MOSS 2007: Plan SharePoint Sites

Planning a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 involve determining the types of Web sites and portal sites to implement, and a list of the features that we need to plan for each site.

Few important points to be considered for each site we plan are:

• The sets of users who will participate in the site or portal. When we know who the site serves, we can more easily determine the appropriate security settings for the site.
• Requirements for searching.
• Customization needs.
• Personalization needs.
• Features that we need to plan for each portal or site, such as business intelligence, document management, forms, or workflows.

Plan Sites

The first step in planning a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is to determine the set of portal sites, Internet presence sites, team sites, and specialized sites that your organization and its customers need. Determining this affects subsequent planning decisions, such as where the sites will be implemented in your server topology, what features to plan for each site, how processes that span multiple sites are implemented, and how information is made available across one or more sites.

Plan Portal Sites

Portal sites based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 provide a focal point for finding relevant, personalized information in an organization. You can plan divisional and rollup portal sites that are based on the scale and structure of your organization and that aggregate organizational information, and you can plan interactive application portals where team members can perform tasks in your organization.

Planning portal sites by organizational hierarchy

Plan the basic portal sites you need based on the scale and structure of your organization. Each of these portal sites should contain information needed for a project or division within your larger organization, and each will link to collaboration sites relevant to that project or division. Some portal sites for larger divisions or projects will also aggregate information found on all the smaller portal sites devoted to smaller divisions or projects.

You can use the following guidelines when planning portal sites based on your organizational structure:

• Divisional or team portal sites - Plan to create one portal site for an entire small organization, or one for every division or project of 50-100 people within a medium-sized to large organization. In large organizations, there might be several levels of portal sites, with each portal site focusing on the content created and managed at its level of the organization.
  You can design a portal site for members of your organization to collaborate on content related to your business or organizational goals. These can be self-contained or they can work with other sites as part of a publishing process. Often, these portal sites will have a mixture of collaborative content used internally and content intended for publication to an audience.


• Rollup portal sites - A rollup portal site contains general cross-organization content. It lets users across divisions find information, experts, and access to organization-wide processes. It often contains subsites that are scoped to the overall organizational information architecture and are usually mapped to the structure of the divisional or project portal sites. For each organization or distinct Shared Services Provider (SSP), plan to create a centralized rollup portal site with an aggregated view of all related portal sites.

Planning application portal sites

An application portal organizes team processes and provides mechanisms for running them. Application portals often include digital dashboards and other features for viewing and manipulating data related to the portal's purpose. The information presented in an application portal site usually comes from diverse sources, such as databases or other SharePoint sites.
For example, the human resources organization in an enterprise could design an application portal site to provide employees with:

• Access to general information such as employee handbooks and career opportunities.
• Ways to do common tasks, such as submitting timecards and expense reports.
• Dashboards for viewing personalized information such as an employee's salary and benefits history.

As another example, the internal technical organization in an enterprise could design a Help Desk application portal to provide technical support to members of the enterprise. Features of the application portal could include:

• Access to a knowledge base of past support incidents and best-practices documentation.
• Ways to do common tasks, such as starting a support incident or reviewing the status of an ongoing incident.
• Integration with communications features that support online meetings and discussions.
• Personalized views of data. For example, support managers could view dashboards providing views of their team members' productivity and customer satisfaction ratings.
• Support engineers could view their current unresolved incidents.

In the Determine Sites and Portals planning worksheet, list each divisional, rollup, and application portal site that you plan to create. Be sure to identify the name and purpose of the portal site.

Plan 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 in addition to 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.

Plan other sites

You can plan to allow portal site or Internet site users to create additional sites. For example, you can plan to give each team member who uses a portal site a My Site, which is a team site based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with public and private views. You can also allow team members to create other sites, such as Document Workspace sites, as they collaborate. Similarly, you can give users of an Internet site access to collaboration sites as part of a Web-based service. For example, you can give them permissions to create Meeting Workspace sites and participate in online meetings as part of their experience of using your site.

In addition to portal sites and Internet sites, Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes the ability to create the following specialized sites of use in the organization:

• Document Center 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.
• Records Center site Records management is the management of files and documents that provide evidence of activities or transactions performed by the organization. The Records Center site is designed to implement the storage component of a records management solution based on Office SharePoint Server 2007.