The address for the CompanyWeb is simply http://companyweb. You don’t have to put ‘www’ in front of it nor ‘.com’ at the end. When you start CompanyWeb you will see it is divided into three sections. The center section automatically contains a list of announcements. You can use this to alert members of your company to happenings in the company, specials you might be running, warnings of things to be on the look out for, etc. When you add a new announcement, you can specify an expiration date so that the announcement will disappear from the Home page of the CompanyWeb after that date. You can add other sections here as well if you like. I like to add an Events section to list upcoming events by date. These also have an expiration date by default. You can use this to put in reminders for upcoming meetings or even parties.

The right section includes the Windows SharePoint Services logo by default. You can change this to your company logo, a picture, or whatever you like. You can also change the theme of your CompanyWeb to give it a jazzier look. Check out www.LentzComputer.net/SBS. The right side comes with a ‘Links’ section where you can list popular or important web sites and services. It comes pre-configured with a link to take you to Outlook Web Access to allow you to read your e-mail using the web e-mail client. As you can see from my CompanyWeb, I’ve added links to other local web sites as well, including my Microsoft CRM application. This can make it handy for users to gain quick access to frequently used web sites that are important to your business.

On the left side is where all the ‘beef’ is. In previous versions of Small Business Server, a Company folder was automatically placed on each user’s desktop. This was a folder on the server where documents that were used by everyone in the company could be stored and available to all. The Company folder is now history, replaced by the CompanyWeb document libraries. Windows SharePoint Services can be used as a document management system. You will notice there is a section called Documents and under that are several selections called Libraries. You can add all the Libraries you want and call them what you want. Here you can store company documents where all appropriate employees can access them. A nice feature is that documents can be ‘Checked Out’ by users who are in the process of updating them. This way, others though they may be able to read the documents, will not be able to update them. This keeps several people from making changes to the same document at the same time and losing all the changes except those by the one who saved last. You can also create a ‘Workspace’ for documents (and just about everything else). A workspace is a special web site where users can share information about a document, meeting, etc.

You may also notice the ‘Incoming Faxes’ library. Small Business Server has a built in fax service that can send and receive faxes. Faxes that are received by SBS can be sent to any of four destinations: E-mailed to a given user; Sent to a printer; Stored in a shared folder’; and Sent to the Incoming Faxes library of your CompanyWeb. This way all the users in your company can access them if desired. Of course you can also delete the junk faxes.

The ‘Help Desk’ is a nice sample feature that shows another way the CompanyWeb can be used. Initially expected to be a place users can post issues they may be having with their computers or their systems, this can be modified (or you can add a new one) to be a forum for resolving all kinds of issues.

By the way, if you are using it as a computer support help desk, how do your computer support folks know you’ve posted something? Easy! Every section and library of SharePoint allows users to set an Alert that will send that user an e-mail notification when something changes. The notifications can be configured to be sent immediately or you can receive just a daily or weekly summary.

The ‘Vacation Calendar’ is really a handy corporate calendar. Here you can post events like meetings and such for all to see. You can also post the vacation schedules for the company employees so all will know when someone is to be gone. As mentioned earlier, you can create a workspace web site for a meeting. Here you can include sections for your agenda, attendees, objectives, documents, etc. This can be very useful in organizing your meetings. As you can see in Figure 2, you can have multiple workspaces for recurring events like weekly staff meetings. The calendar can also be linked to Outlook so you can view it there as well.

There are many more features such as discussion forums and surveys that come stock. You can also add other ‘Web Parts’ to add additional features like news and weather, forms libraries, and much, much more. If you are running Small Business Server 2003, check out your CompanyWeb. If not, get it!

Larry Lentz is an MCSE + Internet, an MCSE on Windows 2000, a Microsoft Certified Database Administrator, and MCSA: Messaging on Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003, and Past President of Alamo PC. He is the owner of Lentz Computer Services, www.LentzComputer.Net, which he founded in 1989. Larry has over 22 years as a computer professional and specializes in Microsoft Small Business Server. He chairs the MCSE Advanced SIG affectionately called 'The Geeks' and the new Alamo PC Small Business Server Special Interest Group (SBS SIG). Larry is available for presentations on technology for small business and can be reached via e-mail at Larry@LentzComputer.Net