Customized Portal Solution

A portal needs to be easy to set up, and for maximum benefit needs to be tailored to an organization's specific needs. With SharePoint Portal Server, you have the ability to quickly deploy an out-of-the-box portal solution that facilitates finding, creating, and sharing all of your mission-critical data from a browser-based interface. And because the SharePoint Portal is comprised fully of Web Parts, it can be easily customized for your business needs. With Web Part technology, you can also customize this interface, managing common resources, such as your contacts, calendars, and messages.

Customers can also extend SharePoint Portal Server and add additional Web application functionality. SharePoint Portal Server is designed around industry and Internet standards, such as OLE DB, Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO), Extensible Markup Language (XML), and HTTP, making it easy for developers familiar with these standards. Due to this support of standards, the use of tools like Microsoft Visual Studio® allows you to integrate Active Server Pages (ASP) functionality into the portal.

Integrated Document Management

Everyone works with documents, but not everyone has the ability to use technology to structure how they work with their colleagues on these documents. The process from document creation through intranet publishing can be a string of disjointed actions, unconnected with business processes. SharePoint Portal Server includes features like document locking, versioning, and publishing and makes these features accessible to the average user. It delivers easy-to-use, document-management features that are integrated with the tools and applications that are used to create and manage documents, with Microsoft Windows® Explorer and Microsoft Office 2000 applications like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint®.

Using SharePoint Portal Server, you can also save and check documents into the document store, capturing business-relevant metadata in Document Profile forms. You can also tailor forms to your organization. Tracking changes though multiple drafts as a document is edited, reviewed, and approved is accomplished using integrated approval routing. This occurs prior to publishing for public viewing on the intranet dashboard site. You can also roll back to a previous version of a document. Look for features like Document Collaboration, Profiling, Lifecycle Management, and Web-based document management through a browser.

Search Engine Retrieve text using state of the art probabilistic ranking. The search engine also features "best bets," property searches, and auto-categorization of crawled content.   Data Access and Indexing Crawl and search file and Web servers, Microsoft Exchange Server Public Folders, Lotus Notes servers, and remote servers for SharePoint Portal Server.   Subscriptions Subscribe to a document, folder, category, or search query so you are notified when changes are made, in the portal and optionally, by e-mail.   Categories Classify content under a set of customer-defined categories. This allows easy navigation to information.   Low-Latency Indexing Support manual and scheduled crawls, as well as adaptive and incremental crawling, to ensure that your search results contain the most recent information.   Search Extensibility Search protocol handler interfaces enable connection to custom data sources. Support custom content types through the IFilter interface.   Office and Windows Integration A complete set of document management functionality is accessible directly from the Microsoft Office 2000 toolbar and Microsoft Windows® Explorer. This helps users manage documents with familiar tools.   Check-in and Check-out Enables optional enhanced Web folders so that documents can be reserved by individual users for updating.   Document Versioning Document changes, including metadata such as keywords, are tracked and assigned different version numbers for auditing and rollback.   Document Profiling This captures optional and required metadata about customer-defined document types.   Document Collaboration Use the Discussions feature in Office and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) documents for inline, content review.   Security Using roles built on Microsoft Windows NT® security, SharePoint Portal Server ensures that only users with appropriate access can see a given document.   Lifecycle Management Create private drafts, review and revise, then publish, with optional approval routing.   Digital Dashboard–based Portal Get flexible, Web Part–based portals using digital dashboard layouts and content interfaces, using third party or your own Web Parts.   Shareable Personal Dashboards Easily create customized dashboard sites, and share them with other users.   Web Storage System Built-in services for building Web-based collaborative applications.   Standard Tools Develop solutions using familiar tools like Microsoft Visual Studio®.   Standard Interfaces Utilize common interfaces like Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO), Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV).