Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

568 Part VII: Information Management in SharePoint Products and Technologies
Listings
can contain lists, discussion boards, document libraries, and other collaboration
tools that enable people to work together. You must be a member of the Administrator,
Web Designer, or Content Manager site group to add, edit, or delete a Topic.
It is usual to assign a person who will manage a Topic area, both from the content
perspective and the user access perspective.
From a technical perspective, Topics are created from area templates that host
specific Web Parts, such as Area Details and Area Contents Web Parts. Additional
Web Parts can be added once a Topic area is created. See Chapter 31, “Working with
Web Parts,” for more information on the purpose and use of each built-in Web Part.
Topics behave like other areas and are managed in the same way. (For more information
on area management, see the next section in this chapter.) However, Topics
usually contain highlights of other areas or frequently used content that are related
For greater discoverability, you can add listings to more than one Topic.
As detailed earlier, whenever an area, subarea, or Topic is created, a specialized link
list, called Portal Listings, is created. This is combined with a Web Part on most area
or Topic Web pages to display a subset of link items that is dependent on the user
and the targeting of those links, through the audience feature. For more information
on audiences see Chapter 23, “Personalization Services in SharePoint Products and
Technologies.”
Throughout the browser interface, many methods are provided that allow you to
add link items to the Portal Listings lists. Such methods are labeled as Add Listing, Add
Person, Submit To Portal Area, Select A Portal Area For This List, Select A Portal Area
For This Document Library, and Add A Listing For This Document. This section of this
chapter is about listings—that is, the ability to add a listing to an area, subarea, or
Topic. For greater discoverability, you can add listings to more than one area or Topic.
The names of the methods used to add a link item to a Portal Listings list can
be obtuse—for example, when you create a site, the areas section asks you to click
on the location link if you want to select one or more areas for this site. The word
location used in this context can be misleading, as it is also used to specify where
in the area and Topic hierarchy of a portal site you want an area or Topic to reside.
For a site, the location link, if selected, allows you to add a link item to the Portal
Listings list. That is, a pointer to this newly created site is added as a link to each
location selected. The default location is set to none—that is, no link item is added
to any Portal Listings list.
An example of an obvious label for adding a listing is when you upload a document
in a portal document library and you select the Add Listing check box. This
is illustrated in Figure 20-5.