Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 18
Managing SharePoint
Portal Server 2003
In this chapter:
Administering Portal Site Settings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
General Settings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 482
Portal Site Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
Search Settings And Indexed Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502
User Profile, Audiences, And Personal Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502
Changing Owners of Portal Sites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508
If one thinks of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services as providing a collaboration
engine targeted to helping members of individual teams and small workgroups collaborate
and share data, one can look at Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
as the product that brings those teams and workgroups together, allowing them to
find each other and to leverage each other’s work. In fact, part of the intent of the
portal product is to provide a central place for all workers in an organization to
quickly and easily find information in workspaces that they might not be members of.
When looking at and using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, users had
no way to easily find all the team sites that were created and it was left to the administrator
to create a Web page of links that pointed to those team sites. Also, searching
for data is always limited to the team site from which you do the search request.
Essentially, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 takes all the Windows
SharePoint Services sites and makes them navigable, as well as searchable from the
central portal site. Furthermore, a new kind of site is introduced, called portal areas,
which can be created as part of the portal site. Using special area templates, these
portal area sites include additional enterprise-level features such as support for alerts
based on users’ subscriptions to lists and list content, as well as support for content
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