Topics in this chapter   Introducing Microsoft's SharePoint Team Services     Introducing Office XP Workgroup Strategies     Microsoft Web Solutions

Introducing Microsoft's SharePoint Team Services

Many features of Microsoft Office XP were created in an effort to help teams work together and get things done. One way to work together as a team is by using a Web site to communicate. You can use Office XP to interact with a new technology, Microsoft's SharePoint™ Team Services, to improve your team communications. Your Office XP applications, including Microsoft FrontPage® 2002, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, and Microsoft Outlook® 2002 can work with SharePoint Team Services to help you communicate and share information as a team over an intranet or the Internet.

Features available in SharePoint Team Services

Microsoft's SharePoint Team Services includes many features to help your team communicate and collaborate. All of these features are available with SharePoint Team Services and with Web sites based upon SharePoint Team Services. Some of the team features in SharePoint Team Services include:

• Prebuilt list functionality to help you track special events, contact information, and announcements

  As well, you can easily create and customize your own lists.

• Document libraries to help store, organize, and find documents on your Web site
  
  
• Surveys to help your team contribute to important decisions and graphically see how team members are voting
  
  
• Discussion boards, Web document discussions, and subscriptions to help your team communicate about important ideas and receive automatic e-mail notifications when pages or discussions have changed

In addition to the new team-related features, SharePoint Team Services provides new features geared to provide a good experience for Web server administrators. For administrators, SharePoint Team Services includes features such as:

• Improved permissions through finer-grained roles and rights

  Control the permissions granted to each user of your site. Assign users to one of several standard roles, or for even more flexibility, create your own custom roles by selecting individual rights.

• Better remote administration

  All Web site administration tasks can be performed remotely by using either HTML-based administration pages or the command line.

• New usage analysis reports

  Find out which pages in your site are generating the most interest, where users were referred to your site, which pages are slow to load, which pages and graphics are not being used, and which pages have not been updated recently.

Installing SharePoint Team Services

Note   The SharePoint Team Services Administrator's Guide also covers FrontPage 2002 Server Extensions, which are also included with Office XP. For more information about FrontPage Server Extensions 2002, see the "SharePoint Team Services Administrator's Guide." Information about the guide is provided in this topic on the Office Resource Kit Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/.