Benefits of SharePoint Portal Server

• Creates a complete view of your business
• Puts relevant information at your fingertips
• Shares knowledge across the organisation
• Finds and makes the most of your organisation's intellectual capital
• Finds, aggregates and provisions SharePoint sites
• Creates self-service portals
• Automates business processes
• Speeds up adoption by using familiar interfaces and tools
• Reduces development time and cost with out-of-the-box portal services
• Allows easy deployment with flexible options

Here is a list of 10 ways Windows SharePoint Services can bring the most value to your organization:

1. Improve team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools.
   Windows SharePoint Services connects people with the information and resources they need. Users can create team workspaces, coordinate calendars, organize documents, and receive important notifications and updates through communication features that include announcements and alerts. In addition, new templates are available for creating blogs and wikis, and mobile users can take advantage of convenient offline synchronization capabilities.
   
   
2. Easily manage documents and help ensure integrity of content.
   Windows SharePoint Services has enhanced document management capabilities, including the option to activate required document checkout before editing, the ability to view revisions to documents and restore to previous versions, and control over document- and item-level security.
   
   
3. Get users up to speed quickly.
   User interface improvements in Windows SharePoint Services include enhanced views and menus that simplify navigation within and among SharePoint sites. Integration with familiar productivity tools, including programs in the Microsoft Office system, makes it easy for users to get up to speed quickly. For example, users can create workspaces, post and edit documents, and view and update calendars on SharePoint sites, all while working within Microsoft Office system files and programs.
   
   
4. Deploy solutions tailored to your business processes.
   While standard workspaces in Windows SharePoint Services are easy to implement, organizations seeking a more customized deployment can get started quickly with application templates for addressing specific business processes or sets of tasks. Appendix B provides a list of available templates that you can download.
   
   
5. Build a collaboration environment quickly and easily.
   Easy to manage and easy to scale, Windows SharePoint Services enables IT departments to deploy a collaborative environment with minimal administrative time and effort, from simple, single-server configurations to more robust enterprise configurations. Because deployment settings can be changed easily, less preplanning is required, and companies can get started even faster.
   
   
6. Reduce the complexity of securing business information.
   Windows SharePoint Services provides IT with advanced administrative controls for increasing the security of information resources, while decreasing cost and complexity associated with site provisioning, site management, and support. Take advantage of better controls for site life-cycle management, site memberships and permissions, and storage limits.
   
   
7. Provide sophisticated controls for securing company resources.
   IT departments can now set permissions at the document or item level, and site managers, teams, and other workgroups can initiate self-service collaborative workspaces and tasks within these preset parameters. New features enable IT workers to set top-down policies for better content recovery and easier site administration for users, groups, and team workspaces.
   
   
8. Take file sharing to a new level with robust storage capabilities.
   Windows SharePoint Services supplies workspaces with document storage and retrieval features, including check-in/check-out functionality, version history, custom metadata, and customizable views. New features in Windows SharePoint Services include recycle bin functionality for easier content recovery, and improved backup and restoration.
   
   
9. Easily scale your collaboration solution to meet business needs.
   Quickly and easily manage and configure Windows SharePoint Services using a Web browser or command-line utilities. Manage server farms, servers, and sites using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, which enables a variety of custom and third-party administration solution offerings.
   
   
10. Provide a cost-effective foundation for building Web-based applications.
    Windows SharePoint Services exposes a common framework for document management and collaboration that can be used to build flexible and scalable Web applications, intranet solutions, and Web sites that meet the specific needs of the organization. Integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 further expands these capabilities to offer enterprise-wide functionality for records management, search, workflows, portals, and personalized sites.