Addressing Information Islands


Another limitation that the combination of Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 addresses is the issue of "information islands." Often documents created with the Office suite of products exist on workstations, file servers, in email folders, thumb drives and other locations, and SharePoint 2003 products provide centralized repositories to make sure the latest versions of the documents are stored in a centrally located, secure, recoverable environment.

Often many of the Office Suite products are required to create vehicles for communicating different types of information, and collecting and managing sets of information. Word was used to create a textual document, Excel was used to create a spreadsheet, Visio was used to create a diagram, and PowerPoint to present pieces of each documents. An Access database was used to collect specialized information, and Project facilitated the completion of tasks. Although documents could be linked to one another with hyperlinks or pasted into other documents, the results were not always ideal. Take, for example, the issues involved with pasting text from a Word document into an Excel spreadsheet, or from Excel into Word, or from Project into Word. SharePoint 2003 technologies offer an alternative to creating these "Frankenstein documents" by providing document workspaces, team sites, and Web Part pages that collect different documents.

SharePoint Portal 2003 acts as a central repository for any type of Office document (and non-Microsoft documents as well), so the documents can be grouped by subject matter or project, and the use of HTML and other Web-enabled file formats can make the documents viewable by "anyone, anywhere." Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server 2003's collaboration tools change the formerly isolated documents into components of a customized workspace environment that connects the data with the users and keeps everyone connected and up-to-date on changes and developments.

Perhaps the most compelling capability of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is the ease with which these customized workspaces can be created, and this chapter reviews these capabilities as well.




Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed
Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Unleashed (2nd Edition) (Unleashed)
ISBN: 0672328038
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 288

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