Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Out of the Box

A Departmental Site with Version 3 Whiz-Bang
To create the site for our IT department, start at the intranet home page and click Site Actions, then Create, Sites and Workspaces. Create a friendly title for this site, such as Information Technology, but give it a short URL, such as “IT.” Configure a Team Site template and use unique permissions, so that you can more easily give IT employees access to resources on the IT site. You'll be prompted to create the Visitors, Members, and Owners groups, which you can always do later from Site Settings.

In our departmental site, let's leverage three great new capabilities of SharePoint Services 3.0. Click Site Actions, select Create, Wiki Page Library and name the library “IT Wiki.” Wikis are a fantastic tool for a capturing knowledge.

Link to another page by using the syntax page name can contain spaces. For example, you might have a message at your site: “Don't forget to bring your family to the upcoming corporate baseball games. The schedule is on the Baseball Schedule page.” Clicking the link Baseball Schedule brings the user to the existing Baseball Schedule page or, if that page doesn't exist, will create a new page called Baseball Schedule. So it's easy to create a new page from an existing page by creating a link to a nonexistent page, then clicking the link.

Blogs are another useful tool for unstructured knowledge capture. Click Site Actions, select Create, Sites and Workspaces and create a blog site named IT Blogs and the URL blogs/, also using unique permissions so that you can control who is allowed to blog to the site.

Security
Probably one of the most important enhancements to SharePoint Services 3.0 is item-level security. From the IT site home page, click Shared Documents and upload a Word document. Hover over the document and, from its drop-down menu, choose Manage Permissions. By default, permissions are inherited from the parent—in this case, the document library. Choose Actions, Manage Permissions to configure the permissions on the document. After the document is uploaded, click the document link, and it will open directly in Microsoft Office Word 2007 or Microsoft Word 2003. Both versions of Word can also open and save directly from and to a SharePoint document library by using the library's URL (e.g., http://wss01/IT/Shared%20Documents). When you open a document from a library, unlike a traditional file share, the document is “checked out” to the current editor, and the document library itself can be configured to maintain versions.

Security also extends to the UI, with “security trimming.” If a user doesn't have permission to see part of a SharePoint site, links to that part of the site won't be displayed in the UI. For example, you can configure permissions so that an administrator of a team site can see the Site Actions option but readers can't.

Better Collaboration
Add SharePoint Services 3.0's support for workflow, Microsoft Outlook integration, offline files, Digital Rights Management (DRM), and forms—all of which I'll discuss in upcoming articles—and your business processes are now supported more completely and more securely than ever before, with a software cost of exactly zero. May the file share rest in peace.