Kris Syverstad

Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server provide a lot of functionality out of the box. After installation you can begin creating portal and team sites. These newly minted sites can be customized; content can be created and managed, color themes can be modified, and pages for the site can be edited. All of this is great, however many attempts to create a portal within an organization fail because little or no consideration is given to user acceptance. The most important reason for creating a custom site definition is to address user acceptance issues. Identifying a problem domain and designing a site definition that addresses specific issues within that domain will greatly increase the likely success of your portal. Even though you could edit the files that have been distributed with SharePoint to meet these requirements, ... (more)