Portal sites connect your people to business critical information, expertise, and applications. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a world class Enterprise Portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites for every aspect of your business.

Connect your people to information and expertise

Quick, easy access to critical information and expertise means better decisions and more rigorous execution.

• A comprehensive portal framework makes it easy to build portal sites that meet the specific requirements of your audience. A flexible, highly scalable architecture supports personal, divisional, intranet, extranet, and Internet sites.
 
• Integrated web content management makes customizing site look-and-feel easy. Powerful authoring features simplify content contribution. Centrally managed site design, publishing and deployment capabilities seamlessly integrate cutting-edge web content management into the overall portal platform.
 
• Cutting-edge social networking technology makes finding and managing expertise easier than ever before.
 
Connect your people to key business applications

Consolidated access to existing business applications drives consistent performance of common business tasks. Streamlined development of new composite applications can lead to order of magnitude improvements in important business processes.

• A sophisticated application development environment shortens development time for highly customized business applications.
 
• A comprehensive application integration framework allows you to quickly assemble composite applications from existing systems.
 
• State-of-the-art application governance features provide fine-grained control over the application execution environment.
 
Connect your people to role-specific resources

Personalized information delivery increases the relevance and value of information.

• Audience targeting features allow information owners to decide how, when and where specific audiences consume their information.
 
• The My Site personal site pulls together summary views of personal information, providing full control over information "for me, by me, and about me."
 
• Personalized information rollup allows users to create customized summaries of important information in the portal.
 
SharePoint Deployment

Today’s workplaces and work teams can cut across skill sets, international borders, time zones and organizational boundaries. While such fluidity has its advantages – easy access to information and more agility to respond to business opportunities, for example – it also creates coordination challenges.

Microsoft’s integrated approach to collaboration software and services is key to establishing a competitive business edge in the modern work world and helping ensure people can easily connect to each other and to the information they need, wherever they are.

Microsoft Gold Certified Partner The Henson Group, Inc., provides a practice dedicated to Microsoft’s Collaboration technologies that specifically address today’s collaboration challenges in four critical areas: integrated communications, collaborative workspaces, access to information and people, and people-driven processes.

This practice is staffed by Microsoft Certified consultants with extensive field experience (incl. many former Microsoft employees), including infrastructure and development experts that specialize in deploying and extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), 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.

The Henson Group, Inc. (THG) assists clients in leveraging MOSS 2007 to build comprehensive portal solutions for content aggregation and document management, creating end-to-end solutions that meet the complete information-sharing needs of business organizations. For example, users can quickly create and contribute to team or project-focused Web sites from a Web browser or Microsoft Office application.

WHAT WE CAN DO FOR YOU:  MICROSOFT OFFICE SHAREPOINT SERVER 2007

MOSS 2007 ―Test Drives/Upgrade Planning: This one-day business/technical review includes discussions on key capabilities, critical features, enhancements, high-impact demos, and an architecture session to map out the upgrade/deployment scenario.

Systems Deployment Planning: THG details the info needed for a deployment, incl. capacity planning calculations to determine hardware and software requirements, anti-virus concerns, network configurations, scalability considerations, and supportability.

Knowledge Management Planning: THG reviews existing document management and workflow and existing content, user roles, indexing, search, and portal requirements. Upon completion of this analysis, THG will provide a Taxonomy and Workflow Design to structure and organize documents for access, searching, and workflow processes.

Site Design and Implementation: THG customizes the design to match your brand colors and logos, while also setting site topics, alerts, listings, surveys, audiences, document management, version controls, and more.

Custom Search Strategies: THG extends MOSS to integrate with existing portals, file shares, and email systems, so info is aggregated/ accessible through a single gateway.

Application Integration and Workflow: Custom web parts development to gather, present, and modify info from internal/external sources. THG migrates paper forms into InfoPath for electronic tracking, monitoring, and approval. THG implements workflow solutions using BizTalk Human Workflow Services and K2.net.

Site Design and Implementation: THG customizes the design to match your brand colors and logos, while also setting site topics, alerts, listings, surveys, audiences, document management, version controls, and more. Services also include:

• SharePoint Skin Design
• Portal Branding Planning
• Technical Guidance in Branding a SharePoint Site
• Developing and Leveraging Templates

Establishing Corporate Identity and Ownership: With the portal site home page becoming the primary interface between employees and their intranet, The Henson Group provides expert guidance to assure that it reflects and reinforces the organization's identity.  THG ensures that portal site users understand intuitively that they are using an enterprise resource and that users feel that they are interacting with the organization's portal site rather than a standard software application.

Reinforcement of Enterprise Standards: The Henson Group provides services for developing standards to guide the creation of intranet sites. These standards include logos and images, colors, fonts, page layouts, and navigational models. Because a portal site is at the center of an organization's intranet, it must adopt such standards.  Standards should promote a common look and feel throughout the organization's intranet to make it easier for users to navigate and find the information they need to do their jobs.

Ease of Use Planning: A corporate intranet is commonly made up of many different sites, created by diverse parts of the organization using a variety of tools. The Henson Group facilitates branding efforts and strategies that ensure the greatest possible consistency with existing sites. You should always place higher priority on usability than on look and feel, but aesthetics are still a key consideration in any THG strategy. A solution's look and feel refers to the visual, attractive elements of its interface; usability, however, is about making it easy for end users to interact with and use the interface.

Color and Style: Applying color and style are the most fundamental elements of any branding exercise. THG provides expert guidance on applying these elements of a brand completely and consistently throughout any solution.

Navigation: Organizations have various requirements for site navigation, typically including one or more horizontal and vertical menus. THG provides guidance on the location of these menus varies; in particular, you can place the horizontal menu along the very top of the page or immediately below the banner. Menu style also varies; some organizations prefer a "fly out" style, others a collapsible style, and still others their own custom design.

Page Layout: Organizations often have one or more standard screen layouts. These are page designs that define where to position elements such as navigation, banner, footer, and body on a page. You must accommodate any number of these page designs within the portal site design, promoting consistency throughout the intranet and in turn making it easier for people to use.