Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

554 Part VII: Information Management in SharePoint Products and Technologies
Lists
A list can be created in several places. First, a user can create a list on a portal site,
where the collection of information is shared throughout the organization. A user can
also create a list on a Windows SharePoint Services site for collaboration within a
team, or a user can create a list on her personal website to share or host information.
Sites include a set of built-in lists and document libraries. Except for the
Announcements list, these lists are empty when you create the site. You can immediately
fill them with items pertinent to your needs. The Announcements list contains
a sample announcement to help you get started.
Each list appears on a page that includes commands for adding items, sorting
and filtering items, switching to a different view of the list, and changing the design
of the list. You can copy the list to a Windows SharePoint Services–compatible
spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel 2003, and you can create an alert to be notified
of changes to the list from this page.
List Management
You can use the lists that come with your site as is, you can modify or delete lists
that you don’t use, and you can create your own custom lists. The lists featured on
your sites will vary, depending on the site template your site uses. SharePoint Products
and Technologies uses two types of templates:
■ Site definitions. Site definitions include the set of basic pages and schema
from which all SharePoint sites and lists are derived. Site definitions contain all
the configuration data for the site and are stored on the file system of each
front-end Web server as Web pages and XML files. A site definition can actually
contain multiple configurations, but all the configuration data in a site definition
uses the same set of lists that a user can create. For example, the Social
Meeting, Multipage Meeting, and Decision Meeting templates that are listed on
the Template Selection page are based on the Meetings site definition. There is
currently no user interface to customize these definitions or to add new ones.
To do this, the XML files need to be edited manually. To change the XML files
see the white paper “Build Custom SharePoint Sites and Portal Areas with Templates
and Site Definitions,” by Dino Dato-on, September 2003.