Planning Your SharePoint Portal

As you plan your Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server deployment, you'll need to answer these essential questions:

• Who owns the information in the portal?
• What processes and rules are associated with information maintenance?
• Who will be responsible for maintaining the information?
• Who can view the information, and where can it be viewed?

SharePoint Portal Server and Windows Share- Point Services provide various features for managing and presenting information to users. But in my experience helping companies with their SharePoint portal projects, I've too often found that the project's designers blur the lines between how information is stored and how it's presented. For your portal design to succeed, you need to separate the information-storage and presentation aspects and, at the same time, keep in mind SharePoint's technology limitations and features.