SharePoint Portal Server Overview

As an organization creates and collects information, people spend increasing amounts of time searching, organizing, and managing that information. SharePoint Portal Server combines the ability to create corporate Web portals with searching, document management, and collaboration options. SharePoint Portal Server tightly integrates with the tools that you use every day—Windows Explorer, Office applications, and Web browsers—to help you create, manage, and share content throughout your organization.

Introducing the Dashboard Site—A "Portal in a Box"

Web portals are quickly becoming a popular means of aggregating information from many different sources into one convenient place. SharePoint Portal Server provides an easy way to create corporate Web portals and integrate document management and search.

SharePoint Portal Server creates a Web portal—known as the dashboard site—automatically during installation. The dashboard site offers a centralized access point for finding and managing information. By using a browser to view the dashboard site, users can perform document management tasks and find information. The dashboard site allows users to

• Browse through information by categories.
• Search for information.
• Subscribe to new or changing information.
• Check in and check out documents.
• Review a document's version history.
• Approve documents for publication.
• Publish documents.

The dashboard site provides access to information that is stored both inside and outside your organization, which allows users to find and share documents regardless of the location or format of those documents. In addition, you can customize the home page of the dashboard site to display organizational news and other important information.

The dashboard site uses Microsoft Digital Dashboard technology to organize and display information. A digital dashboard consists of reusable, customizable Web Parts that can present information from a wide variety of sources, including Office documents and Web sites. You can add or remove Web Parts to customize the dashboard site for your organization.

In addition to providing a default, organization-wide dashboard site, you can allow users to create customized "personal" dashboards to organize and present information that is especially relevant to them, such as project-specific or workgroup-specific information. Users can add content to dashboards by creating Web Parts directly from Office XP or by importing Web Parts from a catalog.

Managing and Publishing Documents

Large and complex information sources, such as a collection of file shares, can be difficult to navigate and use because there is little or no organizational framework to direct users. File shares, for instance, provide only a hierarchical directory structure as a means of organizing content. There is only one navigation path to any given document, and users must know the name of the server that the document is stored on, in addition to the directory structure of folders on the server. When you add other sources of information, such as Web sites, e-mail servers, and databases to the mix of information sources, finding the correct information can be difficult.

SharePoint Portal Server offers a number of features to help streamline your document management, such as the following:

• Version tracking to record the history of documents.
• Application of descriptive, searchable information (metadata) to identify a document.
• Document publishing control.
• Automated approval routes for documents to be reviewed.
• Web discussions for online comments by multiple document reviewers.
• Control of document access based on roles.

Version Control

SharePoint Portal Server records a document's history to help you track changes and eliminate the possibility of someone overwriting another user's modifications. To edit a document, you must check it out first. This prevents others from changing the document until you check it in again. Every time you check in a document, SharePoint Portal Server assigns a new version number to the document and archives the previous version. When you check out a document, you retrieve the most recent version unless you specifically select an earlier version.

Document Profiles

Document profiles provide a way to add searchable information that pertains to a document. This information, known as metadata, can help describe or identify the document. By default, a document profile includes basic properties, such as Author and Title. You can easily add custom properties to capture additional information that makes it easier to organize and find documents.

Document Publishing

SharePoint Portal Server can store both "private" and "public" versions of a document. You can automatically publish a document each time you check it in or you can choose to check in private drafts and publish the document only when it is complete. You can generate as many drafts as you want before you publish a version of a document. Only published documents are available for users to search or view on the dashboard site.

Approval Routes

You can use approval routes to ensure adequate review of documents before publishing. When an author chooses to publish a document, SharePoint Portal Server can send it automatically to one or more people for review before publishing it. Each of these people, called approvers, has the option of approving or rejecting the document.

Approvers receive e-mail notification when a document requires review. SharePoint Portal Server supports two approval routes: One after another (serial) and All at once (parallel). Figure 3.1 illustrates both models.

Figure 3.1. Approval routes

Web Discussions

Web discussions allow you to conduct online discussions about a document without modifying the document. Instead of using e-mail to discuss a document or trying to capture conversations about a document, authors and reviewers can now communicate with each other through Web discussions. Simultaneous discussions about a document can occur even if one person has the document checked out. Comments are stored as threaded conversations, grouping comments and replies together. With all comments grouped into a single place, authors no longer need to compile hand-written comments from reviewers or comments sent through individual e-mail messages.

Role-Based Security

SharePoint Portal Server uses roles to control access to content. You can assign the coordinator, author, and reader roles to users based on the tasks they perform. Each role identifies a specific set of permissions: coordinators handle management tasks, authors add and update files, and readers can read published documents. SharePoint Portal Server also offers the option of denying a user access to specific documents.

Searching Content and Creating Indexes

An organization's information is usually stored in multiple locations, in a variety of formats. Even if a server infrastructure allows searches across multiple data stores, often only limited text searches are available. It can also be difficult to determine whether the results that these simple searches provide are relevant.

Whether you are searching for a specific document or you just want to browse through a group of related documents, SharePoint Portal Server has several features that help you find information quickly and easily.

To make information easier to find, SharePoint Portal Server offers

• A single location to search for information stored in many different places.
• Keyword searches that query the full text of a document and the document's properties.
• Browsing by topic (categories) to find information.
• Automatic categorization of documents.
• Best Bet classification for documents that are highly relevant to a search.
• Subscriptions to keep you updated on useful information.

Full-Text Search

The dashboard site provides a full-text search option so that you can search document text and document properties for the keywords that you type. SharePoint Portal Server finds all documents that match your search and returns a list of results. For a more specific search, you can use the advanced search option to add document properties, such as Author, to your search criteria. You can also narrow your search scope to search only a specific set of documents, such as a folder for press releases or a supplier's Web site. In addition to searching from the dashboard site, you can also search content that is included in the index by SharePoint Portal Server from within Office XP applications.

Content Sources

Organizations keep information in a variety of places such as Web sites, file systems, public folders on mail servers, and databases. SharePoint Portal Server improves search efficiency by enabling you to search across all of these information sources at the same time. In SharePoint Portal Server, each of these information sources is known as a content source. By using a wizard to add a content source, you identify the location of the content that you want to make available for searching and link that content to your dashboard site. SharePoint Portal Server then includes information from each content source in the index. Users can perform quick searches on this content from the dashboard site. With the addition of content sources, the dashboard site is the easiest place to find information, regardless of its location or format.

Categories

You can organize information on the dashboard site by using categories to group similar documents. This allows users to browse through information by topic. For users who do not know where documents are stored, categories help them find what they need. Another advantage is that a document can appear in several different categories. Categories can include documents that are stored in SharePoint Portal Server and information from additional content sources.

Category Assistant

Categories are an excellent way to organize your information. However, if you have a large number of documents, categorizing them can be a time-consuming task. To simplify the process, SharePoint Portal Server provides an automated categorization tool called Category Assistant. After you have categorized a few representative documents for each category, Category Assistant compares those sample documents to the uncategorized documents, and then selects the best category matches based on the content in the uncategorized documents.

Best Bets

Best Bets guide users by directing them to documents that are particularly relevant to their search. A Best Bet is a document that is selected as the best recommendation for a category or specific keyword. SharePoint Portal Server displays Best Bets at the top of a search results list.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions notify you about new or updated information on topics that match your interests. You can subscribe to content you find useful: a specific document, all documents in a folder, all documents assigned to a category, or a set of search results. After you subscribe to content, SharePoint Portal Server notifies you when the content is modified, if a new document matching your criteria is available, or if Web discussion comments about the content are added. You can view your subscription notifications on the dashboard site. You can also choose to receive notifications by e-mail.