See Also

Estate agency portal on Sharepoint 2007

Business goals

  • Intranet goals:
    • collaboration center for employees
    • organizing of internal document circulation
    • workflow support
    • business process management
    • role based security to restrict access to business content
    • advanced search compatibilities for employees
    • integration with external CRM system
    • storing and managing of users’ personal data (e.g. profiles, personal intranet web sites) based on integration with AD
  • Extranet goals:
    • ability for external users to access the portal and use its services
    • access to internet published content
    • ability to order company services and track status via integration with external CRM

Solution

We decided to use Sharepoint 2007 CMS as the base platform for the development of the customer’s portal. The benefits of using proprietary CMS software rather than developing a custom web-solution, is that Sharepoint 2007 already has many out-of-the-box features. This matches the customer’s needs and is simultaneously fully customizable. E.g. the collaboration center was implemented via customized site templates based on OTB templates. Workflow support was easily accomplished via standard Approval Workflow and several custom designed workflows implemented via the Windows Workflow Foundation.
Business process management was specified and implemented based on Sharepoint custom content types. The extranet part of the portal was configured via MOSS administration tools. Advanced search, security engine, documents versioning – all of these being customer goals achieved via the OTB features embedded as part of our customization. This allowed covering a customer investment in proprietary CMS software and making the development work to be completed much faster than developing a custom web-solution.

Tools and Technologies

  • .Net 3.5/ASP.Net 3.5/ Ajax
  • Visual Studio 2008 with Sharepoint extensions
  • Sharepoint 2007 (MOSS 2007, WSS 3.0)/Sharepoint Designer 2007
  • BizTalk 2006
  • Windows Workflow Foundation
  • Active Directory services
  • Windows Server 2008