Clarifying the New and Revised Terminology of SharePoint


When Microsoft redesigned its SharePoint products, it also changed some of the terminology associated with the technology. These changes are described in the following sections. For users of SharePoint Team Services, or SharePoint Portal Server 2001, it is important to understand how the terminology has changed.

Replacing Roles with Site Groups

Roles from SharePoint 2001 have been replaced with site groups in SharePoint 2003. Site group names and definitions are slightly different from the SharePoint 2001 role names and definitions. When migrating from SharePoint Portal 2001 to SharePoint Portal 2003, Table 2.1 shows the site group SharePoint 2001 users will be in after the migration.

Table 2.1. SharePoint Portal 2001 Roles Versus SharePoint Portal 2003 Site Groups

SharePoint Portal 2001 Role

SharePoint Portal 2003 Site Group

Administrator

Administrator

None

Content Manager

Advanced Author

Web Designer

Author

Contributor

None

Members

Discussion Participant

Reader

Browser

Reader


SharePoint Portal Server 2003 has two additional groups: Content Manager and Members. Users in the Content Manager group can manage and create sites, areas, document and form libraries, and lists. This group has similar rights to the Web Designer but can actually create pages and sites. The rights of this group would fall between the SharePoint Portal 2001 Advanced Author and Administrator groups.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 also has a Members group. Users in the Members group can create personal sites, view information, and submit items for lists. The rights of this group fall somewhere between the Reader and Contributor in SharePoint Portal 2003 and between Browser and Author in SharePoint Portal 2001.

Enhancing the Alerting Process

SharePoint Team Services provided notifications, whereas SharePoint Portal Server 2001 provided notifications and subscriptions to keep users apprised of changes within the SharePoint environment. The SharePoint 2003 products provide alerts, which notify a user of changes in a particular Web Part or to a specific document. Alerts are provided for additional types of information not included in SharePoint 2001 and also include more information about what was changed. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 supports the following alerts:

  • Search queries

  • Documents and listings

  • Areas

  • News listings

  • Sites added to the Site Directory

  • SharePoint lists and libraries

  • List items

  • Portal site users

  • Backward-compatible document library folders

SharePoint users can manage their own alerts through the web interface, and Microsoft Outlook 2003 can be used to view alerts and includes rules to sort and filter them into special folders. Figure 2.2 provides a view of this feature, with the Create Rule options visible.

Figure 2.2. The Rules and Alerts window from Outlook 2003.


Understanding the New Audience Feature

Audiences are used by SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to target content to specific users. Audiences can be set based on a user's membership in a Windows 2003 security group, distribution list, organizational reporting structure, or the public properties in their user profiles. This allows for flexible and dynamic creation of audiences. Audiences apply across all portals in the deployment, not just to individual sites or areas.

Content in a portal area can be targeted to an audience within a Web Part, and items or links can also be targeted to an audience. This means that content displayed can be different depending on the audience the user belongs to. For example, in the News area on the portal, a newsletter can be targeted to members of the sales audience, and only they would be able to see it. By using audiences, the information presented to users can be targeted and streamlined, which results in a more focused user environment.

Understanding Topics

SharePoint Portal Server 2001 provided categories for organizing documents, and these have been enhanced in SharePoint Portal 2003 with areas and topics.

Areas can be found on the navigation bar on the portal, to facilitate navigation, with the default areas being Home, Topics, News, and Sites. Topics are a subset of areas and can refer to subareas under all top-level areas except the default areas of Home, News, and Sites.

The topic hierarchy can be easily managed from within the Portal Site Map: Home page as shown in Figure 2.3. Topics can provide a way for users to easily find information for a specific subject. Like a table of contents, topics direct users to the place where the information can be found. Figure 2.3 also displays the menu of available actions for the areas and topics displayed.

Figure 2.3. The SharePoint topic/area site map.


Topics can contain lists, discussion boards, document libraries, and other features that enable the SharePoint administrators to effectively manage and provide access to information. Topics provide navigation assistance and organization not only to documents but also to people, lists, discussions, and even sites.

Security for topics is granular and distributed. A topic can be managed so that there are restrictions on who can submit items for a topic and who can approve "publishing" an item to a topic. In addition, when a listing is added to an area or topic, the audiences who can see the listing can be chosen.




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

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