Solution Overview
Because this is a SharePoint book, it should be no surprise that SharePoint has an answer for each of these requirements. Table 21.2 outlines the SharePoint solutions that will be implemented to meet each requirement.
| Requirement | Solution |
|---|---|
| Collaborative spaces must be easily instantiated for projects and corporate initiatives. | Enable self-service site creation for all portal contributors. |
| Consultants need to be able to find collaborative spaces for their specialty. | Modify the site directory so that the categories for sites are customized. |
| Place for community and unstructured collaboration. | Create a site collection dedicated to Wikis and blogs that can be provisioned by anyone in the company. |
| Sales team must be able to share leads and track sales progress of items in the pipeline. | Create custom sales pipeline list that stores opportunities, leads, and opportunity ownership. |
| Project documentation needs to have specific format and latest template applied. Template must be in a location that can be easily updated. | Define a content type for the project documentation that you need and add it to a site that will be used as a project template site. |
| Create a project site template from your project site and add that site template to the templates available in self-service site creation. | |
| Project managers need to have a central view of all active projects and their status. | Project list that contains status fields that is filtered by project manager. |
| Executives must be able to see project status overall for each consulting group. | KPIs for project status. |
| Project managers must be able to see invoice status on projects. | Accounting dashboard that allows PMs to enter a project number and start/end date. |
| Accounting department needs to have invoices and hours billed in one interface. | Accounting dashboard that shows invoices and report for submitted time filtered by project number and start/end date. |
| Resource managers need to be able to view the workload for job descriptions throughout the company. | Excel services access to central workbook that is updated by PMs on a weekly basis to track employee time. |
| Existing file shares need to be indexed so that posted materials are available. | Configure a content source and search scope for the file share location. |
| Portal content needs to be available when employees are not on the corporate network. | Configure portal as extranet portal. |
In this solution, you are going to create a SharePoint portal with the following structure:
Home Site Collection: The home page of the portal will provide a central point for news and navigation with the following structure, as shown in Figure 21.1.
Accounting: A reporting site for storing the accounting lists, dashboards, reports, and resources.
Consulting Resources: This site presents the consulting information for the rest of the company to consume.
Management: Site for executive dashboards.
News: This area contains the organizational news sorted for each area of the company.
Project Central: This subsite centrally stores information about projects for the organization.
Recruiting: The recruiting site is a location where the recruiting organization can present information for the rest of the organization, such as active job postings and who has received the latest referral bonus.
Sales: The sales node of the portal stores the opportunities and metrics for the sales organization.
Search: The search center provides the search capability for the portal.
Sites: The site directory is the jump-off point for creating new collaboration sties and finding existing collaboration sites.
Figure 21.1. Configure the right to use self-service site creation for contributor role.
Wiki Site Collection: This site collection stores the unstructured Wiki and blog sites for ad-hoc collaboration.
You are going to implement the portal in a small farm configuration with a single SharePoint server front end running the roles of application (search, indexing) and Web front end and shared services provider with the databases stored on a separate SQL 2005 database configuration with SAN storage. This configuration takes advantage of the existing SQL configuration in the company, while providing an easy method to grow the infrastructure by adding Web front ends or separating the application server role out in the future if necessary. For 500 users, we could have also installed in a single-server configuration.
Once you install SharePoint, you create a Web application for the root site and use the Publishing Site template provided in the Publishing tab of Site Templates. This template gives you the base structure of a root site, a search center, a report center, and site directory that you will extend to implement your solution. From the newly created root site, you will perform the following actions to build out your designed site structure:
Rename the reports subsite to Accounting
Delete the document center subsite
Create a team collaboration subsite for Consulting Resources
Create a team collaboration subsite for Management
Create a team collaboration subsite for Sales
Create a team collaboration subsite for Recruiting
Create a team collaboration subsite for Project Central