Content organisation in Microsoft SharePoint 2007: key concepts

For web managers who are used to considering the organisation of web content in terms of a static folder structure, Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Server’s (MOSS 2007) content delivery model can seem pretty daunting, primarily because it’s no longer enough to think about the presentation of content in terms of a hierarchical folder structure. Platforms like SharePoint Server allow web managers to provide site visitors with different ‘views’ of web content which means that the same resource or tool may be made available on the same website in different ways, depending on the influence of a number of factors.

A key aspect of MOSS 2007 is the provison of tools and services that can be used to ensure that the experience for a web user is ‘personalised’ (or personalized!), i.e. the content and tools that are displayed on a website are ALWAYS relevant to a user with irrelevant content material from view. Personalisation is usually achieved by providing tools for website users to allow them to tailor the user interface and content to suit them, or through the use of system processes that can attempt to match content to a user depending on what SharePoint knows about a user’s role, behaviour and needs.

In this blog entry I’ll outline the Sharepoint 2007 tools that can be used to shape the delivery of web content. My key aim is to help web managers understand some of the key concepts so that they can start thinking about how personalisation might impact their planning.

If you are interested in finding out more about personalisation then this 2004 paper by Neil Smith, Seb Schmoller and Nicky Ferguson might be of interest (note the slightly concealed PDF download link at page top-left).

Sharepoint Concepts

A Site Collection

A site collection is a collection of websites that are organised hierarchically in a ‘parent/child’ manner, which means that child sites may optionally inherit the properties of their parent in terms of ‘look and feel’ and access rights. There is no theoretical limit to the number of site collections, sites and subsites that reside on a single Sharepoint server.

If we use the example of a global corporation to illustrate this concept, then an organisaiton of this type may use a single portal ‘entry point’ (e.g. www.global.com), and site collections for each territory and then sites and subsites for operational teams in those terroritories.

A Workspace

A Workspace is a virtual space that is used to support a specific team activity such as production of a document. In planning a Sharepoint deployment we tend to consider Workspaces as transient tools that are created ‘on demand’ rather than something that needs to be considered at the beginning.

User management

Anyone who has had cause to restrict acccess to web content or tools on a website to named individuals or a group such as ‘members’ has had to think about user management – the rules that determine what a user can see and do. In general Active Directory is the method by which access to Windows server applications are managed and MOSS 2007 is no expection to this. Management of your organisation’s Active Directory server is usually the responsibility of your IT staff.

Profiles

A Profile is a detailed description of a user that goes beyond being a record of whch security groups they are in. A Profile is an entry in a database , and that database might be used to store other information about an individual such as their contact details or the department that they work in. A Profile is much more than a contact database however, since a Profile can be used drive personalisation in a more sophisticated way than user management.

Audiences

Whereas Windows Active Directory is principally concerned with people’s roles in an organisation and an organisation’s communication requirements, an Audience is another layer which allows content to be targetted according to an individual’s Profile information. So if we return to the global company example I used earlier, it would be possible to use profiles to target content by audience so that staff in the German office for example, didn’t see content that was only relevant to staff in Paris.

Content Query Web Part

The Content Query Web Part is a method of aggregating Sharepoint content by allowing the display of content from anywhere in a site collection at a single location. So for example it might be used to display a list of all the documents that are identified as minutes of meetings in a single location, even though those documents have actually been stored in different locations around the site collection. The use of tools such as user management and audiences in combination with CQWP could mean that only those minutes that are specifially relevant to a user (rather than all minutes) are displayed.

These are the key Sharepoint 2007 tools that can be utilised to shape content delivery and personalisation. Once these are understood then the next goal is to understand which tool is appropriate to which set of circumstances, and this is something that i’ll pick up in a later entry.

In closing I’l state that personalisation should not distract from ensuring that your content structure is robust and well thought through. Furthermore, the effectiveness of personalisation depends on an good understanding of your users needs and readers who are interested in this may want to take a look at this whitepaper on web usability from Futurate, which highlights some core approaches to user-centred design.