Portal Listings
Portal listings are available only in
SharePoint Portal Server, so you might
not be familiar with them if you're
new to the product. A portal listing is
simply a special type of list that's
available only on a portal area. Portal
listings are a vehicle for displaying
information inside a portal area, such
as a piece of news. Listings are at the
core of information aggregation; they
reduce data-entry duplications and
provide a consistent presentation
layer for your users. Portal listings
include the following features:
- Each portal area contains one, and
only one, portal-listing list—a list of
all the portal listings. That is, the
portal-listing list is the container,
and the portal listings are the items
in the container.
- The content of a portal listing can
be either a URL or an RTF document.
- Portal listings can be grouped.
- Portal listings can have an associated image and icon.
- Each item in a portal listing can be
filtered from view by using SharePoint's audience feature.
- Each item can have defined publishing dates, so that the item is
removed from display in the portal
area after the item's expiration date.
- You can set portal listings so that
new items must be approved before
they're displayed.
- Listings from one portal area can
be displayed on any other portal
area by using different Web Parts,
depending how you want to use
them.
As I mentioned, portal listings let you
target a specific audience for each
item in a listing. When you add a new
portal listing to the portal area, you need
to choose the audience(s) to target. Be
aware that an audience's main purpose is to filter items only; an audience
isn't equivalent to security permissions.
For each portal-listing item that
you create, you can either reference
an existing document reference (i.e.,
by a URL pointing to the document's
location) or enter the RTF document itself. SharePoint Portal Server search
will index only the portal-listing information, not any document reference.
(For in-depth information about
SharePoint's search capabilities, see
"Making Sense of SharePoint Search,"
September 2006, InstantDoc ID
50623.) When you add a new portal-listing item to the portal area and your
intent is to reference a document, it's
a good practice to enter a description
of that reference. Note that search
results don't honor audiences.
Unfortunately, portal-listing items
are more difficult to remove from a
portal area than to add to it. For
example, when you create a new Windows SharePoint Services site, you
have the option to create any number
of portal-listing items in any portal
area you have permissions to. If the
Windows SharePoint Services site
containing these portal-listing items is
deleted, the portal listings aren't automatically removed; you need to delete
them manually. This situation applies
to all portal-listing items that use a
reference. If the reference is no longer
valid, the portal listing item isn't automatically removed.
Moving On
As you've seen, SharePoint Portal
Server incorporates the basic elements of Windows SharePoint Services within the larger framework of a
portal area. Becoming familiar with
the concepts of portal areas, portal
permissions, and portal listings will
help you take your first steps in planning and putting together a SharePoint portal for your organization.
You'll also need to get a handle on
SharePoint Portal Server visual elements, such as Web Parts, and the
essentials of developing a navigational
structure—which I'll cover in my next
article.
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