IWI-Portal (engl.)

Collaboration platform and PIM - SharePoint 2007

A portal is a website which bundles and combines applications / services and information from different sources with each other. Portals differ from each other, depending on integrated information- and service resources. Well-known are news- and information portals like web.de, t-online.de or heise.de. Like the description reveals, such portals gather information from different sources, transmit them to consistent dimensions and arrange them in their navigation structure. Furthermore often integrated is a search function which searches through the prepared information by using keywords, and content sensitive advertisements, which content matches the just shown news. The portal user so gets a consistent and individual overview about the topic he looked for.

Using the Microsoft SharePoint server – replacement product of the Microsoft SharePoint Portal server – makes it possible to build up other and more complex types of (service-) portals. The institute for business informatics at the University of Leipzig uses SharePoint to build up a collaboration platform for coordination of research projects and teachings. Foundation of this platform is the repository, where every relevant document becomes sorted in and indexed to search through them.

At the beginning is the authentication of the user. Because it is a non-public portal, every user has to log in before using the portal. One attribute of portals is single sign-on: If logged in once, the user can use all functions of the portal without authenticate again. SharePoint takes one step further. By integration with the active directory users which logged themselves in with their desktop PCs at the domain of the institute become automatically logged into the portal. They get their personal welcome page to see – personalization is another function of portals. Depending on the tasks of the respectively user anybody can arrange a personal portal welcome page, which clear and compact combines all important information.

The coordination of the teamwork takes places via the integration with the exchange server. Tasks and appointments for project staff members are shown and managed via group calendars. Work packages and milestones can be managed with project planning. All those data can be linked with documents from the repository. The integration with exchange goes so far, that documents from the repository which were send or received with email attachments, are once saved centrally in the SharePoint. This saves disk space and avoids inconsistent data. The email integration can even more: Emails with documents attached can be sent to the portal itself. SharePoint takes the attached documents over and appropriate sorts them in.

The repository represents a central document depot and features the functionality of an enterprise content management system (ECMS). Imported documents are automatically indexed and hence are prepared for the full-text search. Keywords – also called “tags” – can be attached to these documents to semantically classify them. Furthermore the repository prevents documents from being simultaneously edited by multiple users. When a document shall be modified, it will be “checked out” by the user and hence is not editable for every other user. When the document is “checked in” again after modifying, it is saved as a new version. Users have no need to pay attention to check in and out manually – via the integration with Microsoft Office Excel, Word and PowerPoint are doing this automatically.

SharePoint offers even more possibilities. For instance a wiki or discussion forum exists to every research project and every course, which are provided by the SharePoint server too.