By Chris Alliegro [bio]
Posted: Mar. 12, 2007

The following is an illustration accompanying an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. More samples of our content, as well as a list of upcoming articles and reports are also available.

This top-level Web page was generated by the SharePoint Server 2007 Collaboration Portal site template and contains Web Parts, links, and tabs to prebuilt subsites. At the top of the page (1) a set of tabs represent the major subsites. For example, the Document Center is used for managing important documents; the Reports tab brings users to the Report Center, which is used for building, storing, and managing key performance indicators (KPIs), reports, and dashboards.

All pages in the site have a control (2) for entering search queries and a menu called Site Actions (3), which provides access to various configuration and administration tools for the sites. For example, an administrator or user with appropriate permissions could use the tools in Site Actions to change the layout of content on a page or add or delete Web Parts. Visitors without appropriate permissions do not see the menu.

Web Parts serve as the primary window to content on SharePoint pages and workers can customize sites and pages by adding and configuring Web Parts. The page contains several Web Parts (4), including the new RSS Viewer that gives users a simple way to connect to and view RSS feeds, such as those generated by Internet news sites.

A quick link section (5) provides a configurable mechanism for displaying other subsites—when a new subsite is created, its author can choose to have a link to it displayed in this section. Also shown in the quick link section is SharePoint's new Recycle Bin feature, which is similar to the Windows Recycle Bin.