Ceylon: Governance of sites and site collections using SharePoint
Ceylon is the Amplexor solution to increase your governance of sites and site collections when using SharePoint 2007 for collaboration and document management.
It is easy to create a site to share documents, announcements, discussions etc. between a number of people in order to collaborate on a certain issue: this can be a project, a marketing campaign, a product site, a customer site, whatever. The use of team sites and site collections give you a first, but limited way to organize the overall management of this collaboration.
In many organizations, hundreds or thousands of sites are created, and this proofs difficult to structure or organize these collections. It is even difficult to find back your own site!
The Amplexor developed ‘Ceylon’ component, which seamlessly integrates with SharePoint, provides you the possibility to tag each site with your own choice of metadata, to quickly search through a huge collection of sites and to ease the creation of sites by the end-user. This site level administration and end user overview possibilities greatly enhance the use of a large number of collaboration and document management sites in Sharepoint.
Overview and fundamental concept
The Amplexor ‘Ceylon’ solution provides “helicopter views” on your collections of SharePoint sites. Ceylon consolidates sites throughout the SharePoint farm in a structured way, thus offering an overview and single point of access to hundreds of sites. No matter if you are working in one single farm or in different site collections.
Ceylon Webparts lets you assign properties to a site. These properties are configurable per type of site. Various site types can be defined to reflect your business needs: a typical project site will have different properties than e.g. a customer site (proposals, invoices, contracts, etc.) or an HR site (labor contract, annual evaluation reports, pay slips, certificates, etc).
Now that these Site properties are available, Ceylon offers a myriad of ways to ‘unlock’ this information and provide a true helicopter view on all your sites through a faceted search overview of all the available property values. So with a simple click, you can select the name of a project manager and you will get a list of all projects realized by that project manager. If you want to drill further, just click on another property value – e.g. ‘Year of Realization’ – and the faceted search will filter out all the projects from that specific year.
Organization and Definition of metadata
Ceylon allows you to define "site types" via the SharePoint Central Administration interface. Examples of common site types are Project Sites, Marketing Campaign Sites, Customer Sites, ...
Each Site Type is composed out of one or more Site Columns which are automatically displayed when you select a Site Type. Site Columns allow you to provide additional information (metadata) to your site.
Site Columns can be indexed, meaning that their values can be used in a search query. Indexed Site Columns are available as search facets in our Ceylon Faceted Search Web Part, allowing you to quickly find your site based on your search query.
Ceylon Faceted Search Web Part
The main focus of the Ceylon Faceted Search Web Part is to allow you to quickly find sites by refining search results through facets.
The metadata, defined in the Site Columns, is now displayed as "facets". For example, all project managers are shown (with the number of projects they manage between brackets): clicking on one of them results in a list of projects managed by this particular project manager. Facets can be names, dates, customers, statuses etc. giving you several views on your collection.
You can also drill down by using more than one facet at the same time. As a result, you can see for instance all projects managed by a certain project manager for a certain customer.
We additionally foresee search via a free text field. Search results can be security trimmed, i.e. you will only see those results to which you have access.
Ceylon Site Provisioning
The Ceylon Site Provisioning Link Web Part allows you to quickly create new sites (or site collections) based on an existing Site Type directly from within your site.
The advantage here is that your users can create sites quickly, based on predefined templates, set by the administrator. There is no chance that they forget some metadata or other configuration settings. Standard templates are created automatically with all metadata pre-configured.
Ceylon Search Export and Reporting
All search results of a manually initiated Ceylon Faceted Search can be exported to a new or existing Sharepoint list on your Intranet. With the standard functionality of Sharepoint, this list can be exported in MS Excel. This allows the re-use of this data for other purposes (e.g. Project Manager Office reporting).From version 3.1 upwards this export can even be scheduled (e.g. daily) so that all stakeholders use the same consistent export without having to trigger it manually.
Administration
Ceylon gives you an easy administration interface to setup the different functions described above (webpart config & Central Administration). Ceylon also comes with a user and administration manual.