Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Resource Kit

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RapPort Overview
The Knowledge Management Information Technology Group
RapPort and SharePoint Portal Server
RapPort Portals
Benefits of RapPort Deployment
Summary

Intranet Web sites, or portals, are expensive to create, difficult to update and maintain, and inefficient for finding information quickly. Microsoft® SharePoint™ Portal Server 2001 offers solutions to assist organizations in finding, sharing, and publishing information. With Rapid Portal (RapPort), the process of creating and customizing a corporate portal that uses SharePoint Portal Server takes only a few days.

RapPort Overview

Rapid Portal, called "RapPort," offers Microsoft's internal users predefined templates to quickly and inexpensively build intranet portals that take advantage of the search, document management, and collaboration features of SharePoint Portal Server. RapPort portals deploy quickly and are easy to maintain.

RapPort and SharePoint Portal Server bring significant benefits to Microsoft's internal groups:

• Self-Provisioning of Intranet sites. Creates sites with content from predefined templates. 

• Reduces the time and cost to build and manage a site. Cost to build a site dropped from $68,500 to $3,750. Maintenance effort cut by 80 percent. 

Intranet portals often fail to map to day-to-day work. For example, information might be stored in multiple places without a consistent taxonomy. Tools may focus on individual work instead of sharing and collaboration. In addition, intranet portals rarely include tools to help with mostly manual day-to-day tasks. This is true even inside Microsoft.

To address those issues, in June 2000, the Knowledge Management Information Technology group (KMIT) inside Microsoft set out to look at knowledge management and collaboration in departments within Microsoft, and to create solutions that eased those problems.

The Knowledge Management Information Technology Group

KMIT has several unique charters within Microsoft:

• Drive creation of knowledge management and collaborative solutions on emerging Microsoft Technologies. 

• Provide real-world feedback to the product teams while solving real business and user problems. 

They discovered that Microsoft's 40,000 employees, like other knowledge workers in worldwide enterprises, were generally dissatisfied with existing capabilities in the areas of site creation, search, document collaboration and management, and maintainability.

Some groups were using Microsoft Office Server Extensions (OSE), for document publishing, discussion and subscription capabilities. Version tracking presented a challenge, however, as did site navigation. Within a group, different sub-groups wanted to organize documents differently. Consequently, the "one view fits all" folder hierarchy view was unsatisfactory. Also, these groups usually handled their calendars and contact management needs with applications separate from the document collaboration space.

Other groups created their own custom Web sites with custom applications. This provided them with great control over the look, feel, and navigation features. However, these solutions were time consuming to build, hard to maintain, and impossible to share with other groups. The resources dedicated to building and maintaining these solutions were not available for Microsoft's primary mission, building and providing innovative software and solutions.

RapPort and SharePoint Portal Server

In order to solve these problems, the KMIT team envisioned a template-based, rapid deployment tool to create collaborative sites easily and quickly. These sites needed to support intergroup and intragroup collaboration as well as function as a central location for group members to see and do their work. KMIT chose to build RapPort on SharePoint Portal Server because of its out-of-the-box capabilities, including:

• Document management. Document profiles, check-in and check-out, versioning, and simple approval and publishing, along with seamless Office XP integration. 

• Customizable portal. Easy-to-customize dashboard site using Web Parts. Includes category browsing for information organization. 

• Search. Crawls full content and metadata of documents stored locally or on other platforms including Web sites, file shares, and Microsoft Exchange public folders for inclusion in an index. 

• Collaboration features. Notifications when content in documents, folders, categories, search results change; searchable, document based discussions. 

RapPort Portals

With RapPort, once employees decide they need an intranet site, they simply fill out a two-page Web form, and the site is ready the next business day. On the second day they configure the site, which resides in the corporate data center, and then load their documents and other content. The site is deployed by the third day, instead of weeks later.

The contents of a RapPort site are pre-loaded at the time a user creates each site. RapPort copies the content of the master template the user selected to the new site. The templates are the key to RapPort success. A template is simply a pre-built SharePoint workspace, and includes:

• Virtual server name. The site is known as https://my_site for ease of use. 

• Categories, document profiles, and attributes. These features form the basis of a consistent taxonomy implementation. 

• Document folder structure and documents. Users can preload content such as templates or samples to promote best practices. 

• Web Parts, dashboards, and applications. These technologies provide a way to customize the interface. They provide meaningful functionality based on the audience. For example, a product development group portal receives a view of bug database information; sales offices portals receive sales data from Siebel. 

RapPort currently includes templates for department and business unit portals for product development and sales organizations. Experts from each of these groups helped build this set of templates. KMIT continues to refine and extend templates as adoption accelerates. The architecture for RapPort supports an unlimited number of templates.

Figure 28.1 shows the architecture of RapPort. The RapPort server stores both the RapPort application and the templates. The AUTOSETUP component creates the sites and populates them on any one of a number of servers based on simple allocation rules. Finally, Microsoft uses SharePoint Portal Server as the enterprise search solution. RapPort offers a Web Part that enables each RapPort site to "plug in" to the enterprise search solution.

Figure 28.1 RapPort architecture 

Benefits of RapPort Deployment

RapPort provides three key benefits to corporate intranet portals. The first benefit is self-provisioning, the ability for users to do a self-service request for a site. The second is preloading the workspace with content from a predefined template. Instead of users starting with a blank workspace, they receive a site that has been preconfigured with components tailored to their business. The third key benefit is ease of maintenance. RapPort includes Web Parts that ease content management for daily tasks and assist quickly restructuring sites when people, organizations, or projects change.

In addition, RapPort presents significant reduction in time and costs for deploying a corporate intranet portal. The Business Tools Division (BTD) used RapPort with SharePoint Portal Server to create its marketing Web site. The group saw tremendous improvements in time and costs. The following table shows a nearly $65,000 savings between creating the original site and the one based using RapPort and SharePoint Portal Server 2001.

Time and Cost Comparisons 

In March 2001, the Product Group portal, which aggregates content from the more than 400 Product Development sites inside Microsoft, migrated to SharePoint by using RapPort. The following table shows the nearly 80 percent reduction in labor required to manage the site. Equally important, RapPort eliminated the need for developer resources to maintain the site, freeing that resource to focus on other activities.

Maintenance Comparison 

Summary

Intranet Web sites can be expensive to create, difficult to update and maintain, and inefficient for finding information quickly. SharePoint Portal Server offers solutions for how organizations find, share, and publish information. With RapPort, the process of creating and customizing a corporate portal that uses SharePoint Portal Server takes only a few days.

Microsoft Products and Technologies Used

• Microsoft Windows® 2000, Server, Advanced Server Service Pack 1 

• SharePoint Portal Server 2001 

• RapPort 

Benefits

RapPort and SharePoint Portal Server brought significant benefits to Microsoft's internal groups:

• For the IT group, it automates site creation. This reduces labor, and speeds implementation. RapPort creates sites on Datacenter servers, making them easier to manage. 

• For the business, creating a template once and replicating it many times, saves enormous costs. Consistent sites in terms of look, functionality, and taxonomy across groups, improve collaboration and speeds communications. 

• For internal customers, it provides a rich set of features including document management, a dashboard site, and powerful search capabilities. The templates provide business-specific, useful applications and a one-stop location for users to work. 

For more information about how to deploy SharePoint Portal Server by using RapPort, see Chapter 14, "Deploying SharePoint Portal Server across Multiple Sites Using RapPort."