About connected collaboration

Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 facilitates easy, connected collaboration across an enterprise organization. It enables people to work together on documents, projects, and tasks and to leverage best practices by using the combined collaboration features of Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies. Index and search services, as well as newly introduced people services, allow you to increase efficiency by finding relevant people, teams, sites, and other information.

Index and search

Search SharePoint Portal Server provides a search feature that finds all types of content — people, documents, sites, and other items on the portal site — based on keywords you enter. Search can find content stored in different sources, such as Web sites, file systems, mail servers, and databases. The results can be organized in different ways, such as by site, area, or date. For a more specific search, you can use the advanced search option to search by properties of items, to sort results by factors other than relevance, and to set other advanced search options.
Best Bets Best Bets enhance search efficiency and provide guidance to users by directing them to people, sites, documents, or other items considered particularly relevant to their search. SharePoint Portal Server displays Best Bets at the top of a search results list.

Site Directory The Site Directory is the easiest way to add content to the portal site for searching. When a user adds a site, they have the option to include its contents in search results. A search administrator can have sites automatically approved for searching or can manage approval for each site. After approval, a site is indexed and its contents appears in search results.
Alerts You can ask to be alerted when changes occur to the results for a specific search.

Areas

To make it easy for users to navigate, browse, and find what they need, you can divide portal site content into areas. Areas let you organize content — from documents to people to sites — into sets of related information even though the content can be stored in different sources and formats. To control all of the content in an area, the portal site administrator can assign a manager for the area. The manager can then control what content appears in the area and who has access to it.

People services

User profiles User profiles allow you to search for and connect with people within your organization based on information they publish about themselves. Index and search services use the profile information to improve search results.

My Site My Site is a personal SharePoint site created in the portal site that provides personalized and customized information for you, including content targeted to you based on your membership in a particular audience.
Audiences You can target content to a specific audience based on a user's job or task. For example, in an area called Human Resources, a site administrator or the manager of that area can choose to add a news item targeted to all new employees that directs them to the New Employee Benefits site.

SharePoint Portal Server enables you to easily share information, leverage best practices, and work together with others on documents, projects, and other efforts. Some of the ways you can do that are by:

Creating Web sites based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services

Windows SharePoint Services allows you to create a Web site by selecting a template that best suits the project. SharePoint Portal Server includes a diverse collection of templates to meet business needs. You can create sites to facilitate meetings, organization, teams, or projects. By default, each site template features a custom set of collaboration features from Windows SharePoint Services. If you work with external customers or partners, or if you have users who need to access data from outside of your organization's firewall, SharePoint Portal Server allows both internal and external users to view and interact with the same content and data. After the sites are created, SharePoint Portal Server can search these sites the same way it searches other content on the portal.

Managing, publishing, and collaborating on documents

SharePoint Portal Server offers a number of features that make it easy to find, organize, and work together on documents. A document library offers a central place to store documents and track changes, My Site is a personal site where you can add links to documents you work with often, the Topics area lets you organize documents under different topic headings, and Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Document Workspaces offer a place for collaborating on documents with others.

About connected collaboration

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