Since the best of Office’s collaboration depends on SharePoint, we wanted to make sure that getting Windows SharePoint Services up and running wasn’t too onerous. Fortunately, setup is really simple compared with that of traditional portal products. The server runs on top of IIS 6.0 in Windows Server 2003. It bundles Microsoft Data Desktop Engine as a database. (Connecting to SQL Server is also a database option.) We had a default SharePoint Web site going quickly. The site contained options for all the core shared content, like posted documents and pictures, contacts, events, and shared tasks.
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Administering users in a portal environment can be demanding. SharePoint’s administration strikes a good balance between granularity and ease of use. In testing, we used the standard Active Directory tools to model an organization of 100 users assigned to 10 departments, with overlapping groups for executives, managers, and the like. SharePoint made simple work of assigning reader, contributor, editor, and administrator rights through its slick, Web-based administration console. These core roles let you control who can access and modify content; they are exactly enough for a basic portal, though they will not permit highly customized workflows with approval from different players, as in a full-fledged portal.
One of the strongest aspects of SharePoint is the impressive wizards for creating new sites and shared content automatically. Several standout tools surpass what we’ve seen in traditional portal space. Uploading content of all kinds is also a snap. In addition to posting from within the Office applications, we posted Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as Web links, from the SharePoint site itself. In particular, we admire the excellent support for uploading and organizing pictures. With integrated support for thumbnails and slide shows, posting image files for a simulated company picnic and corporate retreat was very simple. (The interface here is so smooth, we were tempted to use it for a personal photo library.)
For those with the rights to add and modify Web content, SharePoint has a number of guided step-by-step wizards that simplify creating new mini-sites for specific events, like meetings. We simulated a company-wide meeting and a more selective sales meeting. We are impressed that the automatically generated Web site offered about half a dozen default template options for different kinds of meetings, from those with agendas to more informal meetings.
Notifications can be e-mailed as content changes (either in real time or as scheduled) so users can keep up to date. A busy team, of course, won’t want to use alerts for every event, or mailboxes will become clogged; stick with the daily or weekly updates. Additionally, all content is marked new after it has been added or edited, which helps you find it.
While there isn’t extensive customization for the placement of portal elements within these sites, you can tweak content placement. In the new SharePoint, Microsoft has gone back to the drawing board with a revamped portal component model. Though it is still called Web Parts, it has been redesigned to provide support for all current browsers (not just IE) and more extensive support for XML. SharePoint Portal Server bundles many more such controls. (Microsoft and its partners are at work with hundreds of components due out shortly.) The basic set of parts in SharePoint Services presents shared data for Office.
SharePoint exposes the core areas of collaboration in a familiar interface centered around such Outlook staples as contacts, calendaring, and tasks, while adding some support for business essentials like threaded discussions, online surveys, and simple content management. In testing, we found the interface for creating surveys quite effective. Another wizard let us type in questions and responses, including numeric and multiple-choice answers. Graphical feedback of survey options makes it easy to see how users voted.
When posting files, you can mark content to expire, and SharePoint Services provides built-in versioning to track changes during the collaborative process. Getting a simple workflow approval process will probably mean turning to the more powerful SharePoint Portal Server. Though readers and contributors may be clearly defined, SharePoint Services offers little support for content approval via a chain of command that includes different kinds of users—editorial and legal, for instance.
Businesses will clearly need SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to integrate multiple sites and for extensive customization for new portal sections. BizTalk Server integration and connectors to standard ERP systems like PeopleSoft, sap, and Siebel also come standard in the full version, along with a library of Web Parts beyond the dozen or so that ship with the free SharePoint Services. Other enhancements in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 include personal Web pages for users and the ability to define and manage “audiences” for content more easily, plus improved full-text searching.