Summary

Getting started deploying your corporate portal can at first seem daunting, however, after you learn about the different levels and how the choices you make at one level affect the other levels, making the correct choices for your deployment becomes much easier. We hope this chapter answered many of your questions and will get you moving in the right direction. In summary:

• From a nontechnical perspective, a Web application is the entry in IIS that determines the URL used to access SharePoint from a Web browser.

• The Shared Services Provider (SSP) allows settings and services to be configured in one location and consumed by several Web applications.

• A site collection is a container for administrative purposes. It’s the only level in which a quota can be set.

• Sites enable you to group together information using lists and libraries and then display that content using pages. Many templates are available as a starting point for sites.

• Features allow you to add or remove functionality on a specific scope. The scopes available are farm, Web application, site collection, and site.

• For the users to find the content created, a navigation structure needs to be created. SharePoint has five major elements to configure this navigation structure: Top link bar, Quick Launch bar, current breadcrumb, global breadcrumb, and tree view.

• Although SharePoint has many settings and configurations, it’s important to understand where each of these are set and how they are inherited. Even if you don’t have access, knowing where the option is located is half the battle.

The following chapters look at each of these levels a little deeper in terms of how you can get more business value out of an implementation. Let’s just say, more answers are to come.