Ten Things To Know About SharePoint 2007**
The newest version of Microsoft SharePoint is a broader product than ever, with a host of new features, new tools, and many options for licensing and deployment. This list of key concepts is designed to help demystify SharePoint products and technologies.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (
SharePoint may now be used not only for intranets and extranets, but for public websites, including those that support anonymous users (no login). The most popular reason for using SharePoint is for a corporate intranet, where SharePoint provides a user interface to disparate data sources, a launching point for line of business applications and a place to publish or collaborate on documents.
The Main Elements of SharePoint
SharePoint’s building blocks include sites, site collections, web parts, and zones. A SharePoint site includes a default home page with space for highlighting the information important to your group, and several predefined pages for storing documents, ideas, and information. A site also includes navigation elements so you can find your way around. A Web Part is a modular unit of information that consists of a title bar, a frame, and content. Web Parts are the basic building blocks of a SharePoint site. The Zone specifies the area on the Web Part Page where the Web Part is located. Web Part Zones are groupings of Web Parts. The default site template includes a Top Zone, Middle Left Zone, Middle Right Zone, and Bottom Zone.
1. What are the eight types of sites in SharePoint 2007?
Portal Sites - A
Internet presence sites - Internet presence sites are customer-facing sites. They are usually branded and are characterized by consistent stylistic elements, such as colors, fonts and logos as well as structural elements, such as navigation features and the structure of site pages. Although the appearance of an Internet site is tightly controlled, the content of the site may be dynamic and may change frequently. For example, a corporate presence Internet site communicates important company information to customers, partners, investors and potential employees, including descriptions of products and services, company news, annual reports, public filings, and job openings. As another example, an online news Internet site provides frequently updated information, along with interactive features such as stock tickers and blogs. Because an Internet presence site represents your enterprise to an external audience, you might stage and test the site and then publish it, either based on a schedule or as needed, to its public "production" location. A staging site is a mirror of the production site that you use to test content before it's published. Using a staging site can help you ensure that published content meets stringent standards.
Managed Document Repository site This is a large-scale library useful as an enterprise-wide knowledge base or historical archive. It includes features that can help users navigate, search, and manage a large number of documents in a deep hierarchy by using a set of specialized Web Parts. A portal site for a large body of documents managed separately from your usual authoring and collaboration portal sites, with its own distinctly managed workflow and document lifecycle processes.
Records Repository site Records management is the management of files and documents that provide evidence of activities or transactions performed by the organization. The Records Repository site is designed to implement the storage component of a records management solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007.
My Site - A team site based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (version 3) with public and private views. The public view makes it easy for a user to share data and documents with other users within the organization. A personal site also has a private aspect, allowing a user to store data and documents that are not meant to be shared.
Personalization sites - A personalization site is a site created by using a template that filters and targets the information displayed on the page based on the identity of the current user viewing the site. Users can then choose to view the general content displayed by the portal or Internet site or they can view the related personalization site, which filters the content so that it is more relevant to a particular user's specific information needs or tasks. You can personalize Web Parts on other pages in several ways, including using the Current User Filter Web Part on a dashboard or any other site to filter data from other Web Parts based on the identity of the current user.
Document Workspace sites – Created within Word or Excel. Default template includes Announcements, document library, members, tasks, links web parts.
Meeting Workspace sites- Created from Outlook and creates a site to support a meeting. Default site template includes objectives, agenda, attendees list, document library.
A site collection is a hierarchical set of sites that can be managed together. Sites within a site collection have common features, such as:
Shared permissions,
Galleries for templates,
Content types, and
Web parts, and
They often share a common navigation.
All sites in a site collection are stored together in the same SQL database. A portal site often is implemented as a site collection with the top-level Web site as the Home page of the portal.
In general, when planning a solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007, put each of the following types of sites or portal sites in separate site collections:
· Portal sites
· All team sites related to a portal site or Internet site
· Internet sites (production)
· Internet sites (staging)
· Records Repository sites
· Managed Document Repository sites
3. What Workflow capabilities does SharePoint 2007 have?
Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes out-of-the-box workflows that address primary content management needs, such as reviewing or approving documents for publication, along with specialized workflows for tracking issues, managing multiple language translations of content.
Workflows implement business processes on:
- Documents
- Web pages
- List items
For example, a workflow can route a document for review, track an issue through its various stages of resolution, or guide a contract through an approval process.
You can create custom workflows using Microsoft SharePoint Designer.
4. What is a Shared Service Provider (
An
5. What is information taxonomy?
An information architecture, also known as a taxonomy for your organization, is simply a structured outline of key concepts and groups of content in your organization. An information architecture provides a framework for implementing specific capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
For the content and content needs you identified in your content survey, think about how that content fits into the overall conceptual organization of your organization. Use that to create a detailed outline of your organization’s content. Start by dividing content needs into large conceptual buckets, based on key business processes or projects, and then break each high-level concept, process, or project into more detail at successive levels.
Different subject matter experts will be involved in identifying key concepts in the information architecture at different levels of the organization, and the process will happen in successive waves of planning over time, so it is not necessary to plan everything at once or by a small team from the top down. Often, one team will sketch out the information architecture for the central portal site and leave the details of the information architecture at the division level to a separate content planning team within each division.
After identifying the important concepts and placing them in a logical hierarchy, you can then take specific content from your survey and organize it within those important concepts. After you have the structure and content identified, you can use the information architecture to plan feature implementation for a complete solution using Office SharePoint Server 2007
Information architecture planning can be a relatively quick process for small organizations or a highly specialized process involving teams of experts for very large organizations. The goal is the same in either case: to figure out how content needs translate into key business concepts and implementation of the features of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
6. What are User Profiles?
User profiles are a
The properties and data from these sources are stored in user profiles managed by Profile Services. User profiles identify connections between people such as common managers, workgroups, group membership, and sites. In this way the relationship between people in an organization can be used to encourage more efficient collaboration with colleagues and across teams. This collaboration includes the ability for people to find each other using people-specific search features.
User profiles and user profile properties can also be used in implementing personalization features such as building My Sites and content targeting. User profiles are more than just groupings of imported and custom properties about people in your organization. The properties are also used in the public page of My Site to display information about the relationships of each person to other people and content in your organization. This also includes a list of documents shared by each person, and the policies that define how information about people is displayed and shared. Profiles allow users to learn more about the people they work with and see how everyone fits into their company's organization chart. User profiles also provide the foundation for other
When it's time to write custom code against a user profile, you can program against the UserProfileManager to load and inspect the property values for a specific user.
7. What are Audiences?
By using target audiences, you can display content such as list or library items, navigation links, and entire Web Parts to specific groups of people. This is useful when you want to present information that is relevant only to a particular group of people. For example, you can add a Web Part to the legal department's portal site that contains a list of legal contracts that is visible only to that department.
Any item in a SharePoint list or library can be targeted to specific audiences. To do this, you use the Content Query Web Part. Any other type of Web Part and its contents also can be targeted to audiences.
You can create an audience by specifying criteria to define a subset of users. For example, you can create a Sales audience that is defined as all the users who are members of an Active Directory group named Sales. Once you have defined an audience, you can then configure a Web Part to conditionally display its content only when the current user is a member of that audience. Audience targeting is a great way to show privileged users links to secured pages while hiding these links from non-privileged users who would receive Access Denied errors when attempting to follow them. This makes it straightforward to target content to those users who need it while hiding that content from users who either don't want to or shouldn't see it.
An audience can be identified by using a SharePoint group, a distribution list, a security group, or a global audience. On the Web page that contains the Web Part, on the Site Actions menu, click Edit Page. On the Web Part, click the Web Part menu, and then click Modify Shared Web Part. Under Advanced, enter one or more audience names in the Target Audiences box. To enable audience targeting on the list or library, click Settings, and then click List Settings or Document Library Settings. Under General Settings, click Audience targeting settings. Select the Enable audience targeting check box. After you enable the list or library for audience targeting, you can set individual items in the list or library to be displayed to one or more audiences. Click the arrow next to the name of an item in the list or library, and then click Edit Properties. In the Target Audiences list, add one or more audiences.
8. What are the Search Capabilities?
Search makes it possible to search through, not only content and documents within portal sites and WSS team sites, but also through external content such as Windows file shares, public Exchange folders, and standard Web sites.
Configuring
9. What is the Business Data Catalog?
The BDC is a new framework that provides
The BDC enables you to integrate data from back-end systems without requiring custom code for managing connections and retrieving data. The BDC design is based on standardized metadata that describes the location and format of a back-end system and data entities defined within it. The BDC also provides an execution component that is capable of reading BDC metadata and that is able to retrieve external data from back-end systems and return that data to
The first step in using the BDC is to author an XML file containing the metadata to connect to a back-end system. When you author metadata for the BDC, you define the data you want to retrieve in terms of entities. For example, you might define a customer as one entity and an invoice as another entity. The BDC metadata format also lets you define associations between entities in scenarios when there is a one-to-many relationship such as one that might exist between customers and invoices.
10. How to Customize or Add onto existing SharePoint functionality.
Development in SharePoint is two-fold:
Content Development - Done with SharePoint Designer. Includes modifications to master pages, cascading style sheet (
Web Part/Assembly Development – build actual .
It is critical to understand that content development is very different from traditional development (such as Web Part/Assembly Development). A significant difference between traditional development and content development relates directly to how the physical coordination of multiple developers conducting simultaneous content development is achieved. The guidance to establish a single authoring environment for multiple content developers is particularly significant. The reasoning behind this concept is that the migration and merging of master pages, style sheets, and other content objects can be extremely problematic. SharePoint Server does not have a direct method of conducting merges between these objects, as they are considered content, not code. Additionally, moving these items among multiple authoring environments is extremely difficult to manage and coordinate for multiple team members. Thus, a single authoring environment where multiple content developers can use SharePoint Designer to create and publish content simplifies time spent in migrating content artifacts from separate environments into a production environment.
Details are available here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428899.aspx#MOSS2007TeamDev_AnatomyofaSharePointServerSolution
(**content in this document is mostly from Microsoft’s page")
