Content Management
The content management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 fall within three
categories:
- Document management
- Records management
- Web content management
Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 provides the core foundation for document
management tasks, including the versioning features, descriptive metadata features,
workflow features, content types, auditing, and role-based-access controls at the
document library, folder, and individual document levels.
Office SharePoint Server 2007 extends these capabilities to deliver enhanced authoring,
business document processing, Web content management and publishing, records management,
policy management, and support for multilingual publishing.
Document management
Document management controls the life cycle of documents in your organization —
how they are created, reviewed, published, and accessed. No matter where you work,
you have no doubt encountered the challenges of document management. Consider the
life cycle of the average document. First the document is created, then saved, then
perhaps shared with other users, then perhaps modified by other users. As new versions
are developed, they must be tracked and organized. With Office SharePoint Server
2007, your organization can enable appropriate policies at every step of the document
life cycle, use centralized repositories for storing, managing, and accessing documents, and use labels and barcodes to
efficiently track documents. Office SharePoint Server
2007 offers the following features to support document management.
Document Center site template The Document Center site template
enables organizations to create large-scale document management sites that support
highly structured document management scenarios. Default settings for the Document
Center site template support strong content control: check-out is required before
editing, major and minor versions are enabled, support for multiple content types
is enabled, and auditing is enabled to track content changes over time.
Translation Management Library The Translation Management Library
helps organizations create, store, and manage translated documents by providing
both views and features that facilitate the manual document translation process.
This library features customized a customized view that groups translations by source
document, and it also features a Translation Management workflow that can be used
to manage the manual translation process.
Document conversions framework Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers
support for the server-side conversion of documents from one file format into another.
2007 Microsoft Office system client program integration Many document
management features in Office SharePoint Server 2007 are extended powerfully through
tight integration with 2007 Office release client programs. From within Office 2007
client programs, users can:
- Start and complete workflow tasks
- Update the properties for server documents using the Document Information Panel
- View information management policy statements for server documents in the Message
Bar
- Compare versions of server documents within Microsoft Office Word
- Insert barcodes or labels into server documents
Records management
Records management is the process of collecting, managing, and disposing of corporate
records (information deemed important for the history, knowledge, or legal defense
of a company) in a consistent and uniform manner based on the company’s policies.
These policies are shaped by the type of work the organization does, the kinds of
legal risks it faces, and the laws and regulations that govern it. Office SharePoint
Server 2007 introduces a new set of features for creating and supporting formal
records management capabilities in your organization.
Information management policies Organizations can define and use
information management policies in Office SharePoint Server 2007 sites to enforce
compliance with corporate business processes or legal or governmental regulations
for the management of information. Information management policies enable site administrators
or list managers to control how content is managed. Office SharePoint Server 2007
includes several predefined policy features that organizations can use individually
or in combination to define information management policies for their sites. These
policy features, which can be defined for an entire site collection, or a specific
list, library, or content type, include: Auditing, Barcodes, Labels, Form Conversion
for Archiving, and Expiration. Additionally, organizations can develop custom information
management policies.
Information Rights Management (IRM) In Office SharePoint Server
2007, organizations can use IRM to limit the actions that users can take on files
that have been downloaded from SharePoint lists or libraries. IRM encrypts the downloaded
files and limits the set of users and programs that are allowed to decrypt these
files. IRM can also limit the rights of the users who are allowed to read files
so that they cannot take actions such as print copies of the files or copy text
from them.
Records Center site template The Records Center site template in
Office SharePoint Server 2007 is designed to help organizations implement their
records management and retention programs. This site template extends standard Office
SharePoint Server 2007 features with additional records management features to provide
the following capabilities:
- Vault abilities The Records Center site template has several features
that ensure the integrity of records that are stored within it. Records are never
automatically modified by the system, which means that records that are uploaded
to the site and downloaded later will always be identical. The default settings
for the Records Center site also prevent direct tampering of records by versioning
any changes made to document contents and auditing specify types of changes. Records
managers can add and maintain metadata on items separately from the record’s metadata.
Changes to metadata are versioned as well.
- Records Routing Organizations can define a Records Routing list
to automatically route records that are submitted to the Records Center to the appropriate
library.
- Information management policy enforcement The Auditing, Expiration,
and Barcode policy features included in Office SharePoint Server 2007 are useful
to records management.
- Hold Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides support for managing
the legal discovery process by enabling organizations to place records on hold.
Records that are subject to litigation or investigations can be added to a Hold
list and thereby suspended from records management policies and expiration. Items
can be placed on more than one hold at a time.
- Records Collection Interface People and automated systems can easily
submit content to a Records Center site without necessarily having access or permission
to any of the contents of the site. Content can be submitted through a Web service
by using the SOAP protocol, or through e-mail by using the SMTP protocol.
Integration with Microsoft Exchange 2007 Office SharePoint Server
2007 is tightly integrated with Exchange 2007. This integration enables organizations
to create Managed E-mail Folders in Exchange that are exposed to users in Office Outlook 2007. Organizations can define information management policies for these
folders that specify things like a retention period or quota. Users can also use
these folders to send e-mail to a Records Center site that has been implemented
in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Users can drag-and-drop e-mail records from their
inbox into the appropriate Managed E-mail Folder.
Web content management
Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes many features that are useful for designing,
deploying, and managing enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet presence
Web sites, and divisional portal sites. These features enable you to author and
publish Web content in a timely manner and can ultimately reduce the cost and overhead
of managing multiple sites.
Template-based Web pages By using the Web content management features
in Office SharePoint Server 2007, you can create, edit, and manage template-based
Web pages. To do this, you create page layouts and thus create and manage the “templates”
for your web pages, both for authors and how they create content and readers and
how they view content.
Publish site templates When you create
a new Office SharePoint Server 2007 site, you can start by selecting one of several
different kinds of site templates, including templates that support specific content publishing needs your
organization may have. The site templates in the Publish group enable organizations
design, deploy, and manage enterprise intranet portals, corporate Internet Presence
Web sites, and divisional portal sites. The site templates in the Publish group
all have publishing features enabled, including the page editing toolbar, content
editor, and check out.
- News site Select this site template when you want to create a site
to deliver news articles and links to news articles quickly and easily. It includes
sample news page layouts and an archive for storing older news items. It also features
an easy-to-use layout for readers and news providers. This site template also includes
two Web Parts that enable efficient news delivery: RSS Viewer, and This Week in
Pictures.
- Publishing site with workflow Select this site template when you
want to create a site for publishing Web pages on a schedule by using approval workflows.
It includes document and image libraries for storing Web publishing assets. For
example, you can create a site to display technical articles that must be reviewed
by subject matter experts before they can be published.
- Collaboration portal Select this site if you want to create a starter
site hierarchy for an intranet divisional portal. It includes a home page, a News
site, a Site Directory, and a Search Center with Tabs. Typically, this site has
nearly as many contributors as readers and is used to host team sites. This type
of template can help when you want to create a divisional portal where employees
can collaborate and publish documents and Web pages. This site template is available
only if you are creating a site collection within Central Administration.
- Publishing portal Select this template if you want to create a
starter site hierarchy for an Internet-facing site or a large intranet portal. This
site can be customized easily with distinctive branding. It includes a home page,
a sample press releases subsite, a Search Center, and a login page. Typically this
site has many more readers than contributors, and it is used to publish Web pages
with approval workflows. By default, you can create only publishing subsites with
workflow under sites that you create by using this site template. This site template
is available only if you are creating a site collection within Central Administration.
Integration with Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Office SharePoint
Designer 2007 is is a new product for creating and customizing Office SharePoint
Server 2007 Web sites and building workflow-enabled applications based on SharePoint
technologies. You can use Office SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize a Office
SharePoint Server 2007 site. This enables you to design and extend portal sites
or portal pages with more flexibility and power than ever before. For example, you
can use state-of-the-art editing tools to edit cascading style sheet (CSS) files
for SharePoint sites.
In-context Web page authoring You can create Web pages by using
the rich-text editor that comes with Office SharePoint Server 2007. In text editing
mode, you can type and edit page content on the page, by using a browser. In HTML
source editing mode, you can type and edit page content by using standard HTML.
Other features include:
- A feature that lets you quickly create, organize, and format links.
- A Web part that lets you roll up content from across your site.
- The ability to spell-check the content you author.
- The ability to manage and edit boilerplate content, such as copyright statements,
in a single
location.
Client authoring Office SharePoint Server 2007 also provides you
with the ability to create Web pages by converting documents that you create using
other programs. This has many advantages, depending on the program that you use
to create the original document. For example, you can use Office Word 2007 documents
to create Web pages for your site collection. Advantages to this approach include:
- Faster creation You can turn important Office Word 2007 documents
— for example, white papers or status reports — directly into Web pages, instead of re-creating those documents for use on the Web.
- Offline working By using Office Word 2007 to create a Web page,
you are free to work on the content with or without a connection to the Internet.
- Richer authoring feature set Office Word 2007 provides more word-processing
features than are offered by Office SharePoint Server 2007 alone.
- Document flexibility You can use Office Word 2007 documents for
other purposes too. For example, you can create a new product announcement by using
Word and then distribute that announcement in an e-mail message and on the Web.
Site variations Audiences of Web sites can vary in many ways including
language, geographic region, browsing device, or company affiliation. The job of
producing and maintaining variations of a site can be difficult and time consuming.
In Office SharePoint Server 2007, the variations feature allows site administrators
to simplify the process of managing variations by maintaining customizable copies
of the content from a source site in each target site. This feature is particularly
useful for for publishing multilingual sites. For example, you can identify a source
(for example, Press Releases – English) and multiple target sites (for example Press
Releases – French, Press Releases – Japanese) and Office SharePoint Server 2007
will keep the target sites synchronized with the source site.
Site navigation Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes features
that
make it easy to create and manage the navigational structure for your site.
Site Content and Structure page You use the Site Content and Structure
page to manage both the content and structure of your SharePoint site collection.
In Office SharePoint Server 2007, navigation is dynamically generated from the site
collection hierarchy. This means that when you change the structure of the site
(for example, if you move a subsite), that change is carried through to the site
navigation. Where the item now appears in the site navigation reflects the new location
of the underlying subsite. The actions you can take on this page include more than
changing the structure of the site. You can manage content by performing other actions
on lists and list items. For example, you check out or check in, publish, and copy
items.
To ensure that the interface for the Site Content and Structure page is familiar
to you, it was designed to be similar to Windows Explorer. You can see the site
collection hierarchy in the navigation pane as a tree view on the left of the Site
Content and Structure page. On the right, items are listed in the list pane.