Bill English has posted a great piece on sites, areas and portals over in his SharePoint Café *. I think there is a simpler core set of factors around point III. A new portal represents a more formal boundary than separate areas. Within an enterprise organisation these boundaries are generally pretty obvious, they are the business units, divisions etc. The needs of these divisions fall into 3 categories :- Some of these will use Portals to publish to their own members (e.g. an R&D function

There has been a great deal of noise created in the SharePoint blog world by a posting made by Mike Drips entitled “ 5 Things Wrong with SharePoint ”, this was then replied to by the whole cast :- Arpan , Paul , Andrew , Daniel , Ed , Scoble and Maurice and other I haven't read no doubt. While the original article was rather flawed with either errors or what I would call flaky logic, it's only right that the users point out the bad point of the product as well as the good. Rather than

After a slow start, we are now rather spoilt for choice when it comes to blogging templates for SharePoint. As well as the one which gets hidden in the bowls of FrontPage, Maurice Pranther wrote a series of articles with samples ( http://www.bluedoglimited.com/SharePointThoughts/ViewPost.aspx?ID=89 ) and Jim Duncan is developing a more advanced template at ( http://dev.collutions.com/blogs/sample/default.aspx ). Combine this with the multitude of list to rss tools you would think that every bloggers

I must admit that I've now become quite sceptical about all search vendors. They all claim to have the latest, greatest algorithms but really are all based on the same fundamental technology. All searches are about the same when it comes to identifying documents which match the search parameters, SharePoint does this just fine, see how your search brings back 200+ documents, the file you wanted is in there, just on page 44 rather than where you want it. The place where searches try to differentiate

A number of people have posted about the publication yesterday of new WSRP webparts and services for SharePoint 2003 ( Daniel McPherson , Patrick Tisseghem ) . I guess a number of people are wondering what on earth WSRP is about and why are people excited about it ? A large part of the benefit of a portal comes from aggregating together information from other sources. On it’s own SharePoint 2003 does a great job of bringing together unstructured data such as word or excel documents through

Wow, I was suprised to find that this blog with just one post in the past 2 months managed to get it's self to the top of google for my name. In the past the best I have ever managed was second from posts on spsfaq.com I do intend to start posting here, but things have been rather busy of late. My son Daniel was both on the 14th May, who would have thought how much time they take up !! Anyway, I'll try to come up with something to write about soon.

It is cutomary for bloggers to start by introducing themselves, kind of like Blind Date. My name is Steven Collier and I work for a large UK retailer as a Technical Architect. I have been a Microsoft MVP for the past 2 years, firstly in SharePoint Portal 2001, now 2003. I contribute to the microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver newsgroup on a fairly regular basis. I actually spend most of my time working with Windows SharePoint Services, and I'll blog on that too. I don't intend this blog to be