SharePoint Server 2007 doesn't use the areas concept that Microsoft
SharePoint Portal Server 2003 uses.
SharePoint Server 2007 uses sites, a
term that's more intuitive and effective. By default, sites are represented as tabs in the global navigation panel at the top of each page. Figure 2 shows tabs for
several sites created by default when you
install SharePoint Server 2007: Document
Center, News, Reports, Search, and Sites.
Also, you'll see at the left on every page
a site navigation panel that contains the
Quick Launch bar and/or a tree view,
based on the site's settings. This is a welcome change from previous versions, in
which the Quick Launch appeared only on
the default page.
For guidance about how you can
customize and brand SharePoint Server,
check out "Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Out of the Box." For this article, I
focus on functionality. Because SharePoint
Server is all about collaboration and
access to information, you need to open
the site to your users. Click the Site
Actions button in the upper-right corner of the page, and choose Site Settings,
People And Groups (as Figure 2 shows).
On the People And Groups page,
select Home Members in the left panel,
then click New, and choose Add Users.
Here is where you specify the members of
this site by associating permissions with
members and other default groups. You
can experiment with locking down your
top site later, after you've studied the planning and deployment guides, but I suggest
you add your users to the Members group for now so that their My Site configuration,
which I plan to describe in a future article,
is easier to do.
On the Add Users: Home page, select Add all authenticated users. This configures the group to include all authenticated users—that is, all of your domain's
users. For our fictitious organization,
WINDOMAIN.com, the users include
Colleen Outyall, director of communications; Penny Xavier, budget manager; and
yours truly, Dan Holme.
Experience 3: Creating a Departmental Site
As I mentioned above, the default installation creates several functional subsites,
including Document Center, News,
Reports, Search, and Sites. I want to create a site for the communications department. Colleen's team wants to collaborate
but also needs a way to distribute company brochures to the sales and marketing teams. I start by returning to the Home
page and, from the Site Actions menu,
choosing Create Site. The New SharePoint
Site page (in Figure 3) appears.
This is where you configure the title, URL,
template, and permissions for the new
site.
Enter "Communications" as the title
and "communications" as the URL. Select
the Team Site template (the default). Under
User Permissions, select Use unique permissions.
Using unique permissions is important:
you might want some users to contribute
to a departmental site but not to the corporate or parent portal, and vice versa.
With SharePoint Server 2007's security
model, each new site inherits the parent site's security permissions by default. You
can "break" that inheritance while creating a site, as we're doing now, or you can
reconfigure permissions later for an existing site by using the permissions section
of Site Settings. One nice feature of the
SharePoint Server security model is that
group definitions belong to the site collection, so if one group requires certain
permissions across several sites, you need
define the group only once, then give it
appropriate permissions in each site.
When you specify Use unique permissions during site creation, you're sent to the Set Up Groups for this Site page,
which Figure 4 shows. You can define
Visitors, Members, and Owners by using
either a group previously defined in the
site collection or by creating a new group
and specifying the members. The members can be users or groups, and the
SharePoint Server "picker" makes it easy to search your domain for
those accounts. It's worth
noting that SharePoint
Server doesn't have to use
Active Directory (AD) and
the local SAM database as
its source of user and group
accounts: It can use any.NET Membership Provider,
including ASP.NET 2.0's
SqlMembershipProvider.
A discussion of such
"forms-based" or custom
membership providers is
beyond the scope of this
article, but you should still
know about them because
at some point, you'll probably need to open part of
your SharePoint Server infrastructure to
partners, customers, or others without
domain accounts.
Experience 4: Creating a Document Library
Now that you've created the
Communications site, let's create a
document library for the corporate
brochures. On the Communications
home page, select Site Actions, Create.
Click Document Library, and give the
library a name: I chose "Marketing
Communications." On the New document library page, you can also turn on
versioning, which preserves the history of
changes made to a document so that you
can open previous versions. For corporate
marketing communications documents,
it makes sense to preserve previous versions, so turn on versioning.
Experience 5: RSS
SharePoint Server lists and libraries
are wired for RSS, thanks to Windows
SharePoint Services. In the Marketing
Communications library, which Figure 5 shows, click the Actions button and
choose View RSS Feed. Use your preferred RSS reader to subscribe to the
feed. I used the built-in RSS capability of
Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0.
Return to the Marketing
Communications library and upload a
document. Then check the RSS feed. You
should see your document in the RSS
feed within minutes.
Experience 6: outlook Integration—
SharePoint's Answer to Public Folders
When you add Office applications to the
SharePoint mix, you get even more functionality. Office 2003 applications do a good
job of integrating with SharePoint Server,
but Office 2007 applications integrate even
better. As you walk through a demonstration
of Outlook 2007 integration with SharePoint
Server, you're bound to elicit "oohs," "ahhs,"
and "wows" from your team and management. You'll also get a glimpse into how
Microsoft is moving toward replacing public
folders with SharePoint.
