SharePoint Portal Server 2001 Scenario

This scenario is based on a single workspace that uses two levels of document library folders to store a large collection of Microsoft Word documents as well as to control which users have access to specific groups of documents. A two-level category hierarchy is also used to provide an alternate way of navigating through the document collection. A single document profile is used to store additional information about each document.

Figure 1. Grant application document library and category hierarchy

In more detail, this scenario is based on a single workspace that holds a large collection of grant applications that have been stored as Microsoft Word documents (depicted in Figure 1). Each document has the following properties associated with it: province/state and grant size (small, medium, and large). Access control to the documents is based on a grant reviewer's membership in one or more regional grant review teams.

Each review team is represented by an Active Directory global group. For each team a grant reviewer belongs to, his or her Windows account is a member of the corresponding global group.

The Categories folder contains a subfolder for each province/state; each of these folders contains a subfolder for each grant size.

The goal is to replicate this solution in SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

Migrating to SharePoint Portal Server 2003

In SharePoint Portal Server 2003, access control can be managed at the site level. To migrate this scenario to SharePoint Portal Server 2003, a separate SharePoint site can be used to manage access permissions for each subfolder of documents. (Alternatively, access permissions can be assigned multiple document libraries, on a library-by-library basis within a single SharePoint site.) The SharePoint Portal Server 2001 document category information is used to link each document to the corresponding SharePoint Portal Server 2003 area.

Areas are the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 equivalent of categories in SharePoint Portal Server 2001. Areas typically contain links to documents, user profiles, internal and external Web sites, other SharePoint sites and lists, etc. An area can contain subareas, used to group content and provide an alternative structure for organizing and navigating all types of content, including other SharePoint sites, documents, employee contact information, and personal sites. A document can appear in several different areas.

For this scenario, run Spout.exe to export the content from each SharePoint Portal Server 2001 document library subfolder. You can run Spout.exe from the SharePoint Portal Server 2001 or SharePoint Portal Server 2003 server, and the exported documents and associated descriptive information must be saved to an NTFS file system that is accessible from the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 front-end server.

Security Note   Ensure that you specify the appropriate security settings on the folder to which you export the content. The folder security settings will control file system–based access to the exported content until it is imported into the target site and the content in the export folder is deleted.

Spin.exe must run, locally on the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 front-end server, once for the content exported from each subfolder. The content from each subfolder is automatically imported into its own site. This insures that the access controls in the original SharePoint Portal Server 2001 workspace are preserved in SharePoint Portal Server 2003. The sequence of spin.exe commands would be similar to

spin.exe http://psn-w23-012c/sites/grantapps/northeast Northeast.xml
spin.exe http://psn-w23-012c/sites/grantapps/northwest Northwest.xml
spin.exe http://psn-w23-012c/sites/grantapps/southeast Southeast.xml
spin.exe http://psn-w23-012c/sites/grantapps/southwest Southwest.xml

where the first parameter is the URL of the four different SharePoint sites and the second parameter is the name of the XML manifest file exported by Spout.exe.

Support Note   To import a document collection into a subsite of a SharePoint site, make sure that you have downloaded the latest hotfix for Spin.exe. For more information about how to download the required Spin.exe hotfix, refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base article 839797. This article can be found at Latest Support News.

If the SharePoint Portal Server 2001 workspace category information was previously imported as areas during the Upgrade.exe installation process and the document profiles include the Category property, Spin.exe automatically links each document to the areas that correspond to the document's SharePoint Portal Server 2001 category metadata. The category metadata is also stored as a column in each document library.

Additional Considerations

SharePoint Portal Server 2001 document libraries support the use of multiple document profiles per document folder. The document profiles are defined at the workspace level. SharePoint Portal Server 2003, in effect, supports only one document profile per list or document library. Spout.exe provides the option of exporting the properties of one workspace document profile or a merge of the properties from all available document profiles.