Overview of Categories

                 

 
Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
By Robert  Ferguson

Table of Contents
Chapter  12.   Creating Categories


SharePoint Portal Server provides the ability to organize documents with a feature called categories. Categories are helpful when users do not know where specific documents are stored, giving them the ability to search by a specific topic.

The association of documents and subjects provides a logical structure of the information through the dashboard site. It is imperative that the category structure strategy is in place and caters to the requirements of its users. This chapter will explain how to plan, create, and manage a category structure.

Categories are an optional feature in SharePoint Portal Server, but are often or best used when documents relate to a specific subject. A sound category structure increases the ability to search for documents by providing a simple directory-like organizational structure. For example, you can organize information in your SPS workspace by using categories to group similar documents. This allows end users to browse through information by topic, rather than by relying on a directory structure that might only make sense to a few content experts. For end users who are new to a particular workspace, categories are a big time-saver. That is, categories accommodate end-users not necessarily comfortable with the layout and makeup of your portal data, without changing the existing folder structure and processes that are in use already. And on a final note, similar to server directories and subdirectories, categories can be designed to include subcategories .

With SharePoint Portal Server, documents associated with a category are only links to the physical documents that lie in the workspace. This powerful feature provides the ability to link a single document with multiple categories. SharePoint Portal Server can also categorize documents from the workspace document library and from crawled content sites. Because you can associate a single document with several categories, you can also remove a document from a category without affecting it or its association with other documents and categories.

The categories hierarchy associated with a workspace can be viewed in two distinct places, the dashboard site (see Figure 12.1) and the Web folder view (see Figure 12.2).

Figure 12.1. View of a category hierarchy from the dashboard site.

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Figure 12.2. View of a category hierarchy from a Web folder view.

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Categories displayed from the dashboard site are displayed in a Web Part on the home page. By clicking the category link (for example, Category 1), a new detailed view of the category and its subcategories is displayed.

As you can see, categories work something like folders: You can expand them to see subcategories and documents just like folders can be expanded to view subfolders and data. They also allow the user to view and search for documents logically and easily.

The Category Dictionary

Like most applications, SharePoint Portal Server utilizes common database functions ”such as a schema, data dictionary, and metadata ”to provide searching capability. The schema references the tables and fields of the database. The data dictionary, referred to as the category dictionary, is a list of files in its database. Metadata , or data about your data, describes how, when, and by whom a particular set of data was collected, and how the data is formatted.

Categories in SharePoint Portal Server appear to be folders in the workspace, yet they are actually an extension of the schema. The hierarchical category dictionary is kept in sync with the categories in the workspace. Therefore, when you create a new category, a corresponding value is created in the category dictionary. SharePoint Portal Server's use of categories allows you to group documents into folders based on shared metadata.

So when a user is searching for a document through Windows Explorer or the dashboard site, a query is being performed and the documents associated with a particular category value are displayed.

Figure 12.3. View of the Categories folder in the workspace.

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SharePoint Portal Server's use of categories can provide functionality that normal content storage has not been able to easily provide. This feature is considered to be one the biggest added values.


                 
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Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
Special Edition Using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
ISBN: 0789725703
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 286

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