Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

496 Part VI: Administration of Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003
administrator and will override the portal-defined default. This is useful in scenarios
where a particular server does not have access to the default portal
e-mail server based on its location.
Change Portal Site Properties And SharePoint Site Creation Settings
The purpose of following this link is for the portal administrator to change how the
portal area pages are displayed to the requesting browsers. There are four customizations
that the linked page provides:
■ Portal Site Name and Description. The Name property will affect what is
displayed at the top of each area page in the portal site. The Description property
is not displayed and is for the administrator’s own use.
■ Custom Portal Site Logo. This setting allows the administrator to designate
a different logo file than the default set at install time. Any path relative to the
local server is acceptable, but the administrator will have to ensure the logo file
has been copied to all Web front-end servers for this to work. To avoid having
to do this, a single accessible URL can be defined instead. Keep in mind that
this URL can be served in a load-balanced scenario, assuming the logo file is
copied to all load-balanced Web servers.
■ Location For Creating SharePoint Sites. If this setting is left blank or if its
default value of /_layouts/language/scsignup.aspx is used, any sites created
from within the portal site will be created in the default content database. If
portal administrators want newly created sites to default to using an alternate
content database, they will have to change this property to a URL that points to
a Web server running Windows SharePoint Services with Self-Service Site Creation
enabled (keeping in mind that the server needs to have a content database
defined for it to use on its administration pages). A few additional rules to
remember include:
■ The URL must end with /_layouts/language/scsignup.aspx.
■ The URL for creating sites from the Sites Directory is limited to 2048 ASCII
characters. In addition, no component of the URL, such as the virtual
directory or virtual server, can exceed 128 characters.
■ Leaving the URL blank reverts the value back to /_layouts/language/
scsignup.aspx.
■ Custom Cascading Style Sheet. By default, the portal site uses a file called
sps.css, which is found in the /_layouts/language code number/styles folder. A
Web designer can design an alternate cascading style sheet file to customize
the look of the portal pages. To have the portal site use this new .css file, the
administrator needs only to place it in a centrally accessible location and specify
the URL in this property.