In the previous section, you saw that a simple but useful an intranet could be based on WSS can be. However, you were forced to make several adjustments just to make the lists suitable for containing news. There was no way to target news items for specific groups of users; they saw either everything or nothing.
If you have a MOSS installation, then it contains a ton more features than WSS, such as global search capability, many more Web Parts, and advanced site templates. You really get something for your money when you invest in MOSS. Even though WSS 3.0 is very good, the difference between WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 is even greater than the difference between WSS 2.0 and SPS 2003. The options when building an intranet portal using MOSS are almost endless, so this section of the book will only describe the basic steps to show you how to build a complete intranet from scratch. As stated before, much of the information in this chapter is discussed in several other chapters as well, but here you will see it in context. Hopefully, it will appear more logical here, and you will understand how and why certain steps must be performed, and in what order.
This section uses the same example as above for WSS — to build one company-wide intranet and then several local intranets for HR, IT, and so on. Comparing these two case studies will give you a better understanding of the differences between WSS and MOSS. As before, you will do this by following an example. In this case, the manager of your company, Filobit, wants you to create an intranet with support for web content management on its Publishing Pages. It must have advanced searching, a news section, and a list of all sites and workspaces, such as departmental web sites, project web sites, and meeting workspaces. The intranet should also have a diagram displaying the current sales statistics, using a MS Excel file. Users must be able to send copies of documents to a shared document archive.
This time, we will skip features like advanced document management, forms management of MS InfoPath files, and building a custom workflow solution to keep the example easier for you to follow. These topics are discussed in other chapters of this book. Note that the suggested solution in this example does not use any third-party products; everything is based on the standard features and Web Parts of MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition.
In this example, assume that MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition is installed and configured, but there is no site collection for the intranet created yet. Now follow the steps in the Try It Out below.
Try It Out: Create the Site Collection for the Intranet
When the process is completed, you will have a new site collection with the following characteristics (see Figure 11-7):
Figure 11-7. Figure 11-7 |
This intranet will use web content management to control the process of adding content to its pages. In many other content management systems, you use a separate server for developing new content (sometimes called a "stage server"), or other content management systems force the web content authors to use a separate application for creating and adding content. With MOSS 2007, you add and edit web content directly on the production server, using only a web browser such as Internet Explorer. To assist web content authors, SharePoint offers a number of features to control the editing process, such as:
Automatic checkout when you start editing a page; for example, the start page of the intranet.
Automatic version history tracking, with major and minor version numbers.
Capability to revert to a previous version of the a page.
Modifications must be published to be made public.
Draft versions can start workflows; for example, to send an e-mail asking another web content author to check a new version of a page.
Capability to force all modifications to be approved before being published.
Capability to define when the page will be displayed, and when it will be removed.
Spellchecking of content.
Previewing of the modified page in a new window.
Capability to compare text changes between versions.
All of these features will ensure that even an organization with very high content management requirements will find that MOSS is a very attractive solution, both for the web content authors and for administrators.
When you open a site based on a MOSS template, it will display a page file of type .aspx. This page is usually stored in the current site's page library. This is a new type of library, not found in SharePoint 2003, and its purpose is to be a repository for web page files. This page library can contain any number of pages, but the web site will only display one of them, at any given time. For example, look at the Home site in your intranet; its URL is http://srv1/pages/default.aspx. Let's divide the URL into its single parts:
http://srv1 is the URL to the Home site (i.e., the top site in the site).
/pages is the name of the page library.
Default.aspx is the current page displayed for the site.
So let's look at this page library. Click View All Site Content at the top of the Quick Launch navigation bar; this will display all the lists and libraries in this Home site. Click on Pages (in the Document Libraries section), and you will find the Default.aspx page mentioned above. Since this page library is like any other document library, you work with its files in the same way; for example, if you want to modify the Default.aspx file, click with the mouse just to the right of this file, to open its quick menu (see Figure 11-8). Then click Edit Properties. Now you must click OK to accept the option to check out the page file before it can be modified.
The form displayed now has all the content you previously saw on the Home page for this intranet, plus a number of properties you did not see, such as Target Audience, Contact Name, and Contact Picture. Now edit the content of the page. Click anywhere inside the Page Content area, for example, change the headline color to red, then click OK. Now go back to the Home page again. Note that the page is now checked out, and you will see a number of buttons on the editing toolbar. Since this modification (i.e., the red headline) has not yet been checked in, or published, only you can see the new look of this page. Now you can choose any of these actions:
Discard the modification: Click the toolbar buttons Page Discard Check Out.
Continue to edit the page: Click the Edit Page button.
Check in, but do not publish the modified page: Click the Check in to Share Draft button. This allows another web content author to continue to edit the page.
Publish the modified page: Click the Publish button. Any user with Read access to the site can now see the modified page.
In this example, discard the modifications, and click OK to confirm the operation. The original content of this page is now displayed again. You can actually start editing a content page much more easily than by using the procedure described above. Simply click Site Actions Edit Page, and once again, the Default.aspx page file is automatically checked out and is ready to be edited. Now discard the modifications again (even if you did not do anything): Click Page Discard Check Out, and click OK to accept this.
Let's test this with another page. Click on the News tab on the top bar, then click Site Actions Edit Page. The page will be checked out, and its content will be editable. Be sure to discard the checkout of this page. Obviously, this is also a Publishing Page. In fact, all of these MOSS sites in this intranet are Publishing Pages, thanks to the site template it was built on: the Collaboration Portal site template. It is safe to say that Filobit's new intranet will fulfill the requirements for web content management.
Did you note that there is more information on the Home site than defined in the Default.aspx file, such as menus, logotypes, and navigation links? It is clear that the Home site must display more than just the Default.aspx page, and this is true! The other type of information on this page is stored in a Master Page; this is a new type of layout file that did not exist in SPS 2003. It comes with the new ASP.NET 2.0 environment, and defines the exact layout for a SharePoint site. You will learn more about Master Pages in Chapters 12 and 13.
Another requirement from your manager was that Filobit's intranet must support news items. Luckily, the Collaboration Portal site template comes with a News site, ready to be used. Its news items are built on pages very similar to the page files discussed in previous section. So, let's create a news item to see how this works.
Try It Out: Create News Items
|
As you can see, it is easy to add news items, and you can define any number of preconfigured page layout files for these. But where are they stored? Well, click on a news item to see its full article, and then look at the URL. For example, the Dinosaur article has the URL http://srv1/News/Pages/TheDeathOfDinosaurs.aspx, which tells you this:
http://srv1 is the URL of the top site the site collection.
/News is the part of the URL that points to the News web site (a subsite under http://srv1).
/Pages is the page library that stores the news items.
TheDeathOfDinosaurs.aspx is the name of the page file for the news item.
So, let's open that page library and see what other news item it contains. On the News site, click View All Site Contents. In the Document Libraries section, you will find Pages, which is a page library exactly like the one you saw before in the description of Publishing Pages on the intranet. The only difference is what it is used for. The page files in this library are all news items, except two: Default.aspx is the content page for the News site, and newsarchive.aspx is a special file that operates similarly to a page library; it will contain all news items, including archived (i.e., hidden) news items. For example, you can create a news item that will be visible from today and one week from now. After that the news item is removed from the standard news lists. But if you open the News archive, it will still be listed there.
If you need to modify an existing news item, you have two options: edit the news page directly or edit the page file in the page library. Both options are described here.
You may ask yourself "How do I specify when a news item should be archived?" This feature is referred to as "item scheduling" and is actually not enabled by default; you must enable it as shown in the following Try It Out.
Try It Out: Enable the Scheduling of News Items
You are taken to the general Site Settings page for the News site — scheduling is now enabled. Test this by creating a news item. Open the News site, then click Site Actions Create Page. Enter the Title and Description, and click Create. Note that at the top is a new link: Publication Start Date: Immediately (see Figure 11-10). Click that link to open a configuration page where you define the scheduling of the news item (as depicted in Figure 11-11). Figure 11-10. Figure 11-10Figure 11-11. Figure 11-11Note that the Schedule section on this page contains an option to send an e-mail to the contact person for the news item some time before the article is archived; the contact person is set on the same page. This is a very handy feature that ensures that important articles are not removed without the contact person knowing about it; for example, this contact person may decide that the archival of this news item should be postponed. |
Another feature that the Filobit manager in this example asked for was that all sites, subsites, and workspaces be easy for the user to find. A very good solution is to create a Site Directory (a directory that shows all the sites in the SharePoint environment). Since this may include many thousands of sites, there must be an easy way to organize all these sites. Compare this to a file system: Instead of storing all files in one folder, you create a folder structure. With SharePoint's site directory, you have the same option: You can define any number of categories, such as Department, Project Type, and Customer, and then assign these categories to links pointing to the sites.
An example will illustrate this better: You talk with the people who will create sites in the new intranet, such as project leaders, team managers, and department managers, and you determine that the sites can be divided into three categories:
Division: Filobit consists of these divisions: Sales, IT, Finance, and HR. The last division will be used for sites like the Board of Directors site.
Project Type: There are three types of projects in Filobit: Internal, External, and Other.
Site Type: There are four types of sites: Intranet, Project, Meeting, and Other.
With MOSS comes a special web site for managing the site directory; its name is Sites, which is both good and bad. It's good because it describes exactly what it is used for, and bad because it is very easy sometimes to get confused, since the term "site" is used both to refer to a type of object and as the name for several objects. For example, try to understand this: "The Site site stores site links in the Sites list!" Maybe a better name for this site would be the Site Directory.
The Site Directory consists of links to SharePoint sites; these links are stored in the list called "Sites." On the Sites page is a button named Add Link to Site, which you can use to add new site links. Another way of adding site links is to open the list (View All Site Content Sites) and click New; this last method is also used to modify or delete existing site links.
NOTE
The Sites list requires approval of any modified site link. In other words, when adding a new site link or editing an existing site link, it must be approved before the users can see the modification.
To manage all the categories available for these site links, you must open the settings for the Sites list, as described below. Note that if you later change any existing categories, all existing site links that belong to that category will then lose the setting. In other words, make sure to evaluate what categories you need, before you start adding site links, unless you are prepared to modify all existing site links!
Your job as a SharePoint administrator is to create a Site Directory with the categories described below. At this stage there are no other sites, beside the one created automatically by the Collaboration Portal site template. Soon you will create new sites, and before that you need to adjust the site categories. The following Try It Out shows how you do this.
Try It Out: Configure Site Directory Categories
The site categories are now ready to be used. Figure 11-12. Figure 11-12 |
The next step in this example is to display an MS Excel diagram, showing the latest sales figures. With MOSS 2007 Enterprise Edition comes Excel Services, which enable you to display any Excel spreadsheet or diagram in HTML format (users do not need an MS Excel client to view this information). In order to use Excel Services to display Excel files, the SharePoint administrator must configure at least one setting: the trusted file location where these Excel file are stored. Excel Services are a part of the Shared Service Provider module, so all configuration settings for Excel Services are located in the SSP instance, typically named SharedService1.
To display this file you will use a special Web Part, named Excel Web Access; it will display any Excel file, in HTML format. If you have ever used Outlook Web Access to view your Exchange mailbox using a web browser, you get the idea. In both cases, you can use a web browser to view content instead of using a full client, such as MS Excel or MS Outlook.
NOTE
You must use the new Excel 2007 format (.xlsx) to use Excel Services. If you use the old .xls format, you will get an error saying "Unable to Load Workbook" (see Figure 11-13).
In this example, the sales figures and the diagram you need to display will be saved in the Sales.xlsx file, stored in the document library Sales Info, which belongs to the Document Center site. This document library does not exist yet, so you must create it. Then you must publish the Sales.xlsx file to that document library, using Excel services. Follow the steps in the Try It Out below to configure the Excel services, and to display the diagram using the Excel Web Access Web Part.
Try It Out: Use Excel Services to Display an Excel File
|
As described in the example, this intranet must have three local intranets for the departments IT, HR, and Sales. Since the security requirements are moderate, you can create subsites in the current site collection for these departmental intranets, as described in the following Try It Out.
Try It Out: Create Departmental Intranets
|
All three new sites are now created and ready to be used; time to continue with the configuration of the intranet.
Your manager in this example requested that the intranet have a shared document archive that users can use to upload important documents they want to share with others. This is a standard feature in SharePoint. You simply create one ordinary document library in a suitable site and configure its permissions, if necessary. Then you configure individual document libraries in subsites, project sites, and the like to show an upload link to the document archive. Whenever a user uploads a document to the archive, a copy of that document is stored in the archive, but it contains a link back to the original document. If the original document is modified, that author will be reminded that there is a copy in the archive, and he or she can choose to update that archived copy. A user that looks at the properties for the files in the archive can see that the document is a copy, and where the original file is stored.
One important reason to use a separate document library as an archive instead of allowing users to read the original files is permissions. For example, say that you have three subsites; users in these subsites create a lot of documents, and some of them should be publically available. Instead of opening these subsites and/or their document libraries to all users, you can copy documents to the public document archive. That archive can have any permission setting that your organization needs, without your needing to worry about the permissions on the original documents and their libraries. But this creates a new challenge: How do you make sure that the copies in the archive are updated? SharePoint solves this problem by creating a link back from the copied document to the original version, as described in the previous paragraph.
In the Filobit example, you will first select a document library to be used as the document archive. Then you will modify the document libraries in the subsites IT, HR, and Sales to contain a upload link to that document archive, as described in the Try It Out below.
Try It Out: Configure a Shared Document Archive
|
The intranet, as requested by your manager in this example, is now almost complete. But you need to do some more things. Since the Finance department and the Board of Directors group requested much higher security, you decide that they will each get a separate site collection. Doing this means that there is no way a user, or even an administrator from the first site collection, will have access to either of these two sites. You may remember from earlier discussions about security in Chapters 3 and 5 that each site collection is similar to an isolated island. Its settings only affect the sites in that site collection, and never a site in another site collection.
The quick steps to create the site collections for the Finance and Board of Directors groups are listed below. Instead of creating these new top sites using the WSS Team Site template, you will use the MOSS site templates Document Center and Report Center. These templates are identical to the subsites with the same name in the main intranet site (http://srv1).
Try It Out: Create Finance and Board of Directors Intranets
|
Building a new intranet using MOSS was a lot easier than doing so with WSS, since MOSS contains much richer functionality, such as web content management, advanced News features, a configurable site directory, and features such as Excel Services and more advanced site templates. After building these sites and configuring these features, the next steps could be these:
Adjust the design by adding new Master Pages and page layout files for news items and the like.
Add more Web Parts; for example, use the RSS Feed Web Part that comes with MOSS to present information stored in external web sites, instead of adding code to the XML Web Part to make it work as an RSS Feed client.
Analyze which users should have access to specific sites, libraries, and items, then implement that using SharePoint groups and/or AD security groups.
Start investigating how InfoPath forms could assist your organization to work in a more process-oriented way.
Analyze what content types your organization needs.
Prepare yourself for constant change. Listen to your users; try to understand what their needs are, and help them find solutions based on the standard features of SharePoint. When that is not enough, look at the vast market of third-party products and solutions for SharePoint.
3.142.173.227