I've been asking this to myself for quite a while now. Microsoft has invested a lot of time, money and good ideas in developing a very good product that could finally meet the needs of todays knowledgeworker. They made a serious attempt to stucture information and bring it to the users and, last but not least, Microsoft has intergrated a great way to find the information you're looking for in a web based corporate intranet portal! To summarize, Microsoft made the tools available for building succesfull knowledge solutions.
So, if they invested so much in making a good product, why are they waiting so long to expose a way that describes how we can succesfully implement Sharepoint Portal Server in an organisation?
Best bets and my assistant
Ofcourse, there is the MSF that we can use, or We could use the knowledge that we learned from the 70-300 (implementing requirements and solution architectures) MCP exam. However, we have to find out ourselves how Sharepoint Portal Server fits in best. Questions, for example, about how much effort brings 'keywords and best bets' in a particular situation, and more, how should we use it to make effort in the first place. Should we catagorize it in the Area stucture? Or should we just work our way though log files to find out what the most used search queries are, analyse the results and think of a good way to represent it in Sharepoint Portal Server?
Just like the 'best bet' feature, MSDN and other resources are saying 'there is a Topic Assistant'. However, from the time I first heard about it I never found a proper way to implement it so it would benefit the knowledgeworker solution. I will clap my hands if I finally get my so called 'assistant' to work :)
Listings
Then there are listings, ofcourse. Now this is a feature I do think I have the idea how to implement it right. Listing is a good way to categorize resources (documents, pages, people, etc) through different knowledge axes and list the same information to different Area's but in a different context. It is the key for the networked organisation and it's knowledgeworker. But then there is a question about how we should manage it. It would be a mess if everyone would give its own interpretation of stuctured data and it would be a greater mess if everyone would be able to manage this data by themselves. On the other hand, if no one except the administrator would be able to add new knowledge to the portal, the whole idea of knowledge worker would be gone. The solution for this is to make sure there is someone that has a clear overview of the way the organisation works and how knowledge should be presented to the people that should use it. The listings users will create in the portal should be reviewed and approved first.
So..?
Every organisation differs from another, so I can imagine there is not just onw way to descibe how and what we should do to make a knowledge solution to work. However, from my daily work I see there is a need for information about how a portal should be implemented, not technically, but from a knowledge point of view. Sharepoint brings the tools to us to implement it. Ofcourse Microsoft can't tell us how we should design the Portal, there is a need to fill there. But I do think there should be an overview on what tools are available for what kind of problem... I'll get back to you soon on this topic about this one, I think.