What's New in Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

The following are a just few of the new features for users of SharePoint Portal Server:

• Areas   You can organize information on the portal site by using areas. If you find a useful listing missing from an area, add a listing for a content manager to approve. You can add a listing to more than one area on the portal site.
• News   SharePoint Portal Server enables you to highlight information, such as announcements and other key company information, by adding listings to the News area. A news listing can be either text-based content or a link to an existing news item, such as a press release or an article on a news service.
• Personal sites   My Site is a personal SharePoint site that provides personalized and customized information for you. In addition, My Site provides quick access to things you need to do your work such as links to documents, people, or Web sites as well as alerts to track changes to content within the portal site and your organization. From My Site, you can also update your user profile and share links with other portal site users.
• User profiles   Easily find information about people, their documents, and their shared links.
• Alerts   Get alert results sent to you in e-mail immediately or in daily or weekly summaries for portal site content. You can now add alerts for people, lists, list items, and the Site Directory in addition to news, areas, topics, search queries, documents, and backward-compatible document libraries. Alert results are shown in an easy-to-read HTML format and now identify whether the alert result is sent because content changed or was added. You can manage all of your alerts from the My Alerts page.
• Lists and views   Because SharePoint Portal Server is built on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, you can add both predesigned and custom lists to all SharePoint sites. For example, you can create a picture library to share a collection of digital pictures or create an issue tracking list to maintain a history on a specific issue. You can also use calendar views for any SharePoint list that has a date and time column. In addition, you can add attachments to list items, including HTML pages, documents, and images.
• Simple site creation and page customization   By using Self-Service Site Creation, you can create SharePoint sites — such as team sites or Meeting Workspace sites — on demand without involving the IT department if you have the necessary permissions. In addition, you can customize a page by changing or adding Web Parts. Each list and library on a portal site is a Web Part, enabling easy customization and personalization using the browser.

• Search   Faster results and improved relevancy ranking enable you to find the information you need easily. Search results now include people, picture libraries, list items, and user profiles. If you search for an image, you'll see a thumbnail view of the image; if you search for a person, you'll see his or her personal profile. You can also group search results in different ways, such as by author, site, date, or area. From the search results page, you now can save a useful search to the My Links Web Part on your personal site.
• Site Directory   The Site Directory provides a central location from which to view and access all Web sites associated with a specific portal site. You can also create sites based on Windows SharePoint Services or add links to existing sites. In addition, adding a site to the Site Directory is a quick and easy way to include content in search results.

The following are a just few of the new features for content managers:

• Lists and views   Because SharePoint Portal Server is built on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, you can add predesigned and custom lists to all SharePoint sites. List managers can approve or reject items that are submitted to the list and add comments. List managers can also apply permissions to a list, allowing only specific users to make changes to the list.
• Support for list and site templates   Users can save SharePoint lists as templates, and reuse them or distribute them to other sites. You can save sites as templates to capture best practices or to define a consistent look and feel.
• Areas   The portal site is a hierarchy of rich subsites that enable content managers to add lists, images, and documents to one or more areas. Content managers can approve or reject items that are submitted to the area. In addition, security can be managed at the area level, allowing only specific users to make contributions or changes to the area.
• Portal site map   Manage portal site areas and topics by dragging them in the portal site map in your Web browser. Create, move, rename, and delete areas by using the portal site map.
• Topic Assistant   The Topic Assistant in the portal site can suggest listings to include in an area. Content managers can approve or reject these suggestions. As areas are added to the portal site, and listings are added to areas, the Topic Assistant continues to learn and suggest listings for each area.
• Site Directory   To organize and display the sites in meaningful ways, you can create views that sort, filter, and group the sites. The Site Directory also offers Web Parts to display "Newest sites," "Sites I added," and "Spotlight Sites." The Site Directory can be configured to automatically approve sites for searching or to require approval for each site.
• News   To make managing news listings easier, you can specify start and end dates for content display and automatically hide expired news items. As a content manager, you can vary the display of news listings — from headlines to summaries to expanded views — by modifying the properties of the Web Part.

The following new features have been included to help administrators:

Architecture

• Scalable, distributed architecture   SharePoint Portal Server scales from a single server to a server farm with multiple front-end Web servers and back-end database servers. Front-end Web servers are stateless, so the load can be balanced across them to support the largest of organizations. You can deploy up to one hundred portal sites per server farm when using a shared services topology.
• Shared services   Deliver shared services to multiple portal sites from a centrally managed and configured server farm. Shared services can include creating indexes and search, user profiles, audiences, alerts, and personal sites.
• Communicate with external partners by using an extranet   If you work with external partners, or if you have users who need to access data from outside of your organization's firewall, you can use SharePoint Portal Server in an intranet/extranet environment. In this configuration, internal and external users can view and interact with the same content and data. You can also employ the antivirus protection and blocked file extension features to help protect your server integrity.

International

• Support for multiple language sites   Multiple language sites can be hosted on a single server or server farm running SharePoint Portal Server. Note that site language is independent from server language.
• Regional settings for each site   Each site can have its own regional settings, such as time zone.
• New word breakers   Word breakers for Czech, Finnish, Hungarian, and Portuguese are available, as well as the original set of SharePoint Portal Server 2001 word breakers for English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Thai, Korean, Chinese Traditional, and Chinese Simplified.

Management

• Alerts   The portal site now automatically identifies and optimizes alerts that have the potential for generating large numbers of results; it will deactivate any alert that generates an excessive number of results. Administrators can deactivate or delete any user's alerts and alert results. Misdirected e-mail messages can be prevented by locking e-mail address fields to use only user profile data. You can also customize the format of the alert results e-mail messages by using an .xsl file.
• Single sign-on   Single sign-on allows you to store and map account credentials so that users don't have to sign on again when portal-based applications retrieve information from enterprise applications.
• Securely integrate enterprise applications   Tight integration with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002 enables rich and secure enterprise application integration using single sign-on. Connectors from Actional enable integration with PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel.
• Full-text searching   The portal site delivers a scalable, high performance index creation and query handling infrastructure. By using a multiserver topology, you can manage your resources by propagating content indexes from the index management server to multiple dedicated search servers. Creating indexes of HTTPS protocol enables crawling of Web sites over SSL. In addition, protocol handlers for Windows SharePoint Services sites enable the portal site to crawl information in site pages, document libraries, lists, and list items. Ifilters now provide the ability to full-text search files created by Microsoft Office Publisher (.pub) and Microsoft Office Visio (.vsd) in addition to the existing capability to search files in Microsoft Office Word (.doc), Microsoft Office Excel (.xls), Microsoft Office PowerPoint (.ppt), MIME, XML, and HTML formats.
• Audiences   Audiences allow organizations to target content to users based on their job role or task. Target Web Parts, news, lists, and list items to one or more specific audiences. Use your investment in Microsoft Active Directory directory service to easily create Audiences from existing distribution lists and security groups.
• Backup and restore   Improved backup and restore enables flexible site recovery. Each site in a server farm can be individually backed up and restored. This feature can also be used for archiving inactive sites prior to deleting them.
• User profiles   Easily create user profiles by importing properties and user data from Active Directory. User profiles make it easy to find people and enable content managers to target information by using audiences. Add properties to the flexible user profile for use by integrated applications or to enable portal site users to find people more easily.
• Inactive site management   Site owners are periodically asked to confirm that their sites are in use or delete them. If multiple notices are sent to a site owner without any response, the administrator can specify that the site be automatically deleted.

Security

• Standard Windows authentication and security methods   You can use SharePoint Portal Server with any Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 authentication method, connect to the database by using Microsoft Windows authentication or Microsoft SQL Server authentication, and integrate SharePoint Portal Server with Active Directory.
• SharePoint administrators group   Allow members of a domain group to perform central administration tasks without granting them administrator rights to the local server computer.
• Manage users from SharePoint Central Administration   Use the SharePoint Central Administration pages to add or delete users on all sites and assign site owners.
• Domain group support   Use domain groups to control access to your site.
• Blocked file extensions   Server administrators can block the upload of specific file types (for example, .mp3 or .exe files).

For a complete list of new administrator features, and information about using these features, see the Administrator's Guide for SharePoint Portal Server.