Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

172 Part III: Planning and Deployment
manner that makes sense to your organization so that users can browse the area or
Topic hierarchy to find the information they are looking for.
There are seven types of area templates and Portal Listings. We’ll briefly
describe each one here:
1. TOC (Table of Contents) Category template. This is the home page of the
Topics area hierarchy. It is used to view three levels of topics in your organization.
It is the tree view of the Topics areas.
2. Topic Category template.
Topic area.
This is the template used to create an individual
3. News Category template.
News areas.
This is the template used to create individual
4. News Home Category template. This template “rolls up” news items from
News areas under the News Home. If there are subareas—such as Public
News, Corporate News, and Competitor News—you would see each of the latest
items from those three areas in the News Home area. There is also a targeted
Web Part named News for You, which allows you to target news items to
audiences.
5. Community Category template. This template is designed to create an
online community for any purpose you might have, such as an event or a
social or business concern.
6. Shared Page template. Found under the Page tab of any area when you
click on Change Settings. You can select Inherit the Parent Template, which
allows you to create multiple areas using the same template that hosts different
content.
7. Sites Directory template. This template is used to organize site collections
that are created as part of your overall collaborative effort.
When planning out your topics and areas, you need to gain the insight and recommendations
from each interested party who will be using the portal site. How
people think about information will heavily influence how they will want to browse
for information.
For example, let’s suppose you’re on a marketing team charged with next
year’s advertising campaign. You develop a marketing budget for the campaign.
Now, who would have a legitimate business interest in seeing that budget? Well, several
groups come immediately to mind: Accounting, Executives, Sales, Marketing,
Content Development, and others. The sales team will quite likely want to browse
for this budget differently than the accountants. Because you can’t possibly read the
minds of your portal site users, a best practice is to glean from them what they think
is the most logical way to structure the data they most commonly use and then to use