Microsoft delivers a best-of-breed collaborative infrastructure that gives end users the tools to easily create their own workspaces and share assets across teams, departments, and organizations while maintaining IT control.

• Deliver a secure, self-service collaborative workspace infrastructure that keeps people connected, informed, and on task.
• Maximize the value of Microsoft Office desktop programs by seamlessly integrating with collaborative workspace capabilities.
• Extend collaborative workspaces beyond the firewall to enable secure collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers.
• Enable collaborative workspace access anytime, anywhere.
• Customize collaborative workspaces for specific business processes.

Microsoft will help bring the full insight and data of the organization to the right people at the right time by making it easy to connect people with line-of-business data, experts, and business processes across the organization.

• Easily deliver targeted content, data, and information to users based on their network and corporate identities.
• Rapidly build composite applications or mashups using a common portal framework that aggregates multiple portals, business applications, and LOB data into a single environment.
• Offer users a single, personalized view of their work and the tools and resources they need to do their jobs with My Sites.
• Reduce cycle times and promote efficiency by automating business processes.

Microsoft gives organizations the tools to deliver a broad set of social computing capabilities within their existing workspace and portal infrastructure, so end users can more easily harness the collective intelligence of the organization.

• Accelerate innovation and collaboration across the organization by automating the process for people to find, connect, and build social networks across business and geographical boundaries.
• Leverage the collaborative workspace infrastructure to streamline collaborative authoring and information sharing to quickly and easily build collective intelligence with enterprise-grade wikis.
• Leverage the collaboration workspace infrastructure to provide users with better ways for users to have persistent conversations with others, both within and outside the organization, using blogs.

Learn more about social computing.

The Microsoft collaboration infrastructure leverages existing investments, is extensible, and interoperates with other systems, so organizations can maintain a lower cost of ownership and more easily meet business demands by building a single infrastructure.

• Leverage existing Microsoft investments.
• Maximize the value of existing LOB systems and other business applications by using SharePoint as their interface.
• Lower total cost of ownership by consolidating silo collaboration applications onto a single, extensible platform.
• Shift the perception of IT from cost center to strategic business enabler.

The following table outlines and compares the collaboration features included in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise CAL. For the complete feature outline, please refer to the Office SharePoint Server edition comparison document.

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.
Blogs Blogs provide a publishing-oriented experience for a single user or a team.
People and Groups lists People and Groups offer a unified place to find, communicate with, and manage people and their permissions.
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.
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.