Integrated Document Management

                 

 
Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
By Robert  Ferguson

Table of Contents
Chapter  2.   SharePoint Portal Server Features and Capabilities


In this section we will provide a high-level overview of the key features of document management. We will discuss check-in and check-out , versioning, security, document profiles, and integration with Microsoft Office. If you think about the traditional lifecycle of a document, you may agree that document creation is rarely an activity that involves just a single author. For example, an author creates a document, and often an additional individual will act as editor and collaborate on the document to provide feedback and review. Multiple versions of the document are created, until consensus is reached that the document is approved and ready to be sent or posted to the final destination. SharePoint Portal Server was designed to address this tedious manual document management challenge. The document management capabilities within SharePoint Portal Server are likely to be the single most important set of capabilities within the product. The core capabilities within the document library integrated services are document version control, document security, document profiling, and history tracking. These features are described in more detail in the following sections.

Check-In/Check-Out

SharePoint Portal Server allows an efficient process for authors and editors to check-in and check-out documents. When a document is checked out, other authors and editors cannot make any changes to the document. Administrators have the option to enable the check-in/check-out feature on a per-folder basis. By default, folders are set up as "Standard," and SharePoint Administrators must specify a folder as "Enhanced" in order to enable the check-in/check-out capabilities.

Version Control

The version control feature within SharePoint Portal Server enables tracking of the history of a document, which can determine who changed the document, when it was changed, and more importantly which changes were made. This audit feature is one of the two main benefits of version control. The second component of version control is recovery, which allows a user to revert back to a previous version of a document. Additional features of version control are

  • Version Numbering Scheme ” The version method that is used is a [Major.Minor] numeric versioning scheme. The number on the left of the decimal point refers to the major version; in the examples 1.0 and 2.0, the major versions are 1 and 2, respectively. The number on the right of the decimal point refers to the minor version of the document; in the examples 1.1 and 1.2, the minor versions are 1 and 2. Version retention is a parameter that is established by the SharePoint Portal Server administrator.

  • Version comments ” This allows comments to be associated with each version of a document. A sample comment may be "Revised Letter of Intent to include subcontractor responsibilities." These comments associated with each version of the document are important. The comments can be leveraged by an author or editor to allow browsing through a historical view of all changes made to the document.

  • Auditing ” The auditing capability tracks changes to documents as well as changes to metadata (document profiles) associated with the documents. This tracking is done by security account (for example, CPQNA\robertf) to show not only who made the changes, but also what changes were made.


                 
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Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
ISBN: 0789725703
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 286

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