Datasheet

Tech Consulting, to show how SharePoint operates. Rossco Tech Consulting has expanded operations to

support a major software manufacturer. This means providing English-, French-, and German-speaking

customers with an Internet support portal where they can access up-to-the-minute information on the

manufacturer’s various software offerings.

Planning

While doing needs analysis, the following factors were major contributors in Rossco’s decision to use

SharePoint as the platform on which to build its customer support portal:

❑ The portal must accommodate multiple products from a central Internet-facing location. Each

product has its own unique support materials.

❑ The portal must serve up content in multiple languages, though the original content would be

created in English and then translated.

❑ For legal reasons, support documentation must be published via a strict approval process

involving several individuals in the organization.

❑ The portal must accommodate speedy publishing of up-to-date information on emerging

products.

❑ Additional documentation exists beyond what is stored in the SharePoint sites. This content

must be indexed and accessible via the SharePoint search interface.

❑ Specific reporting requirements exist for dashboard scorecards on progress related to specific

requirements, as well as the aggregation of information from multiple sources on a single page.

Moving from Plan to Practice

With the planning needs in mind, Rossco set out to plan and implement a SharePoint solution. The fol-

lowing section outlines the company’s experience.

❑ Internet-Facing Sites in SharePoint: Because users will access a major part of the portal via the

Internet, they created the initial site collection with a special publishing feature available only in

SharePoint 2007 (this feature was previously in Microsoft Content Management Server 2002,

and is now known as Web Content Management or WCM). This makes it possible to publish con-

tent through an automated and scheduled process from an internal and secured location to an

external anonymous Internet-facing site.

❑ Multilingual Design: Because the portal needed to service three languages, the company used

Variations, a feature unique to SharePoint 2007, which helps you create a site hierarchy for each

language. Variations simplify content management in multiple languages by creating a source

site and a site for each language.

❑ Content Creation: After creating the main subsites, the product teams created intuitively

named lists and libraries (introduced later in this chapter) and added important documents and

information. Making use of built-in features such as content types, site columns, and views, they

created and presented the data more efficiently. To ensure that the portal was in line with the

corporate brand, the portal was customized. Using the master pages feature, they created cus-

tom style sheets, page layouts, and content types to remodel the look and feel of the portal. This

transformed the original site with its generic SharePoint look into an easy-to-use support inter-

face. Using page layouts, they were able to empower key business users with no programming

knowledge to create and publish branded web content such as newsletters and product updates.

Chapter 1: Getting Started with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

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