Your deployment of SharePoint Portal Server is a good opportunity to evaluate document management practices and content organization. Before you begin configuring your workspace, take some time to assess your existing content, identify the needs and habits of your users, and outline your deployment goals. This information can help you decide how to streamline your document management processes and create an effective dashboard site to deliver valuable information to your organization.
If you are deploying SharePoint Portal Server for a group or organization that you know well, you may already be familiar with the current practices and needs of the organization. Consultations with group members about key goals can help you identify which SharePoint Portal Server features you want to deploy. Coordination with others is especially important if your deployment fits into a larger information management system in your organization. If this is the case, you may want to form a team of key people who understand the goals and requirements of your organization to help you plan an effective deployment.
An organization often stores data in many different places, such as file servers, Web sites, and mail servers. If you are uncertain about the location and purpose of the content used by your organization, a content review can help you identify them. Knowing the types of documents that exist in your organization helps you determine the best way to organize your content.
A content review addresses the following questions:
Knowing where information is stored and how your organization uses it helps you to clarify your deployment goals.
If you are uncertain about the needs of your organization, a survey can capture information about the habits and concerns of your users. It can also identify other useful information for planning your deployment.
You can ask users to identify the types of content they find valuable. A user survey could include the following questions:
Responses to these questions help to identify the content that users want to access, even if it is not currently available to them. Users might provide a variety of answers to the same question. For example, some users might identify certain tasks as easy that other users identify as difficult. In this case, consider differences in knowledge between the two groups. Assess whether your dashboard site needs to address each group separately or if you need to redefine your target audience.
You can also ask users how they prefer to find information. Responses to this question help to prioritize your goals for deploying search features. With SharePoint Portal Server, users can locate content by:
You can conduct a survey by distributing a questionnaire with detailed questions, and analyzing the answers with your planning team. You can also survey your organization by meeting with users to discuss existing practices, work styles and habits, and potential deployment goals. Whether your process is formal or informal, the scope of your deployment and the structure of your organization determine the approach that you take.
Your initial research helps you identify your organization's information management processes and may uncover some common problems. Analyzing these problems can help you clarify your goals. The following table describes a few typical problems and suggests some of the SharePoint Portal Server features to include in your configuration plan to solve those problems and achieve your information management goals.
SharePoint Portal Server Solutions
Common Problem | Solution |
---|---|
It is difficult to track revisions to documents with multiple authors. | Use version control to save changes made to a document and to eliminate the possibility of people overwriting each other's documents. |
Information for the organization is not widely circulated. | Display news, announcements, quick links, and other information on the home page of the dashboard site. |
The group lacks control over who accesses content. | Use roles for flexible control over access to content. |
There is no process to maintain a private view of a document. | Select a document publication process to ensure that drafts are not visible to readers until the appropriate time. |
It is time-consuming to enforce review cycles for documents. | Use an approval process to route documents automatically to designated reviewers. |
Information is hard to find on the current portal. | Use categories and Best Bets to organize and highlight relevant content. |
Searches are slow because servers are queried one at a time. | Add content sources to create an index of multiple information sources, such as Web servers, file servers, Exchange servers, Lotus Notes databases, and other SharePoint Portal Server workspaces. |