A Departmental Site with
Version 3 Whiz-Bang
To create the site for our IT
department, start at the intranet
home page and click Site
Actions, then Create, Sites and Workspaces. Create a
friendly title for this site, such
as Information Technology, but
give it a short URL, such as “IT.”
Configure a Team Site template
and use unique permissions, so
that you can more easily give IT
employees access to resources on the IT site. You'll be
prompted to create the Visitors,
Members, and Owners groups,
which you can always do later
from Site Settings.
In our departmental site,
let's leverage three great new
capabilities of SharePoint
Services 3.0. Click Site
Actions, select Create, Wiki
Page Library and name the
library “IT Wiki.” Wikis are a
fantastic tool for a capturing
knowledge.
Link to another page by
using the syntax page name
can contain spaces. For
example, you might have a
message at your site: “Don't
forget to bring your family to
the upcoming corporate baseball games. The schedule is on
the Baseball Schedule page.”
Clicking the link Baseball
Schedule brings the user to
the existing Baseball Schedule
page or, if that page doesn't
exist, will create a new page
called Baseball Schedule. So
it's easy to create a new page
from an existing page by creating a link to a nonexistent
page, then clicking the link.
Blogs are another useful
tool for unstructured knowledge capture. Click Site
Actions, select Create, Sites
and Workspaces and create a
blog site named IT Blogs and
the URL blogs/, also using
unique permissions so that you
can control who is allowed to
blog to the site.
Security
Probably one of the most
important enhancements to
SharePoint Services 3.0 is
item-level security. From the IT
site home page, click Shared
Documents and upload a
Word document. Hover over
the document and, from its
drop-down menu, choose
Manage Permissions. By
default, permissions are inherited from the parent—in this
case, the document library.
Choose Actions, Manage
Permissions to configure the
permissions on the document. After the document is
uploaded, click the document
link, and it will open directly in
Microsoft Office Word 2007
or Microsoft Word 2003. Both
versions of Word can also
open and save directly from
and to a SharePoint document
library by using the library's
URL (e.g., http://wss01/IT/Shared%20Documents). When
you open a document from
a library, unlike a traditional
file share, the document is
“checked out” to the current
editor, and the document
library itself can be configured
to maintain versions.
Security also extends to the
UI, with “security trimming.” If a user doesn't have permission to see part of a SharePoint
site, links to that part of the site
won't be displayed in the UI. For
example, you can configure permissions so that an administrator
of a team site can see the Site
Actions option but readers can't.
Better Collaboration
Add SharePoint Services 3.0's
support for workflow, Microsoft
Outlook integration, offline files,
Digital Rights Management
(DRM), and forms—all of
which I'll discuss in upcoming
articles—and your business
processes are now supported
more completely and more
securely than ever before, with a software cost of exactly zero. May the file share rest in
peace.
End of Article
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