SharePoint Survival

In the move to MOSS, I need to change my way of thinking about my customer’s information. Ownership does not dictate structure. You don’t want to make the mistake of designing all your sites strictly by your company’s organizational chart. Some of that approach is natural, but it shouldn’t be the only approach.

So how does a visitor find what they need in a MOSS site without knowing who owns what? This issue requires more than just a short list of ideas. For starters, I’ve compiled a list of items to research:

Portal sites allow you to connect individual sites across an organization and consolidate access to existing business applications. For more details about this from Microsoft, click the following link:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102433171033.aspx

Administrators can define keywords and best bets at the site collection level. This allows the Search feature to bring up results for a term and its synonyms.

Users can inspect a searchable site map with the Site Map Web Part. The Site Map web part displays the site structure in a tree that you can expand and collapse. Click the following link to see a picture of a site map.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/MossSiteMapWebPart.aspx

My Sites are like personal portals. Content providers can target information to you, based on the information that you or your organization enter in your My Profile, such as your position title, organization, professional interests, current projects, and colleague relationships. 

Several kinds of web parts can aggregate information from multiple locations. Content Query web parts allow you to view information from any other site in your location. The My Sites site allows you to quickly access the areas of a site that you actively participate in.

Audiences are another tool. You can present applicable information to users by targeting relevant information for that audience. Click the following link for a Microsoft article about targeting content to specific audiences.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/HA102432221033.aspx

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