Portal

What is a portal?

A portal allows you to unify the business by offering a central location, where users can access and share information. Content and Code works with you to customise your portal and give your organisation the security it requires, whilst connecting your people to important business resources.

Common barriers to portals and collaboration

• Multiple versions of the truth: Many versions of document may exist during document lifecycle (file shares, local machines, email copies etc) - which one is the latest?
• Data integrity: More than one person may modify a document at once leading to lost changes and reduced productivity
• Complex communication: How do teams communicate when working together? How can this information be accessed at a later date? How to let staff know about changes and news?

Features and benefits of a SharePoint 2007 portal

A portal connects your people to the business, by providing them with information, expertise and tools to be more productive. It also allows the organisation to be more transparent and share information with its staff.

A SharePoint 2007 portal allows organisations to:

• Empower staff to both publish and retrieve information.
• Improve team productivity with easy-to-use collaborative tools.
  • Create team workspaces, coordinate calendars, organise documents and receive important updates through announcements and alerts.
• Make use of social networking and people search, allowing staff to connect to experts.
• Enable My Sites, providing users with a central location to manage and store their documents, links and contacts. My Sites also serve as an area for other users in the company to find information about a specific user's skills and interests.
• Easily manage documents and help ensure integrity of content.
  • Check-in/check-out capabilities are available, preventing users from overwriting each others' changes.
  • Version control permits successive versions of a document to be retained or overwritten.
  • Workflows establish a business process for approval.
• Integration with familiar Microsoft Office applications, email and web browsers makes it easy for users to get up to speed quickly.
• User permissions protect documents or areas of the portal from unauthorised view or manipulation.

View a comparison of the features included in portals built in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Next part of the SharePoint 2007 pie - Enterprise Search