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By: Michele Deo, MCSE
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Sharepoint
Portal Server 2001,
formerly known as "Tahoe"
I have been evaluating
the Tahoe software for the past couple of months to see if it would be a
potential candidate for the Knowledge Management initiative being undertaken at
my company. Within the past week the Tahoe and Sharepoint development
teams had joined forces and the Tahoe server was renamed and the RC1 release
posted. The Sharepoint Portal
Server 2001, formerly known as "Tahoe" is Microsoft's entry into the
Knowledge Management arena. Sharepoint hopes to contend with the other big
Knowledge Management systems in the market, such as Lotus Notes, Eroom, etc. Sharepoint is a web portal, document
management system and team collaboration facility. It is different then the
traditional Public Folders your use to seeing within Exchange. Based
on workspaces and Digital Dashboards and workspaces, Sharepoint enables office
users a more structured approach to organizing their information as well as a
method to collaborate on this information., Sharepoint offers indexed searches,
document publishing mechanisms, automated document routing , and web
discussions.
Sharepoint consists of
many parts, and many new terms to the users in the Knowledge Management
Market. Parts and terms like Digital Dashboards and workspaces, in which
Sharepoint is based upon. Sharepoint is also built on the Web Storage System,
making accessibility to documents on Exchange 2000 Information stores and/or any
other system developed on the Web Storage System accessible through web
crawling.
Microsoft's definition of
a Digital Dashboard - A digital dashboard is a customized
solution for knowledge workers that consolidates personal, team, corporate, and
external information and provides single-click access to analytical and
collaborative tools.
Workspaces -
electronic forum where users can collaborate about items posted in the space.
All the back engine
process are supported right out of the box, pretty much the only thing you have
to setup and configure is the Digital Dashboard site. Finding where are
the base code is stored, and where to post your configured dashboards was an
interesting, as well as upon installation I noticed that a mapped network drive
appeared on my system, M: where the web storage system was located.
Each document published in
the document library has a profile, which stores information to describe and
identify the document, author and title, as well as a custom property space for
additional information you may require for your documents. As
documents are posted a version is assigned to them. Document version
requires the author of the document to "check-out" the document, make
their modifications, and then "check-in" the document to update the
sequence the version number. The description properties open up the
information to become searchable so that information can easily be found.
Documents must be published for the "public" to see them, but can be
posted to the document library to a selected few to review and approve before
publication. Sharepoint supports a variety of file types, including the
top three of Microsoft Office (word, excel, etc.), Adobe Acrobat, and HTML
documents.
Web discussions are
another nice feature about this product. You can conduct online
discussions about a posted document without having to modify the document each
time. The author can view the suggested changes through the discussion
threads, check out the document, make the modifications, and repost. This
feature does not interact with an e-mail system, but is built in as part of the
product.
Indexing and Search
services are another feature of this product, which is a necessity when using a
large document repository like this. The dashboard site provides a
full-text search or content search dependent upon your need. So as you can
guess, Microsoft Index server will need to be installed for this feature to
work.
Something residue off the
Exchange Public Folder and Task list scenarios that Sharepoint uses as well is
categories. You can organize the information in the dashboard site in a
way where categories are used to group certain types of information
together. Sharepoint provides this mechanism as well as an Assistant to
simplify the process of attaching categories to your data.
Subscriptions are used in
something similar to how "favorites" work in IE. With the users
specific dashboard, they can subscribe to certain sections of the portal so they
don't have to remember where the data they need to see is physically located.
There are 3 role levels of
access to the content within a Sharepoint server. Coordinator basically is
the "god-like" access to the content. You can create new
dashboard, web parts, update files, and any management tasks that you need to
perform. Author allows the user to add and update files, while reader give
you read-only access to the published documents.
The Sharepoint Portal
Server can be part of a NT 4.0 domain or can integrate with a Windows 2000
forest and Active Directory. It can be monitored through the Performance
Monitor as well as logs can be produced to analyze the performance of the
server.
Note: Sharepoint
Server needs to be installed on a Windows 2000 SP1 server. And at least 6
languages are supported.
Limitations thus far:
1. If you want to
make an image of a Sharepoint Portal Server, at this time you can only do it
through a backup/restore process. The idea here is to store the
information centrally and have the remote users pull from the central location
through either a Sharepoint Portal client, Microsoft Office client and/or
Internet web browser.
2. Administration
is pretty simplistic, and I'm hoping that more is provided in this area as the
product gets closer to release.
3. At this time the
software can not coexist with the following products on the same server:
Any version of Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft
Office Server Extensions
Microsoft
Site Server
Microsoft SQL
Server
4. Sharepoint is
not supported in a clustered configuration.
5. When moving from
Beta code, to RC1, I had lost my configured dashboard settings. The reason
is that I could not upgrade, but had to uninstall the Beta code, and install the
RC code.
Although still in RC
level of release and still a bit buggy, Sharepoint has the potential in becoming
a contender in the document management market. More information can be
found at : http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint
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