Introducing Portal Technologies and SharePoint

Before getting started on the technical tasks associated with managing and working with SharePoint content, it is important to understand the purpose and common usage scenarios for the technology.

Organizational stakeholders often suffer from what’s been termed information overload. Because computers play such an integral part in any business, not surprisingly, more and more of the information that is created, consumed, and shared in an organization is digital. The more business that you have and the more successful your business, the more information you have to manage. Usually, you have some form of document for just about every process and transaction that plays out during the day-to-day operation in your company. From proposals to legal documents, from sales receipts to human resource policy documentation, the amount of information required to function is staggering.

To manage your information overload, SharePoint offers tools with which you can build business applications to better store, share, and manage digital information. With it, you can create lists, libraries, and websites for your various company teams to help run your business processes more efficiently.

What is Portal Technology?

A corporate portal is a gateway through which members can access business information and, if set up properly, should be the first place an employee goes to access anything of importance. Portals differ from regular websites in that they are customized specifically around a business process. In SharePoint, a portal may actually consist of numerous websites, with information stored either directly on those sites or in other systems, such as fileshares, business applications, or a regular Internet website. Because making informed business decisions is key to becoming and remaining successful, it’s important that the information you place on a portal is secure, up-to-date, and easily accessible. Because a business’s marketplace may span the globe, an organization also needs to have the information that reflects the needs of employees from multiple specific regions.

As an example, consider a new employee who has just joined an organization. In addition to learning her new job responsibilities, this employee must quickly get up-to-speed on the various company processes and policies. A good portal should provide all the company reference and policy information that the employee needs to review as well as links to all the information systems and websites that employee needs to do her job. Information should be stored in easy-to-browse locations, based on subject or topic. In situations where the location of a document or information is not obvious, the employee should be able to type words into a search box and receive suggestions. The employee should also be able to share information with others. In many ways, a good portal should act as a table of contents for all the information and websites related to an organization or topic.

Why Does an Organization Invest in Portal Technology?

The following list provides ten reasons why many enterprise organizations opt to invest in portal technologies:

1. The recent adoption of the web and web-related technologies makes portal technologies an obvious choice. Because portal technologies are web-based, decision makers can access important information via the Internet regardless of where they are located.

2. Portal technologies allow information workers to handle day-to-day tasks from a single starting point where previously things were spread out across multiple places and applications.

3. With important regulatory initiatives, such as Sarbanes Oxley, organizations are using portal technologies to ensure that an accurate audit trail is kept on important documents and that business processes remain compliant.

4. The fileshare based approach previously used to store most information was highly dependent on the habits and practices of the person creating it. Portal technologies store and share information based on the organizational structure, making them intuitive to everyone in the organization. This structure translates into productivity boosts because workers can more easily locate and retrieve information.

5. Portal technologies such as SharePoint scale with an organization, offering a model that will grow as your company grows.

6. While the typical business portal product incorporates many common business practices, your organizational needs may dictate a customized process. Because SharePoint offers an extensible infrastructure, you can build custom solutions.

7. Although a company may be tempted by the latest and greatest information management system, most organizations still have legacy systems and data sources. You can massage portal technologies to integrate with these systems, allowing easier data mining or migration.

8. Much of today’s digital information is created and managed using the Microsoft Office system. It, therefore, makes sense to use SharePoint as the portal technology. SharePoint integrates seamlessly with these tools, allowing you to create, store, manage, and collaborate on this information from a single location.

What Is SharePoint?

SharePoint is an extensible and scalable web-based platform consisting of tools and technologies that collectively form what’s known as SharePoint Products and Technologies. The total package is a platform on which you can build business applications to help you better store, share, and manage digital information within your organization. Because you can build with or without the need for code, the package empowers the average business user to create, deploy, and manage team websites, without depending on skilled resources, such as systems administrators or developers. Using lists, libraries, and Web Parts, you can transform team websites into business applications built specifically around making your organization’s business processes more efficient.

SharePoint Products and Technologies has two major offerings:

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is a free offering available to Windows Server 2003 and Small Business Server 2003. It contains the core functionality needed for document management and collaboration, such as document libraries and lists.

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a newer version of SharePoint Portal Server 2003. It offers the same features of WSS in addition to the functionality required for Enterprise Content Management as well as Excel and Forms Services, Business Data Catalog, and Business Intelligence. SharePoint also features a more robust and customizable search engine as well as special features for displaying information stored in the SharePoint environment in a more customizable and aggregated format than is possible with WSS.

SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003

If you’re familiar with SharePoint Server 2007’s predecessor, SharePoint Portal Server 2003, you might appreciate a quick look at the changes in the new version.

While SharePoint Portal Server 2003 offered a great method of aggregating content from multiple sites to a single, easy-to-navigate location, the process was dependent on a user’s manual actions to publish the links to the portal areas, a dependency that highlighted the platform’s shortcomings. If the person who updated content forgot to publish a link to the portal, business decision makers could not access information.

Microsoft responded with SharePoint Server 2007, which offers tools and features that automate business processes and content aggregations. Built-in Web Parts, such as a site aggregator and Content Query Web Part meant that the site administrators can specify what content should automatically roll up to the main portal sites, eliminating manual updates and resulting in sites with up-to-date information.

With 2007, the technology in the top-level portal sites is exactly the same as that available on the team sites. This was not the case for SharePoint Portal Server, where there was a very distinct difference between working in a team site and working with portal content. Users had to learn each separate tool and there was confusion as to what activities were appropriate for each location.

The architectural changes and feature enhancements make it possible for you to use SharePoint for a wider range of organizations and scenarios. SharePoint Portal Server required that users authenticate using a Windows-based authentication system and Active Directory for user profile information. Because of its platform enhancements, SharePoint 2007 uses a variety of systems for authentication due and supports multiple authentication providers as well as LDAP sources for user profile information. In addition, SharePoint has much better support for extranet and Internet-facing scenarios.

SharePoint Portal Server 2003 has no mechanism for automated workflow or business processes. SharePoint 2007 includes several workflow templates that business users can further customize to suit their specific requirements.