Exploring the Capabilities of SharePoint Portal Server 2003


The previous section provided a brief tour of some of Windows SharePoint Services' capabilities. This section now provides an overview of some of the key features of SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

As an astute reader might have noticed, the URL for the document workspace previously examined was https://sp.cco.com/sites/ProServices/Extremely%20Important%20Document/default.aspx. If the user were to navigate up to the portal site or to change the URL to https://sp.cco.com, she would see the home page of the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal site, as shown in Figure 1.12.

Figure 1.12. Sample portal home page.


This portal page looks somewhat similar to the workspace. It contains horizontal navigation bars and a vertical menu on the left-hand side of the page, as well as a number of Web Parts and a search bar. However, the portal provides a number of features that Windows SharePoint Services does not, including

  • Automatic categorization

  • Audiences

  • Topic areas

  • News

  • Personal sites

  • Shared services

  • Single sign-on

  • Site directory

  • User profiles

This portal home page includes a news Web Part (which pulls information from the News area), an events Web Part (which resides on the home page), a links Web Part (which also resides on the home page), and a My Links Web Part. The My Links Web Part shows links that I have added to my personal site. By including these on the home page of the portal, it saves the user from having to go to her personal site to access her links.

The portal home page also includes a search bar and links to My Site, Site Settings, and Help.

An Overview of Personal Sites on the Portal

Personal sites (accessed through the My Site link) provide each user of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with the ability to customize her own personal site. Figure 1.13 shows a personal site for the user SP Admin.

Figure 1.13. A sample personal site.


The Quick Launch bar on the left-hand side provides access to a number of tools, which allow the user to turn his personal site collection into a powerful information management tool. These tools include the following:

  • Edit Profile

  • Set as Office Default Website

  • Create List

  • Create Page

  • Manage Alerts

  • A link to Private Documents

  • A link to Shared Documents

  • A link to My Pictures

  • Link(s) to My Pages, if any

Several Web Parts are available by default (that can be modified by a portal administrator) that look for information in the portal specifically directed to the individual:

  • My Calendar Can be connected to a web-accessible calendar such as Outlook. The user can then see the week's schedule from this page.

  • News for You Collects news items from sites directed to the groups of which the user is a member.

  • My Links Summary Collects URLs that the user has requested be added to My Links, or new URLs can be added as needed.

  • Links for You Collects links targeted to the user based on the groups she belongs to.

  • My Alerts Summary Collects alerts that have been sent from other subsites to the user.

The individual's profile can be edited, so she can choose what information is available to other users of the site about herself. Lists can be created (including document libraries, contact lists, events, tasks, custom lists, surveys, and discussion boards), or additional web pages can be created if the Create Page option is selected. If Manage Alerts is chosen, the individual can view all the alerts in one place. Private and shared documents as well as My Pictures can be accessed from this same part of the My Site page.

My Site also gives the user the option of searching his personal site or the whole site collection, which can facilitate the searching process if the user knows an item is included in his personal site.

This site can also be made available to be viewed by others, and the owner of the site can determine which items are viewable to visitors of the site.

An Overview of Portal Areas

The horizontal navigation bar on the portal home page lists portal areasin this case, Home (the current page), Topics, News, Sites, Library, and Help. Areas are slightly different from Windows SharePoint Services sites or workspaces and are intended to allow an organization to present the different resources available in the portal and to help users of the portal find this information. Documents, lists, and other items on the portal site can be associated with one or more areas.

Figure 1.14 illustrates that site collections, areas, and personal sites can be linked in a variety of ways. A new site collection would normally be listed in the Sites area on the portal, or the Topics area could contain a listing based on content in a document library from a subsite.

Figure 1.14. Relationships between site collections, areas, and personal sites.


Portal areas can be modified by adding or modifying Web Parts in the area if the person is a member of the Administrator, Web Designer, or Content Manager site group. Subareas can also be created to further fine-tune the information provided under a specific topic.

Areas are examined in more detail in Chapter 14, "Using SharePoint Technologies for Storage, Indexing, and Centralized Information Access."

SharePoint Portal Level Searching

SharePoint offers advanced searching capabilities from the portal level, from within site collections, and even from within certain Web Parts.

A key part of the searching process is indexing. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 can create indexes for content stored on SharePoint Portal Server 2003 sites, in Windows SharePoint Services sites, as well as in file systems (the standard network directory structure), Exchange 2000 and 2003 Servers, and Lotus Notes version 4.6a and R5 databases. External websites can also be "crawled" to add to the index of information. This crawling is termed "adaptive" because it indexes only information that has changed since the last indexing process, which makes subsequent indexing much faster.

A filtering process takes place before the data is indexed, to remove nontextual information such as formatting and graphics, which dramatically reduces the amount of data that needs to be managed. Specific files that can be filtered are Microsoft Office documents, Microsoft Publisher files, Visio files, HTML files, Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) files, and text files.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Audiences

The ability to define audiences in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 allows an organization to create sites that display and distribute content based on the user who accesses it. Audiences can be based on the Windows 2003 security group, distribution list, organizational reporting structure, or the public properties in their user profiles. Certain items can be targeted to one or more audiences: Web Parts, news, lists, and list items. Whenever a document is uploaded to a portal area the audience needs to be selected to determine who can view the document.

An administrator for a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 site can create an audience based on the inclusion or exclusion of information from a user's profile, such as a department, manager, office, name, or phone number. So an audience could be created that included everyone in a Sales Department, from North America. Figure 1.15 shows some of the operands that can be used when creating an audience.

Figure 1.15. Creating a rule for an audience.


When a user accesses his My Site, he can also see information targeted to him based on different criteria in the News for You and Links for You Web Parts.




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

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