What s New in Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 | Microsoft Office 2003 Editions Resource Kit (Pro-Resource Kit)

What’s New in Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003, using the combined collaboration features of SharePoint Products and Technologies, facilitates easy, connected collaboration across an enterprise organization. SharePoint Portal Server enables people to work together on documents, projects, and tasks; helps to provide secure access to relevant information across multiple systems; and presents specific applications and customized content based on a user’s functional group and organizational role.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 is an update to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 and offers a number of improvements, several of which are described in the following sections.

What’s new for administrators of SharePoint Portal Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides an architecture that addresses the most demanding performance needs. By using the latest technologies, SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides a centralized, unified interface for enterprise users and highly flexible deployment options.

The following new features have been included to help administrators.

Architecture

Scalable, distributed architecture SharePoint Portal Server 2003 scales from a single server to a server farm with multiple front-end Web servers and back-end database servers. Front-end Web servers are stateless, so the load can be balanced across them to support the largest of organizations. You can deploy up to a hundred portal sites per server farm when using a shared services topology.
Shared services Deliver shared services to multiple portal sites from a centrally managed and configured server farm. Shared services can include indexing and search, user profiles, audiences, alerts, and personal sites.
Communication with external partners by using an extranet If you work with external partners, or if you have users who need to access data from outside of your organization’s firewall, you can use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 in an intranet/extranet environment. In this configuration, internal and external users can view and interact with the same content and data. You can also employ the antivirus protection and blocked file extension features to help protect your server integrity.

International

Support for multiple language sites Multiple language sites can be hosted on a single server or server farm running SharePoint Portal Server 2003. Note that site language is independent from server language.
Regional settings for each site Each site can have its own regional settings, such as time zone.
New word breakers Word breakers for Czech, Finnish, Hungarian, and Portuguese are available, as well as the original set of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 word breakers for English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Chinese Traditional, and Chinese Simplified.

Management

Alerts The portal site now automatically identifies and optimizes alerts that have the potential for generating large numbers of results; it will deactivate any alert that generates an excessive number of results. Administrators can deactivate or delete any user’s alerts and alert results. Misdirected e-mail messages can be prevented by locking e-mail address fields to use only user profile data. You can also customize the format of the alert results e-mail messages by using an .xsl file.
Single sign-on Single sign-on allows you to store and map account credentials so that users don’t have to sign on again when portal-based applications retrieve information from enterprise applications.
Security-enhanced integration of enterprise applications Tight integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002 helps to enable rich and secure enterprise application integration using single sign-on. Connectors from Actional enable integration with PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel.
Full-text searching The portal site delivers a scalable, high-performance indexing and query handling infrastructure. By using a multiserver topology, you can manage your resources by propagating content indexes from the index management server to multiple dedicated search servers. HTTPS indexing enables crawling of security-enhanced Web sites over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). In addition, protocol handlers for Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 sites enable the portal site to crawl information in site pages, document libraries, lists, and list items. IFilters now provide the ability to full-text search files created by Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Visio in addition to the existing capability to search files in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, MIME, XML, and HTML formats.
Audiences Audiences allow organizations to target content—such as Web Parts, news, lists, and list items—to one or more specific audiences based on job role or task. You can leverage your investment in Microsoft Active Directory directory service to easily create audiences from existing distribution lists and security groups.
Backup and restore Improved backup and restore helps to enable flexible site recovery. Each site in a server farm can be individually backed up and restored. This feature can also be used for archiving inactive sites prior to their deletion.
User profiles Easily create user profiles by importing properties and user data from Active Directory. User profiles make it easy to find people and enable content managers to target information by using audiences. Add properties to the flexible user profile for use by integrated applications or to enable portal users to find people more easily.
Inactive site management Site owners are periodically asked to confirm that the sites are in use or delete them. If multiple notices are sent to the site owner without any response, the administrator can specify that the site be automatically deleted.

Security

Works with standard Windows authentication and security methods Use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with any Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0 authentication method, connect to the database by using Windows authentication or SQL Server authentication, and integrate SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with Active Directory.
SharePoint administrators group Allow members of a domain group to perform central administration tasks without granting them administrator rights to the local server computer.
Manage users from SharePoint Central Administration Use the SharePoint Central Administration pages to add or delete users on all sites and assign site owners.
Domain group support Use domain groups to help control access to your site.
Blocked file extensions Server administrators can block the upload of specific file types (for example, MP3 or EXE files).

For a complete list of new administrator features, and information about using these features, see the Administrator’s guide for SharePoint Portal Server 2003 on the Assistance Center for Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/assistance.

Using Office 2003 and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 together

When you use both Office 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server in your organization, your users can take advantage of several Office 2003 features that interact with SharePoint Portal Server. For example, when using Office 2003 and SharePoint Portal Server together, users get:

Integrated file open and save Users of Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003, Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, and Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 can open files from and save files directly to SharePoint sites from within the client application.
Document check-in and check-out from the client application Users can check out or check in a file from within Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and FrontPage. Checking a file out locks the file while it is being edited, thus preventing others from overwriting or editing it inadvertently.
Synchronized Events and Contacts lists With Outlook 2003, users can view Events and Contacts lists on a SharePoint site or in Outlook, and items can be dragged onto a user’s personal calendar in Outlook.
Datasheet viewing and editing With Office 2003 installed on the user’s computer, list views are enhanced with the Edit in Datasheet option. This option offers a rich client-side editor for lists, which allows fast spreadsheet-style editing with add row, copy and paste, and “fill-down” as well as richer view filtering and sorting options.
List data editing with Excel and Access Users can edit, analyze, and synchronize data with SharePoint lists from within Excel and Access.
Picture editing Users can view and edit pictures in a picture library by using a new image-editing tool from Office 2003.
Shared attachments Users can send documents that are hosted in a SharePoint site as attachments. Local copies of shared attachments can be updated with the updated copy on the SharePoint site.

For more information about any of these features, see the Help system for Office 2003.

What’s new for site users of SharePoint Portal Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 creates a portal site that remembers who you are and what information you care about and work with. Based on Web Part Page technology, SharePoint Portal Server helps to deliver customization and personalization that is flexible, secure, and reliable. SharePoint Portal Server provides a rich set of features focused on ensuring that portal site users have easy access to relevant information from a variety of entry points.

The following are a just few of the new features for users of SharePoint Portal Server 2003:

Areas You can organize information on the portal site by using areas. If you find a useful link missing from an area, add a link and see if the content manager approves it. You can add an item to more than one area on the portal site.
News Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 enables you to highlight information, such as announcements and other key company information, by adding items to the News area. A news item can be either text-based content or a link to an existing news item, such as a press release or an article on a news service.
Personal sites My Site is a personal SharePoint site that provides personalized and customized information for you. In addition, My Site provides quick access to things you need to do your work, such as links to documents, people, or Web sites as well as alerts to track changes to content within the portal and your organization. From My Site, you can also update your user profile and share links with other portal users.
User profiles Easily find information about people, their documents, and their shared links.
Alerts Get alert results in e-mail messages immediately or in daily or weekly summaries for portal site content. You can now add alerts for people, lists, list items, and the Site Directory in addition to news, areas, topics, search queries, documents, and backward-compatible document libraries. Alert results are shown in an easy-to-read HTML format and now identify whether the alert result is sent because content changed or was added. You can manage all of your alerts from the My Alerts page.
Lists and views From Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, SharePoint Portal Server adds both predesigned and custom lists to all SharePoint sites. For example, you can create a picture library to share a collection of digital pictures or create an issue-tracking list to maintain a history on a specific issue. You can also use calendar views for any SharePoint list that has a date and time column. In addition, you can add attachments to list items, including HTML pages, documents, and images.
Simple site creation and page customization By using Self-Service Site Creation, you can create SharePoint sites, such as team sites or Meeting Workspace sites, on demand without involving the information technology (IT) department. In addition, you can customize a page by changing or adding Web Parts. Each list and library on a site is a Web Part, enabling easy customization and personalization using the browser.
Search Faster results and improved relevancy ranking enable you to find the information you need easily. Search results now include people, picture libraries, list items, and user profiles. If you search for an image, you’ll see a thumbnail view of the image; if you search for a person, you will see her personal profile. You can also group search results in different ways, such as by author, site, date, or area. From the search results page, you now can save a useful search to the My Links Web Part on your personal site.
Site Directory The Site Directory provides a central location from which to view and access all Web sites associated with a specific portal site. You can also create sites based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 or add links to existing sites. In addition, adding a site to the Site Directory is a quick and easy way to include content in search results.

What’s new for content managers of SharePoint Portal Server

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 helps to enable you to easily share information, use best practices, and work together with others on documents, projects, and other efforts. SharePoint Portal Server offers a number of features that make it easy to find, organize, and work together on documents. Content managers have the option to approve content before it is displayed on the portal site, establish expiration dates for temporary content, and control who has access to the content they manage.

The following are a just few of the new features for content managers:

Lists and views From Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, SharePoint Portal Server adds predesigned and custom lists to all SharePoint sites. List managers can approve or reject items that are submitted to the list and add comments. List managers can also apply permissions to a list, allowing only specific users to make changes to the list.
Support for list and site templates Users can save SharePoint lists as templates, and reuse them or distribute them to other sites. Administrators and Web designers can save sites as templates to capture best practices or to define a consistent look and feel.
Areas The portal site is a hierarchy of rich subsites that enable content managers to add lists, images, and documents to one or more areas. Content managers can approve or reject items that are submitted to the area. In addition, security can be managed at the area level, allowing only specific users to make contributions or changes to the area.
Portal site map Manage portal areas and topics using drag-and-drop functionality in a browser. Create, move, rename, and delete categories by using the portal site map.
Topic Assistant The portal site suggests items to list under an area that the content manager can approve or reject. As areas are added to the portal site, and items are added to areas, the Topic Assistant continues to learn and suggest items for each area.
Site Directory To organize and display the sites in meaningful ways, you can create views that sort, filter, and group the sites. The Site Directory also offers Web Parts for “Newest sites,” “Sites I added,” and “Spotlight Sites.” The Site Directory can be configured to automatically approve sites for searching or to require approval for each site.
News To make managing news items easier, you can specify start and end dates for content display and automatically hide expired news items. As a content manager, you can vary the display of news items—from headlines to summaries to expanded views—by modifying the properties of the Web Part.