| After reading through the previous chapters, you should have a good foundation of SharePoint Portal Server. It is based on the Web Storage System, which was introduced in Exchange 2000 Server. It is a storage mechanism for storing unstructured data such as word documents and PDF files, and storing semi-structured data like email. By now, you have also learned about the capabilities of SharePoint and how it provides solutions based on the Web Storage System. Email is considered semi-structured because it has some fields that will always appear in any email, such as FROM, TO, CC, and SUBJECT, which represent structured fields, and a BODY that mainly is in free format without any specific structure. The structured data allows for better sorting or searching of emails based on those fields. For example, in Outlook you can view email arranged in order by From, To, or Subject. In fact you might have noticed that there are more fields, such as Date, that you do not specify; rather, the system automatically takes care of the date field by stamping your email. These fields are another form of structured data, which enable you to search for emails in chronological order. Then how about the Body of an email? Ordering email based on their Body (text) does not make sense, and searching the Body of emails is not precise, and would be based on keywords. This shows that having some sort of structure will help us in locating data quickly and accurately. If these types of structured data help us, why don't we use them for unstructured data? In fact, in SharePoint the idea of profiles serves the same purpose. However, the concept of profiles has existed in the Office products for a while; they were optional and not widely used. Now in SharePoint, you can mandate that each document must have a profile, and also mandate which fields must be filled. The profiles allow for more accurate searches and retrieval of data. |
