Essential SharePoint

Going Public

SharePoint creates web sites. That means your documents can be made public over the Internet, shared within a private intranet, or both. My site is public, but access to certain areas is restricted so that no one steals my chapters.

I assigned different permissions to different members of my site. As site administrator, I have full control; Simon and John are contributors and can make changes; my technical reviewers can read files; and so on. Once the chapters are complete, I move

Figure 1-4. SharePoint sites provide tools to communicate with team members

selected excerpts to a public area that allows everyone to read them. I maintain these levels of access from a web page within the SharePoint site as shown in Figure 1-5.

Membership is a key aspect of SharePoint. In most organizations, individuals may belong to many different teams. Some teams are organizational (company, division, department, etc.) while other teams span organization lines (project teams, task forces, and so on). SharePoint accommodates both structures well; there's a lot more on this in Chapter 2.