Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

158 Part III: Planning and Deployment
Key Information Management Features of SharePoint
Portal Server 2003
The key information management features of SharePoint Portal Server 2003 include
the following:
■ Search and indexing
■ Document collaboration
■ Best Bets and keywords
■ Areas and Topics
■ Personal sites (personal site)
■ Audience targeting
■ User profiles
■ Site collections
■ Site directory area
The purpose of this chapter is not to discuss how to implement or administer
each of these features. Instead, the focus of this chapter is on planning for the
implementation for each of these features and showing how they relate to the overall
information management picture.
Where to Start
When beginning the planning process for a new information management system,
you’ll need to start by answering two basic questions:
■ What information does your organization need to have and use to be successful?
■ Where is that information right now?
It might seem a bit silly, but most IT professionals bypass these two questions
and immediately get to work on building an information management system without
ever considering where their information currently resides. Because most organizations
don’t have an overall structure to their information, they don’t have a good
understanding of where their business-critical information currently resides and, surprisingly,
what that information really is (and isn’t). When asked, most project managers
and system administrators will acknowledge that the organization’s current
information resides in a plethora of disconnected data islands, including the following:
■ People’s minds
■ E-mail
■ Public folders
■ File servers