Microsoft hosts first Sharepoint Conference in the Middle East

The world-class, two day conference will be attended by an audience of over 400 business and IT professionals and will showcase the latest innovations, features and functionality of Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies.

Based on the theme of 'Real world guidance and experience', the event will feature high-level executive speakers from Microsoft as well as customers and partners who will share best practices on building and deploying business critical applications on the SharePoint platform. The first event is being held on April 7- 8 at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel in Dubai.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is Microsoft's enterprise solution for organizations that want to increase productivity and reduce information overload by providing employees, partners and customers the ability to find relevant content in a wide range of repositories and formats.

Sabah Corm, Information Worker, Business Group Lead, Microsoft Gulf said,

'Organizations are constantly looking for solutions that help businesses harness the power of a global work force and tackle the challenges that come with the explosive growth of digital information. With Microsoft SharePoint, users can experience the collaboration and information management capabilities that the technology delivers.'

With SharePoint, organizations can easily leverage their knowledge capital of enterprise data, human expertise, process knowledge and content to operate with greater agility in a dynamic and complex world. Danat, a leading online content provider in the Gulf adopted the technology in an aim to create the largest online Arabic marketplace. Using Office SharePoint Server, Danat has been able to create a portal that expresses the company's unique look and feel, improves the customer experience and helps streamline the project process - all at a reasonable cost to the company. The soft launch of www.logta.com was the first step and the company relied on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server's improved collaboration tools to develop a highly customizable online user interface. Danat has been using the Sharepoint platform to also support its first online portal www.argaam.com over the last one year.

Hisham Baker, General Manager, Danat, said, 'In an aim to develop the region's largest Arabic online portal, Danat was looking for a comprehensive portal framework that makes it easy to build sites that meet the specific requirements of our target audience. None of the other products we evaluated offered as complete a solution as SharePoint Server 2007. We needed to be able to remove functionality and interface elements that did not fit with the user experience we wanted to create. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server is a world class Enterprise Portal platform that makes it easy to build and maintain portal sites.'

With Sharepoint Server 2007, Microsoft has also delivered on its promise of Enterprise Search. Search Server allows users to quickly and easily locate relevant content distributed across a wide range of sites and document libraries. In Office SharePoint Server 2007, search results are delivered quickly and relevance is tuned for enterprise and line-of-business data. It provides a user-friendly search experience with all the features of SharePoint Server 2007 and can be integrated with other Office system products to help users easily find and share information.