SharePoint Addresses the Issues of Storing and Accessing

How might SharePoint Address the Issues of Storing and Accessing

How might SharePoint Address the Issues of Storing and Accessing

Introduction to SharePoint

Share Point Portal Server 2001 (or simply Share Point) is an "out of the box" portal solution from Microsoft that offers search, document management and collaboration features. Portals created using SharePoint are component-based and highly configurable, consisting of "Web-parts" clustered to form "digital dashboards". A Web-part is a custornisable; reusable component used to display information from XML, HTML and scripted data sources.

Digital dashboards are containers for Web-parts, with each dashboard typically serving a specific information need, for example, displaying the latest news from multiple sources each of which are encapsulated by a Web-part. As discussed previously, the portal was to be developed within a short time frame (Belkin, 2004, pp. 209-239). Fortunately, many of the required features were already available in SharePoint, and this helped in the development effort. The important built-in SharePoint features relevant to the portal included:

Categories: SharePoint categories provide a mechanism for browsing content through an organised hierarchy of topics.

Each category is a link to an expanded list that shows sub-categories or content under it. SharePoint separates category definition from the storage of resources/ documents. This provides flexibility in categorising documents according to the information needs of users rather than defining browsing structures based on directories and subdirectories of the file system. An added benefit is that a particular document can be classified in more than one category (Buckley, 1996, pp.246-261).

Folders: Documents in SharePoint are stored in one of two types of folders: standard or enhanced. Folders are distinguished from categories which organise content. An enhanced folder is a document storage folder that supports document management tasks such as check-in, check-out, versioning, approval, and publishing. A standard folder on the other hand is one that does not support the document management tasks mentioned above (Chapelle, 2006, pp.212-236). In the portal implementation, enhanced folders are used to store the source code of components to facilitate the submission, verification and publishing of contributions.

Document Profiles: These are equivalent to metadata, and all documents in SharePoint must be associated with a document profile. SharePoint provides a utility for creating new profile types with support for mandatory fields and various data types (Chung, 1997, pp.169-189).

Discussions: SharePoint provides a built-in threaded discussions feature which allows users to add comments and replies to a document.

Search Engine: SharePoint provides a built-in search engine that is capable of searching on document profiles as well as the full text of documents. The search engine is extensible so that query submission and search results presentation are customisable.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes business intelligence capabilities that can help us preserve data integrity throughout our organization while enabling powerful search, data integration, data analysis, data rendering, and data sharing scenarios. The business intelligence functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 enables centralized management and control of shared resources that can include reports, forms, and documents, ...