SharePoint 2007 Coming Soon?

Today I attended a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 seminar hosted by the institution where I work. The institution is planning to deploy SharePoint 2007 sooner (or later).

While the seminar at times drifted towards the developers among the audience, I managed to pick out the 2 main objectives behind the deployment of SharePoint 2007:

1. Introduce a robust Content Management system
2. Introduce a culture of Collaboration through personal spaces, shared spaces, blogs, wikis, etc

Like I said, the seminar tended to focus on ASP.NET, .NET, DLLs, but I learned enough to realize the potential of, for example, Web Parts, small programmable widgets that pulled or pushed content via RSS that one could easily add to a SharePoint "My Site."

The web guy in me loved that part; meanwhile, the archivist, the other guy, wondered about how the system would capture metadata, and preserve, content of long-term and historical value stored in SharePoint. Records managers and archivists and information professionals were in the audience, posing a few questions about that. But today was the day to celebrate the immediate SharePoint 2007 pay-off. The other issues, I suppose, will be tackled when that proverbial you know what hits the fan.