A clue about how to drive more traffic to your Web site or Blog.

The case of the SharePoint Conference in Peru is interesting. The public facing Web site helps to get information: attendee registrations, speakers, sponsorship requests.

The Intranet of the site merges that information with operative information: Invoices to send, customers contacted, invoices paid, list of participants, expenses.

The site is organized for a team of people that works on it remotely: Europe and South America.

The site is based on SharePoint and developed by B4Contact.

Imagine building a SharePoint Site for managing a book collection. You would need that Site to store information about: books, authors, publishers, storage locations and meta data (search criteria).

After you finish designing the Site you will start using it and of course you will discover things to improve. SharePoint will make it easy to implement changes.

Now that your Site is a success you see that someone needs to manage a collection of software CDs. You would think that they could use your book collection Site as a sample. Sure, that would be good.

SharePoint offers a better alternative. It lets you save your Site as a template so other could reproduce exact copies in few seconds. Now your company could start using your Site Template as a base for organizing books, documents, CDs, equipment and many other things. That is productive and effective.

SharePoint will transform your Site in one file with extension “.stp”. That means that your site template can be named: collections_site.stp

An additional benefit of working with templates is that they can be deployed in any SharePoint environment easily. That means that you could share or sell the template to others that use the same version of SharePoint you use.

For complex sites there are some considerations. Feel free to contact me if you need some support.

SharePoint templates are one important competitive advantage.

SharePoint can help you in the following scenarios:

• You need to set a place where to share and manage information within your company. (Intranet)
• You need to share information with people from outside of your company. Let’s say a service provider or a customer.(Extranet)
• You need to publish a Web site to the internet (public Web site)

SharePoint technologies are the foundation for an extended set of characteristics that will provide life to your Intranet, Extranet or public Web site, for example you can:

• Build picture galleries and document libraries.
• Build calendars and task lists.
• Build surveys and discussion boards.
• Build custom data bases, called lists.

All that without the need of any software development knowledge or tools. That means that you could build an Intranet for example for:

• Managing invoices and customers.
• Managing projects.
• Managing Schedules and meetings.

SharePoint will help you because it is solid and based on WIndows Server technology. It uses great technologies that makes it secure and reliable.

SharePoint will help you because it saves tons of time for developers in case you need to create something special. You don’t need to invent the wheel again. I give you a sample: You need your Web site to be editable by different people and you need some persons to not be allowed to modify contents provided by others. For that you would need to set users and passwords. Ok SharePoint includes that and lets you set different permissions for different persons.

SharePoint Simple CMS, the product I offer to the market, enhances SharePoint making it editable in Firefox and Safari. It also helps Web designers to make SharePoint look beautiful and modern.

In the picture I’m showing you 2 public Web sites developed with SharePoint. Big companies as Nestle and small companies as Foto Zauneker can use this technology for editing contents on the Web.

SharePoint is a technology that help Web developers to create powerful Intranet sites and public Web sites.

SharePoint includes many services that will help your public Web site and Intranet to be secure, interactive and very useful. It is a good solution for SMBs because those services are already developed and that can save time for building your site.

Intranet: It is a private Web site. A place where your team will share documents, databases of contacts or even manage projects. Users will need a username and password to get into the intranet. There are very complex intranets for big organizations but Intranets are also very useful for small companies and even independent professionals.

Public Web sites: Or public facing Web sites, are all the Web sites available for every Internet user.

The picture above shows a sample site and how it can be editable. It is as simple as composing an email!