Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Chapter 8. Building Personalized Solutions

By Brendon Schwartz

A portal is a single point of entry for a family of web sites. Often these sites have complex relationships, such as multiple tree structures or a complicated grid or network topology. The portal takes care of common tasks such as user login, authentication, authorization, and personalization. In addition, the portal typically provides common user interface artifacts such as master pages and themes, giving the underlying sites a common appearance that can be easily personalized to suit each user's tastes. Finally, most portals offer artifacts such as "breadcrumb" controls that simplify navigation into the underlying sites.

ASP.NET 2.0 contains most of the building blocks you need to construct a portal, and several starter kits are available to help do that, such as DotNetNuke. SharePoint 2007 (that is, WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) uses these ASP.NET features, so you can build portals that greatly simplify access to complex SharePoint site topologies.

This chapter introduces you to the key concepts of building a SharePoint portal site:

• Using built-in features such as profiles, colleagues, and audiences

• Creating custom applications by developing with the Profiles API

• Managing membership by designing your own custom people picker

• Working with audiences programmatically