Summary

Customizing and personalizing SharePoint 2003 can happen on a number of levels. This chapter provided examples of the many different ways SharePoint 2003 pages, Web Parts, and libraries can be customized to make them suit the needs of the administrators and the users. Personal sites can be customized with Web Parts that allow the user to stay close to his Exchange calendar or inbox and consolidate portal alerts and personal links. Pages can be added to personal sites for specific purposes, such as storing a variety of documents and images. Personal sites are also excellent places for adventurous users, managers, or site administrators to experiment with site customization.

For more complex and elaborate customizations, FrontPage 2003 offers an amazing number of tools that can be used to customize pages and sites above and beyond the tools and options offered by Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Although FrontPage 2003 should be used with caution, it allows customization of the look and feel of the site, the addition of graphical elements, the addition of web components such as hit counters and scrolling marquees, and the use of behaviors to mirror functionality offered by advanced websites that users interact with on their personal time.