There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding intranets, team sites, extranets, and workspaces in SharePoint. I have seen so many intranet sites designed that are really a blend of an intranet and a team site. What that means is that there is information on the intranet that is not available to everyone in the company. In order to facilitate this, the intranet has to have broken permissions.

Probably one of my biggest challenges in SharePoint has been inheriting sites with broken permissions. In my opinion, permissions should be inherited if at all possible. When you break permissions ask yourself “does this content really belong here”. So to try and make things more clear I am providing my idea of how to distinguish your different sites. For people who are new to SharePoint 2007 they are not familiar with the concept of keeping the “editable” data in one location and the “view only” version in another location. If you do not architect your sites this way, you would have to break permissions within your intranet in order for individuals to have the ability to edit documents in that location.

Internet – A site about the company for the entire public.
Intranet – A site about the company for all employees.
Extranet – A site about the company for a client/vendor/etc.
Team Site – A site about a department or division for the department or division.
Workspace – A site about various topics for various groups of people.

If you follow these definitions then you should have a better ability to create your sites accordingly. For example, when most companies say they want to develop an intranet I say so you want team sites. Initially they are a little confused and they repeat their request “we want to create an intranet”, to which I reply “so you want team sites”. The point of this conversation is that to properly design an intranet you need team sites. You should keep all of your department specific data in your team sites and publish what you need to the intranet. You will typically have less information on the intranet for a particular dept then you will in the team site.

Workspaces, however, are unique by definition. I would expect to find unique permissions within workspaces as they as their purpose is to allow people from multiple departments to collaborate. My primary purpose of this post is to caution you when you are breaking permissions in a site, pause for a second and try to determine where the “editable” version of the data really belongs. I will write a follow up blog about architecting these sites and publishing.

The Shared Services Provider (SSP) in SharePoint is designed to have a central location for administrators to manage shared services in your SharePoint environment. But something I thought was quite strange was that in one of my environments, I was receiving an Access Denied message when I tried to manage specific services in my SSP.

 

I could log into the SSP fine, and I could manage some of the services fine. But on this occassion I tried to manage User Profiles, and no matter who I logged in as, I was denied access. So what’s the deal? Well, it turns out the deal is permissions issue within the SSP itself. There is a section in the SSP called personalization service permissions. According to Microsoft before enabling personalization features in your deployment, you must first configure permissions to personalization features.

Although some permissions are configured by default for deployments using Active Directory directory services, other configuration options vary according to the specific plan for deployment. Administrators of the Shared Services Provider (SSP) have limited ability to configure personalization services. The administration options for personalization services are associated with a set of permissions for different personalization features. Administrators can have access to some or all of these administration options.

The services permissions for personalization services include the following:

• Create personal site – Information workers with this permission can create personal sites by clicking on the My Site link on the home page.
• Use personal features – Information workers with this permission can use the personal features of My Site. They can have a user profile, view the public profiles of other users, be members of audiences and view content targeted to those audiences, and view audiences when targeting content in their own personal sites.
• Manage permissions – Permissions managers for personalization services add services permissions for other users.
• Manage user profiles – User profile managers manage import connections, user profiles and properties, personalization policies, and settings for My Site.
• Manage audiences – Audiences managers create and compile audiences that are used to target content.
• Manage usage analytics – Usage analytics managers enable the usage analytics features for site collections that use this SSP. Users without this permission can view the Configure Advanced Usage Analysis Processing page, but cannot enable or disable settings on the page.

Users who have the Use personal features permission can see personalized information in sites, including user profiles for other users. Users who have both the Use personal features permission and the Create personal site permission can create a My Site by clicking the My Site link in the top navigation bar.

The last four services permissions are intended for administrators or power users who have been designated as managers of the personalization shared service. These users are often information technology professionals or application administrators. They must also have at least View Only permission to the Shared Services Administration site.

Search in WSS, MOSS 2007 for Search, and Enterprise Search in MOSS 2007 are all based on the same Microsoft Search core indexing engine, making sure search is consistent across MOSS and WSS. However, there are differences among the SharePoint search versions. The following table provides a comparison of features among Search in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search, and Enterprise Search in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

If you haven’t already checked out this virtual lab it’s a great opportunity to see Microsoft Office 2007 in action.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101687261033.aspx