SharePoint is a collaboration system, right? So it seems to me that there are three basic collaboration paths that can exist:
- Many-to-one
- Many-to-many
- One-to-many
The more I conceptualize this product, the more I realize that all three paths are “in the box” with SharePoint Portal Server. They are not “in the box” with Windows SharePoint Services. Here's my thinking:
Many-to-one
In a logical sense, the portal represents a many-to-one collaboration relationship. When a person comes to a SharePoint portal, that person is presented with a range of options, such as places to go or information to consume. The user can also find information via the search web part too. So what we have in a portal is a location where many different individuals and teams offer up their best work for consumption to the enterprise. In a very real sense, the “many” are collaborating with each individual who somes to the portal.
Many-to-Many
Team sites in Windows SharePoint Services offer us the chance for small and large teams alike to collaborate in a number of different sub-paths. If SharePoint is implemented correctly, team members collaborate with each other in one or more team sites, but the teams as a unit also collaborate with each other via workspaces, sites and site collections. A good example of this is a document workspace, where a sub-team collaborates to produce a document that is then published back to the source location for the larger team's consumption. This is a many-to-many relationship.
One-to-Many
The onne-to-many relationship can be implemented using personal portals. Personal portals in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 allow an individual user to share links, documents, pictures and other information with the enterprise via their public-facing portal page. If you take away personal portals, you take away a key collaboration path for the individual user.
I honestly think that most of the resistance to personal portals is founded in a cynicism about end users: Administrators simply don't trust their end users to use their personal portals correctly. This is part of the culture change in SharePoint - for IT to more fully trust their end users and the adoption of better education which will teach the end user how to properly utilize SharePoint features, such as personal portals.
I would highly recommend that Administrators find a way to allow personal portals in their implementation.
What do you think?