Bernard Hennecker's Blog

While the previous article was summarizing the scope or our work and the approach used, this one lists most of the SharePoint features and technologies we use to reach our goals.

At the highest level, they are:

• the sites provisioned for a group, business unit or a geography
• the lists and libraries used to store resources (documents, presentations, videos, …) containing data and information
• the pages and web parts used to consolidate and display resources

To support our strategy, there is a need to use specific features to display context dependent resources that are stored inside or outside the SharePoint community home site. Out of the box, many exist, but here are the ones we currently use:

• email enabled lists to automate and facilitate content contribution
• columns or metadata to tag and display items
• content types to handle different types of resources
• views to support the browsing experience
• search to support the search experience
• managed properties to reconcile or workaround different naming
• filtering to display context relevant resources
• data view web parts for specific and custom displays
• rollup web parts and linked lists to display related resources stored in the same site collection
• search core results web parts and web capture web parts to display related resources stored in other site collections
• RSS and web services to access resources stored in other vehicles (repositories, platforms, …) 
• distribution lists and discussion boards to support threaded discussions

Combining and using all those allows to create community portals where relevant resources are displayed together. This can be summarized in the figure below where the Sub Site 1 visitors can access resources located on Sub Site 1, 2, 3 and Other Platforms through the View 1, 2, 3 and 4 respectively.

In the next articles, I will describe in details how we use each of those features to reach our goals and, more specifically, I will start with the choice between one or more site collections.