issue Tracking The Issue Tracking list template has been updated to use the enhanced versioning and version-history storage features of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

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Enterprise portals

KEY:

= Feature Included

= Improved in Office SharePoint Server 2007

 = New in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Features	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
My Site personal site The My Site personal site gives users an opportunity to aggregate information “for me,” “by me,” and “about me.” Significant enhancements include social networking, privacy controls, SharePoint Sites and Documents Roll-Up Web Parts, and Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts.
Content syndication Use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to syndicate content managed in a portal site.
Privacy and security Use authorizations to control visibility of information in a My Site public view.
Site Directory The Site Directory automatically creates a site map and presents it in an easy-to-use format. The enhanced directory now includes the option to scan for changed or deleted links to external content.
User Profiles and the Profile Store User Profiles store personal information for system users. Improvements include multi-valued properties bound to taxonomy from Office SharePoint Server 2007, property-level security controls by person or group, open and closed vocabularies, and per-site property extensions. Profile synchronization and directory import support the extended capabilities of the User Profile Store with enhanced scalability and performance.
Audience targeting Enables use of Web Part pages, Web Parts, and content to target distribution lists and groups in addition to SharePoint audiences.
Site Manager Manage a SharePoint site’s navigation, security access, and general look and feel using this easy drag-and-drop tool. Site Manager unifies site management tasks for portals and Web sites, including management of areas, pages, listings, SharePoint site lists, and associated component parts.
Mobile device support All SharePoint portal, team site, and list pages now render on international and North American mobile devices (including Web-enabled mobile phones) using a simplified text-only format.
Portal site templates Preconfigured templates streamline creating, customization, and deployment of divisional portals, organization-wide intranet portal sites, and corporate Web sites.
SharePoint Sites and Documents Roll-up Web Parts List all the SharePoint sites that a user is part of and documents the user has authored. The Documents Roll-up Web Part also supports more general capabilities for querying and filtering the documents stored in a collection of SharePoint sites.
Colleagues and Memberships Web Parts List people the user knows and people who belong to common distribution groups.
Integration with Microsoft Office Access 2007, Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Word 2007 Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 easily integrates with smart client tools through a set of Web services and documented application interfaces. Users can readily adopt these new tools because of their similarity to other familiar environments, such as the Microsoft Office system. For example, users of 2007 Microsoft Office system programs Word, Excel, PowerPoint, InfoPath, Project, and OneNote can directly interact with information stored in SharePoint sites without having to manually download the content. Users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and assign tasks, all while working on documents stored in SharePoint sites.
Integration with Office Outlook 2007 With Office Outlook 2007, users can view calendars and contact lists stored on SharePoint sites and create and manage sites for editing documents and organizing meetings. Office Outlook 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 support a new set of significantly enhanced functionality including: Read/write access to SharePoint items: calendars, tasks, contacts, discussions, and documents Synchronization of offline support of document library and lists Ability to check out and edit documents when offline Roll-up views of calendars and tasks across multiple lists and sites Unified view of personal and SharePoint tasks in Office Outlook 2007
Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Office SharePoint Designer 2007, based in part on Microsoft FrontPage technology, will provide tools for rich customization of sites, and creating reporting tools and application templates, without any coding.

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Enterprise search

KEY:

= Feature Included

= Improved in Office SharePoint Server 2007

 = New in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Features	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
User interface Simple, clean yet powerful user interface with industry-standard query syntax. Scopes are decoupled from content sources so users can easily broaden or narrow the scope of a content search. Search can be based on arbitrary content properties such as URL, type, and author. Actionable search results can be easily filtered and sorted, used, and shared. Alerts and RSS feeds easily provide updated results for common and frequent queries.
Search results Search results are rendered more clearly. Results are security trimmed so users only see what they can access. Results include user-friendly features such as hit highlighting, duplicate collapsing and synonym suggestion. Optional integration with real-time communications tools allow users to easily contact content authors and experts.
Enterprise content sources Searches over 200 file types in many enterprise content sources, including files shares, Web sites, SharePoint sites, Exchange Public Folders, and Lotus Notes databases out-of-the-box with the ability to extend to additional third party repositories and filetypes through the use of Protocol Handlers and iFilters.
Relevance New and improved search algorithms tuned for enterprise content along with the use of relevance and ranking factors such as click distance, hyperlink anchor text, URL depth, and metadata extraction yield the best results for enterprise content.
Administration and management Improved administration user interfaces and admin application programming interface (API) provides broad support for various search and indexing scenarios, central controls for resource-intensive operations, as well as tools for management and reporting.
Indexing controls Granular indexing controls for easy inclusion and exclusion of searched content as well as immediate result removal of any site or item. Continuous index propagation to keep information fresh. Improved crawl rules and crawl log; multiple start addresses per content source; a new browse-able, filterable index log provide necessary information to optimize search.
Security Administrator permissions no longer required by crawler. Access control list (ACL) and ACL-only crawls index content permissions for compliance, privacy, and protection of intellectual property (IP). Security-trimmed search results only allow users to see content they are allowed to access.
People search People search capabilities allow users to find people not only by department or job title but also by expertise, social distance, and common interests.
Knowledge network Enhanced people search tools let users search for and connect with key internal and external contacts and experts. Search for undocumented knowledge and relationships while keeping personal information private. Leverage the power of social networking.
Business data search Search data residing in your line of business applications using the Business Data Catalog. Structured content sources as well as line-of-business application data and reports accessible through Web services or ADO.NET can be indexed and retrieved through the Business Data Catalog as search results or into a SharePoint list.

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Enterprise content management

KEY:

= Feature Included

= Improved in Office SharePoint Server 2007

 = New in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Features	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
Business document workflow support Automate document review, approval, signature collection, and issue tracking using workflow applications. Approval Collect feedback Collect signatures Disposition approval
Document management site templates The Managed Document Library site template defines large-scale document management sites. The Divisional Library site template includes managed document libraries, dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other reporting tools. The Translation Library site template helps organizations manage multiple translations of a document.
Integration with Microsoft Information Rights Management (IRM) Helps ensure that access rights applied to Microsoft Office documents in a central library travel with the documents, even when they are downloaded from the library.
Document information panel Makes editing document properties an integral part of the Microsoft Office system document-authoring experience.
Document Action bar Describes to users what business policy or workflow governs the current document and what action they are expected to take.
Retention and auditing policies Define customized information management policies to control retention period, expiration actions, and document-auditing settings.
Records repository Helps ensure the integrity of the files stored in the repository, and supports information management policies that consistently and uniformly enforce auditing and expiration of records.
E-mail content as records Provides consistent, policy-based solutions for managing e-mail content across Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Legal holds Makes it possible for records to be searched and placed on hold during litigation discovery to override the retention schedule of the records.
High fidelity Web sites with consistent branding Provides the concept of Master Pages and Page layouts to enforce the branding and navigation of Web sites. CSS supports gives pixel level control on the look and feel of these sites.
Navigation controls Out-of-the box navigation controls that can be easily customized by end users.
Content authoring Provides the ability for information workers to create content rich web pages using a Web browser.
Content publishing and deployment Built in approval workflow allows Web content to be sent for approval prior to publishing. Content deployment to production sites can be scheduled by setting up jobs and a "live" time period for each page can be specified within which that page is viewable.
Site templates Includes support for several new enterprise site templates: The Enterprise Portal template provides a means for a business unit to create and share content that is relevant to the ongoing operation of an enterprise, division, or business unit. The Corporate Internet Presence Site template includes tools and workflows to create and manage Web content for products and service descriptions, company news, and public filings, among other things. The Application Portal template brings together all of the tools and information related to a particular line-of-business application. The Roll-up Portal template consolidates data and content from several applications or locations and presents it in an integrated format.
Page Layouts Page Layouts simplify content authoring and publishing—site administrators define a structure that guides authors through the publishing process; content contributors focus on doing their jobs rather than on the details of publishing and deployment. Flexible Page Layouts also allow designers to mix and match ASP.NET applications, Web Parts, and Authoring Templates in any configuration to create customized sites to meet specific business needs.
Site variations A new feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007, sites can be linked together in a parent-child type of relationship providing a one-way orchestration framework for Web content. This feature allow organizations to deploy multi-lingual publishing sites in a much more structured and manageable environment.
WYSIWYG Web content editor Extends the SharePoint user interface with additional commands and status indicators for in-context Web page authoring.
Slide libraries The repository features in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provide the platform support for slide libraries, a feature of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Slide libraries enable the storage of individual slides in a SharePoint site. Office PowerPoint 2007 slide decks can be automatically created from a selection of slides in a slide library.
Policies, auditing, and compliance Repositories in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 support the following policy, auditing, and compliance features. However, the features denoted with an asterisk are activated only upon the installation of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Document retention and expiration policies Highly customizable policies Workflow process to define expiration Access control and security IRM policies applied on download to secure the functional access to documents Tracking and auditing Logging of all actions on sites, content, and workflows Official document-of-record repositories Site for storing or archiving enterprise approved content types

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Forms-driven business processes

KEY:

= Feature Included

= Improved in Office SharePoint Server 2007

 = New in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Features	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
Browser-based forms Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services available in Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007 make it possible to design Web-capable forms in Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 and distribute them on corporate intranets, extranets, or the Internet. Users can fill out forms in a browser or HTML-enabled Mobile device with no download or client components needed.
Centralized forms management and control Office InfoPath Forms Services provide a administrator controlled centralized form solution catalog that makes it easy for users to find a form and minimize form solution downtime when upgrades are necessary. It also provides administrators with the tools to manage form solution security and accessibility.
“Design Once” development model Forms designers can design their forms once and deploy them for use both within the rich Office InfoPath 2007 client program and through a Web browser. Office Forms Server 2007 automatically converts the form into ASP.NET Web forms, with no additional work from the designer.
Form Import Wizard The designer in Office InfoPath 2007 provides an easy way to convert forms designed in Office Excel and Office Word into rich Office InfoPath 2007 forms. The Form Import Wizard handles the conversion of form fields, repeating tables, rich text boxes, and other elements, dynamically generating the underlying XML structure for the new form.
Integrated deployment model for “no-code” forms The Publish Wizard in Office InfoPath 2007 makes it easy to publish forms that do not have any managed code components to a Windows SharePoint Services library, while making the form available as a browser-based form at the same time.
Compatibility Checker The Compatibility Checker helps forms designers validate those features that need to work across the broadest range of Web browsers.

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Business intelligence

KEY:

= Feature Included

= Improved in Office SharePoint Server 2007

 = New in Office SharePoint Server 2007

Features	SharePoint Portal Server 2003	Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL
Integrated, flexible spreadsheet publishing Office Excel 2007 provides an integrated publishing experience that lets information workers easily choose what they want to share with others and determine how others can interact with published spreadsheets.
Share, manage, and control spreadsheets Share business data broadly while maintaining control and helping to protect sensitive information. Provides access to spreadsheet data and analysis through server-calculated, interactive Office Excel spreadsheets from a Web browser. Use these spreadsheets to maintain and efficiently share one centralized version of the truth while helping to protect any sensitive or proprietary information embedded in documents, such as financial models, by limiting access to portions of the spreadsheet and auditing their usage.
Web-based business intelligence using Excel Services Excel Services empowers spreadsheet authors to easily and broadly share spreadsheets that use the new business intelligence functionality through the browser. Fully interactive, data-bound spreadsheets including charts, tables, and PivotTable views can be created as part of a portal, dashboard, or business scorecard, without requiring any development.
Data Connection Libraries Data Connection Libraries are centralized SharePoint document libraries that store Office Data Connections (ODC); ODCs describe connections to external data. Centralizing Office Data Connections makes it easier to share, manage, and discover data connections that can be used by any Microsoft Office program.
Business Data Catalog The Business Data Catalog (BDC) tightly integrates external data into the Office SharePoint Server 2007 user experience, providing access to external data residing within back end line-of-business applications, and enabling the display of and interaction with external data through a set of Business Data Web Parts.
Business Data Web Parts Use SharePoint Business Data Web Parts for viewing lists, entities, and related information retrieved through the Business Data Catalog.