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The sites directory gives you the ability to aggregate
sites and URL-addressable locations into a single or multiple taxonomies (a
taxonomy is just a method of organizing content and metadata into an
intuitive, browsable format). For example, here is a sample Sites
Directory that has been built with a method of organizing sites by Customer,
Department and Project.
The Sites Directory allows you to categorize sites in any
manner you wish. Sites can be assigned to more than one category but the
categories that exist are entirely up to you. Nearly everyone is going to
way to modify the current category structure in the default Sites Directory.
To modify the current category structure in the Sites Directory, on the Site
Actions menu, select Edit Page. On the Categories tab, you’ll see the
Categories web part. In this web part, click Edit Sites and Categories.
From the Settings menu, select List Settings. This will cause the
Customize Sites page to appear. The categories that you see on the default
Sites Directory page are actually columns in a list. Modify the Columns to
the list under the Columns grouping to customize the taxonomies for your sites.
Because this site template has some unique coding beneath
the covers, there are several things you should understand about modifying and
creating categories:
- When creating a new column, the Column Name becomes
the heading in the sites directory page
- If you select “choice” as the information type for
that column, then the user will be able to select one or more choices from
that columns list data if you select the display of the list to be
“checkboxes”. If you select “radio buttons”, then the user will be able to
select only one choice.
- Yes/No information types should be used if the site’s
metadata is only two choices that are mutually exclusive, such as “Key
Customer Site” or “Extranet Site”.
- To group the sites by audience, select the Audience
Targeting radio button
The Add Link to Site tab allows you to add links to the
Sites Directory even though the web site is not in your SharePoint farm.
This feature existed in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and was often overlooked
because the name “Sites Directory” implied that the directory was only for
SharePoint sites. However, you can use the Sites Directory to organize any
URL-addressable location. This can come in handy if you’re organizing
sites on the internet to meet particular needs within your organization.
For example, your company’s competitor sites can be organized into a small
taxonomy so that your marketing and sales departments can better understand how
to market and sell successfully against your competitors. Another example
would be organizing your vendors across all of your departments in such a manner
that users within your organization can find the vendors’ web sites to see what
their contact information is, what additional products and services they offer
or just to learn about press announcements that they have recently released.
Unlike SharePoint Portal Serve 2003, when a new site is
created using the Create Site link, a sub-site of the portal is created, not a
new site collection. New site collections are only created in Central
Administration in SharePoint Server 2007.