Sharepoint intranet portal

Question

Migrating (rewriting) a whole portal originally made in .net to shareopoint doesn't seem like a very easy thing to do. I've been assigned such task and now i'm just learning, planning and starting to get things practical in order to accomplish it faster.

It's not exactly a question, it should be a discussion about it and may help others who might get to do the same job further on.

1 - There's something like a "message board" in the current portal, which i'm planning on building with a blog site kind, what do you sugest?

2 - as asked in another question, i have to manage users, and the local active directory is organized and reliable, so i guess that's what i'm going to use

3 - There's got to be a way to store files, images, documents and having version controlling in some of them.

4 - There's got to be a customization in design and a cleaning in the default controls of sharepoint masterpage (which may be useless for the desired purposes)

5 - About 30 local users and being accessible from the internet (local server) in case our consultors have to access it from clients

6 - i have available a version of the Visual Studio 2010 (already with the graphical webpart designer) because the company i work is MS gold partner.

7 - I'm going to program webparts in c#, and the designing part is still a mistery to me, since i'm not that familiar to shareopint yet.

I'd like some tips, links and answers.. i'm going to be watching this question from now on and answering any other information.

Answer 1

The answers to this person's similar but not identical question may be helpful: Sharepoint for a C# Asp.net Developer

There's a lot of help available in other existing SO questions. Just click on the "sharepoint" tag, then sort by votes, and you'll find a lot of interesting reading.

Answer 2

1.) SharePoint 2007 has some blog/wiki/board functionality but it's very immature. I tried to get my team to use them but the user interface is lacking and it is challenging to enhance those elements. SP2010 might offer a better experience though.

2.) User management in SharePoint is easy to perform but difficult to manage. Establish processes for adding/modifying end users and keep the number of people with that ability to a minimum. Otherwise it gets out of control and you end up not knowing who has access to what. I would also suggest relying on AD groups as opposed to giving individuals specific access in sites.

3.) Document storage is SharePoint's forte, I think you'll be impressed.

4.) SharePoint branding will require some time but other people have it down to an art form. Note that some pages (referred to as Application pages) shouldn't be fully controlled. Also note that you don't want to remove controls from the master page as some functionality in SharePoint assumes the controls are there - rather it is better to hide them using CSS.

5.) This sounds like a bad idea. SharePoint exposed to the Internet is supposed to be severely locked down - but if you lock it down (i.e. remove access to Application pages), the functionality that you seek won't be available. Have you considered an intranet and separate extranet?

6.) Should be okay, VS2010 is supposed to be a better development experience with regards to SharePoint.

7.) Keep your branding and functionality separate and be sure to deploy them using solution files (as opposed to working directly with the file system). Also, never ever read/write the database directly.

I think you'll find that replacing a custom intranet with SharePoint is a common task but there will be a learning curve. The hard part will be branding and data migration. End users will reject the new system if it is slow - so be sure to get the architecture and configuration right before launch (might require a consultant).

Answer 3

Regarding 7 - Programming web parts: Have a look at SmartPart on CodePlex. This is a fairly easy way to create simple web parts especially if you have some ASP experience.

Answer 4

1 - There's something like a "message board" in the current portal, which i'm planning on building with a blog site kind, what do you sugest?

SharePoint discussions are perfect for what they are intended ... small targeted discussions. A forum is very different. It is a centralized area with multiple threads with different topics. You can try CodePlex (which is your friend) SharePoint Forums

2 - as asked in another question, i have to manage users, and the local active directory is organized and reliable, so i guess that's what i'm going to use

AD is perfect if you already have it ... nice thing is that you can use the Profile page to update AD information which syncs ... you have a lot of capability with this. But, one of the main benefits is that SharePoint can support multiple authentications. You can extend a SharePoint site and plug in a different authentication (like SQL Auth) and then multiple sets of users can interact on the same sites with different permissions. Not to mention that SharePoint doesn't just provide site access but you can make security granular all the wat down to individual items in a list or library.

3 - There's got to be a way to store files, images, documents and having version controlling in some of them.

This is where SharePoint has the most capability OOB.

4 - There's got to be a customization in design and a cleaning in the default controls of sharepoint masterpage (which may be useless for the desired purposes)

We have a completely customized MasterPage complete with code behind. You need to know about Feature Stapling and Feature Receivers. Also use Heather Solomon's website

5 - About 30 local users and being accessible from the internet (local server) in case our consultors have to access it from clients

SharePoint seems almost overkill for this number of users.

6 - i have available a version of the Visual Studio 2010 (already with the graphical webpart designer) because the company i work is MS gold partner.

Get the Visual Studio Extensions for SharePoint

7 - I'm going to program webparts in c#, and the designing part is still a mistery to me, since i'm not that familiar to shareopint yet.

Look into Application Pages instead of WebParts ... Application pages are way more flexible for custom forms than web parts. Web parts are only usefull for when functionality needs to be available on an ad hoc basis so that you can allow users to drag the functionality onto a page or if you need to restrict functionality to specific sets of users (since layout pages are available to all sites).