Chapter 18 -- Building a Corporate Portal Using Microsoft Office XP

Chapter 18

This chapter presents an overview of the advantages of using Microsoft^® SharePoint^™ Portal Server 2001 to create a corporate portal. It reviews how Microsoft Office XP can help you quickly and easily customize the default dashboard site to create your own custom portal solution, and how Microsoft SharePoint Team Services can add value to your portal solution. This chapter also provides suggestions for using Office XP, SharePoint Team Services, and SharePoint Portal Server to deploy a total portal solution that facilitates finding, creating, and sharing your mission-critical content from a Web browser or Office XP.

A portal is a Web site that gathers information from a variety of sources and displays the information in a single location. In addition, portals typically provide simple Web publishing and search capabilities to users. You can create portals for entire corporations, such as Microsoft, or by departments, such as Marketing, Human Resources, or Sales. Individuals can also create portals, in the form of personalized digital dashboards.

You can extend SharePoint Portal Server and add additional Web application functionality. SharePoint Portal Server is designed around industry and Internet standards, such as OLE DB, Microsoft ActiveX^® Data Objects (ADO), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Microsoft Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV). Because of this support of standards, the use of tools like Microsoft Visual Studio^® Professional for Microsoft Windows^® allows you to integrate Active Server Pages (ASP) functionality to the dashboard site. For information about how to create custom Web Parts, see Chapter 21, Creating Custom Web Parts with Office XP Developer. For more information about customization of SharePoint Portal Server, see Appendix B, For More Information.

When used with Office XP, SharePoint Portal Server makes Office Web publishing and content creation simple and powerful. Office XP becomes a great content development tool that takes advantage of the enterprise-wide search engine, powerful document management, and easy portal customizability features of SharePoint Portal Server to make information available throughout an enterprise.

By using Office XP, you can share and publish information in a corporate portal through Web Parts. You can create these Web Parts and Web applications directly in Office XP. By using Office XP, you can publish Microsoft Excel 2000 PivotTable^® reports, Microsoft Word documents, or Microsoft PowerPoint^® presentations as Web Parts in your corporate portal by saving to the dashboard site directly from the Office applications. By using SharePoint Portal Server, you can take existing reports and other data from Office or existing Web pages and customize the default dashboard site to share critical, timely information. With the use of other tools, such as Visual Studio, you can further extend your corporate portal to encompass other content.