Your entry to a new level of document management
After a long gestation, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001, formerly code-named Tahoe, is now available in English, German, and Japanese versions. Microsoft presents this server as a Web-based document-management and portal product that can fit easily into existing Windows 2000 or Windows NT infrastructures and that integrates tightly with Web browsers, Windows Explorer, and the Microsoft Office suite. The new product also boasts powerful indexing and search capabilities.
The product's name is a mouthful. SharePoint implies that the server can replace multiple network file shares as a preferred repository for documents; Portal refers to the familiar portal paradigm that users employ to access the data that the server gathers. (Microsoft also uses the SharePoint name in SharePoint Team Services, a technology that's now in place in Office XP—formerly code-named Office 10—and which the company intends eventually to make a part of other Microsoft products. Ideally, customers will use SharePoint Portal Server to create a central portal site for the products that use SharePoint Team Services.) So how does the new server work, and what is its true purpose?
Alike but Different
No formal link exists between SharePoint Portal Server and Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server, but the two products share technology such as the Web Storage System—WSS. (Note that you can install Exchange 2000's standard edition on the same machine as SharePoint Portal Server. However, you can't run Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server, which supports multiple databases and storage groups—SGs—on the same machine.) SharePoint Portal Server uses a modified version (Microsoft sometimes refers to it as a departmental version) of the Exchange 2000 WSS, and the SharePoint Portal Server WSS variant inherits all the capabilities that the Exchange 2000 WSS delivers, such as support for streaming file formats. The SharePoint Portal Server WSS holds any type of unstructured or semistructured information, including properties for every item that it manages.
When you add a document to the Exchange 2000 WSS, the server examines the document's OLE properties (e.g., subject, author, title, date created) and uses them to populate indexes within the WSS. Users can take advantage of these indexes to build views within Microsoft Outlook and thus look at folders' contents sorted by date, size, title, and so on. The SharePoint Portal Server WSS operates similarly but groups properties into document profiles—literally, a way to describe the information that you'd expect to gather about a document. For example, you can create a profile that describes articles to be published in a magazine; that profile might include properties for the author's name, copy editor's name, technical editor's name, and word count.
On the surface, the WSS's structure looks much like the Exchange Store. Whereas the Exchange 2000 WSS organizes data into mailboxes, folders, and items and represents these objects as rows and tables within a database, the SharePoint Portal Server WSS holds documents as items within folders and organizes those folders into workspaces. The workspaces also hold management folders, information categories, document profiles, and subscription information. (A subscription is a marker that a user places on a specific document or category. When the document changes or users add new documents to the category, SharePoint Portal Server emails a notification to users who have taken out subscriptions to inform those users that new information is available.)
The server supports three distinct types of workspaces: document-management, search, and index. The primary difference between these types is that a document-management workspace holds content as well as indexes. Search workspaces hold only indexes that SharePoint Portal Server builds from searching external information sources, such as Lotus Notes (4.6a or later) databases. Index workspaces are even more specialized and operate as part of dedicated SharePoint Portal Server search machines that build indexes from multiple sources and become the definitive source for a search. You can propagate selective indexing results to either search or document-management workspaces. Microsoft recommends that a server running SharePoint Portal Server manage no more than 10 workspaces.
Technology aside, what does the product do? Current reviews are divided about the server's primary purpose. Is the product a document-management server? Is SharePoint Portal Server's top goal to provide information in a design tailored to meet individual needs and preferences? Or are the server's content-aggregation and search features an indication that it's simply the culmination of Microsoft's attempt to build a better search engine? Microsoft seems to intend the server to do all this and more. In building SharePoint Portal Server, Microsoft concentrated on four goals: delivering departmental document management; easing deployment in existing Win2K or NT organizations; integrating with Web browsers, Windows Explorer, and Office applications; and providing search capabilities.
Deliver Departmental Document Management
Unlike server products that target an entire organization (e.g., Exchange Server), SharePoint Portal Server aims for workgroup or departmental deployments. Microsoft's intention is that every department will have a SharePoint Portal Server machine that acts as a departmental portal and repository for all the information that the department owns and manages. (One SharePoint Portal Server machine can still deliver information to a complete enterprise. The server will permit any authorized user to access information, even when the user doesn't belong to the department that owns the SharePoint Portal Server machine.)
The new product meets the Windows infrastructure's need for basic document-management features such as multiple versioning (i.e., the ability to maintain multiple versions of a document or other item that is under development). SharePoint Portal Server supports minor and major versions of documents. The server automatically creates minor versions—in which the version number moves from 1.0 to 1.1 to 1.2 and so on—each time a user updates a document. The server creates major versions—in which the version number moves from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0 and so on—when an authorized user elects to publish the document. The product maintains a full audit trail to track updates. Although you can't roll back to an earlier document version, you can save an earlier version as a new document.