With SharePoint 2007, organizations can easily create Intranet portal sites that connect individual sites across an organization and consolidate access to existing business applications.
Teams and individuals in an organization can use a portal site to access the expertise, information, and business applications that they need in order to do their jobs. SharePoint 2007 also includes features that organizations can use to personalize the experience of a portal for individual users.
The Benefits of a Portal Site: Before and After
Using the example of the fictious company, Adventure Works, we will examine the benefits portal sites provide.
Before Adventure Works created an portal using SharePoint 2007, employees faced many obstacles to productivity and efficiency:
Business processes were difficult to track and document.
Teams did not have a good understanding of the work that other teams performed.
Employees had difficulty locating names of key contacts on other teams and seeing what other teams were doing.
The company used e-mail or paper memos to broadcast news and information to employees.
Critical business data was hard to access because it was saved in individual, line-of-business applications, and there was no one place where access to this data could be consolidated.
Content employees created was scattered across individual hard drives and file shares, and was not managed in any way.
Business process solutions for tasks like document reviews or expense report approvals were ad hoc, labor-intensive, and time-consuming because they were dependent upon e-mail, paper, and interoffice mail.
After employing the Collaboration site template in SharePoint 2007 which provides a basic hierarchy for an intranet portal, Adventure Works employees can use their company intranet portal to do a broad range of daily tasks such as:
Searching for information across the entire portal site.
Creating & updating documents or tracking projects on their team sites.
Visiting other team sites to locate contact or project information.
Querying business data stored in line-of-business applications.
Reviewing sales data in customized dashboards.
Updating personal information on the Human Resources site.
Using search and My Sites to locate colleagues with specific expertise or knowledge.
Customizing information and content on their personal My Sites.
Receiving personalized views of information, based on their individual roles, when they view certain sites.
Posting ideas or information to blogs and wikis.
Archiving important business documents on a Records Center site.
Helping protect information from unauthorized access.
Easily updating information on individual sites in the portal.
Reviewing announcements of important company events or information.
With a SharePoint 2007 Intranet portal site in place, employees across the company are more productive and more efficient.
Connect People to Information and Data
Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers several features organizations can use to build and customize Intranet portals that connect people with the information and expertise they need to do their jobs:
Adaptable Portal Site Templates: SharePoint 2007 offers a comprehensive portal framework that makes it easy to build portal sites that meets the specific requirements of its audience. Organizations can create personal, divisional, Intranet, extranet, and Internet sites by selecting and customizing the relevant site template.
Easy Portal Customization: Portal sites feature integrated Web content management features that make it easy to customize the look and feel of a site. Additionally, authoring and publishing features make it easy to update and publish content on a site.
Support for Custom Application Development: SharePoint 2007 also features a sophisticated application-development environment so organizations can use their SharePoint sites to consolidate access and
systems integration with existing business applications by assembling composite applications from services provided by line-of-business systems.
Connect People to Expertise and Personalize Information Delivery
A portal site makes it easier for employees to work together and locate expertise within an organization. Additionally, personalization increases the relevance and value of information to employees within an organization. SharePoint 2007 offers several features that support the personalized delivery of information on a portal site:
Audience Targeting: With the audience targeting feature in SharePoint 2007, content owners can display content such as list or library items, navigation links, and entire Web Parts only to people who are members of a particular group or audience. An audience can be identified by using SharePoint groups, distribution lists, or security groups, or by using a rules-based system to create a global audience.
The list items in this Web Part have been customized to display one set of information to regular employees (1) and another set of information to managers (2), as shown in the following figures:
My Site: Individuals within an organization who use a portal site can take advantage of their My Site sites. A My Site is a personal site that gives you a central location to manage and store your documents, content, links, and contacts. My Site serves as a point of contact for other users in your organization to find information about you, your skills, and your interests. Content providers can use My Site as a method of customizing the information that they present to users.
