Beginning SharePoint 2010

Building Business Solutions with SharePoint

Amanda Perran, Shane Perran, Jennifer Mason, Laura Rogers

• Publisher: Wrox
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781118021910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Applications de l'entreprise

Two SharePoint MVPs provide the ultimate introduction to SharePoint 2010

Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Team Solutions with SharePoint provides information workers and site managers with extensive knowledge and expert advice, empowering them to become SharePoint champions within their organizations.

• Provides expansive coverage of SharePoint topics, as well as specialty areas such as forms, excel services, records management, and web content management
• Details realistic usage scenarios, and includes practice examples that highlight best practices for configuration and customization
• Includes detailed descriptions and illustrations of SharePoint's functionality

Designed to mentor and coach business and technical leaders on the use of SharePoint in addressing critical information management problems within their organizations, Beginning SharePoint 2010 is sure to become the premiere handbook for any active or aspiring SharePoint expert.

1

Getting Started with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010

What You Will Learn in This Chapter:

• The differences between SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010
• Common usage scenarios for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010
• An overview of important SharePoint concepts and features

The goal of this book is to provide you with the knowledge to set you on the way to becoming a SharePoint master. An important part of understanding how best to manage and utilize SharePoint Server from either a developer or IT pro perspective is first to understand the core capabilities of the product and how they can be extended to meet your organization's business needs. Along those lines, this chapter introduces you to the new and exciting features and capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. With it, you will learn how to put the platform to work for your organization to create scalable business solutions with and without the use of custom code. In this chapter, you learn about the following topics and concepts:

Introducing SharePoint

Before getting started on the technical tasks associated with managing and working with SharePoint content, it is important to understand the purpose of all common usage scenarios for the technology.

Organizational stakeholders often suffer from what's been termed as information overload. Because computers play such an integral part in any business, not surprisingly, more and more of the information that is created, consumed, and shared in an organization is digital. The more business that you conduct and the more successful your business becomes, the more information you have to manage. Usually, you have some form of document for just about every process and transaction that plays out during the day-to-day operations of your company. From proposals to legal documents, from sales receipts to human resources policies, the amount of information required for a company to function is staggering.

To manage your information overload, SharePoint offers tools with which you can build business applications to better store, share, and manage digital information. With it, you can create lists, libraries, and websites for your various company teams to help run your business processes more efficiently. By locating your organization's important business data in a single location, it becomes much easier and intuitive for users to find the right information when they need it rather than searching through disparate locations such as email, computer hard drives, or file shares.

What Is Portal Technology?

A corporate portal is a gateway through which members can access business information and, if set up properly, should be the first place an employee goes to access anything of importance. Portals differ from regular websites in that they are customized specifically around business processes. In SharePoint, a portal may actually consist of numerous websites, with information stored either directly on those sites or in other systems, such as file shares, business applications, or a regular Internet website. This allows SharePoint to be the central location users may visit to find information regardless of its actual storage location. Because making informed business decisions is key to becoming and remaining successful, it's important that the information you place on a portal be secure, up to date, and easily accessible. Because a business's marketplace may span the globe, an organization also needs to have the information that reflects the needs of employees from multiple specific regions.

As an example, consider a new employee who has just joined an organization. In addition to learning her new job responsibilities, this employee must quickly get up to speed on the various company processes and policies. A good portal should provide all the company reference and policy information that the employee needs to review, as well as links to all the information systems and websites that employee needs to do her job. Information should be stored in easy-to-browse locations, based on subject or topic. In situations where the location of a document or information is not obvious, the employee should be able to type words into a search box and receive suggestions. The employee should also be able to share information with others. In many ways, a good portal should act as a table of contents for all the information and websites related to an organization or topic.

Why Does an Organization Invest in Portal Technology?

The following list provides just a few of the reasons why many enterprise organizations opt to invest in portal technologies:

• The adoption of the web and web-related technologies makes portal technologies an obvious choice. Because portal technologies are web-based, decision makers can access important information via the Internet regardless of where they are located.
• Portal technologies allow information workers to handle day-to-day tasks from a single starting point, whereas previously things were spread out across multiple places and applications.
• With important regulatory initiatives, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, organizations are using portal technologies to ensure an accurate audit trail is kept on important documents and that business processes remain compliant.
• The file-share-based approach previously used to store most information was highly dependent on the habits and practices of the person creating it. Portal technologies store and share information based on the organizational structure, making them intuitive to use for everyone in the organization. This structure translates into productivity boosts because workers can more easily locate and retrieve information.
• Portal technologies, such as SharePoint, scale with an organization, offering a model that will grow as your company grows.
• While the typical business portal product incorporates many common business practices, your organizational needs may dictate a customized process. Because SharePoint offers an extensible infrastructure, you can build custom solutions. Custom solutions may be created with or without the use of code.
• Although a company may be tempted by the latest and greatest information management system, most organizations still have legacy systems and data sources such as file shares, databases or business applications. You can massage portal technologies so that they integrate with these systems, allowing easier data mining or migration.
• Much of today's digital information is created and managed using the Microsoft Office system. SharePoint, as a portal technology, integrates seamlessly with that system's tools, allowing you to create, store, manage, and collaborate on this information from a single location.

What Is SharePoint 2010?

SharePoint 2010 is an extensible and scalable web-based platform consisting of tools and technologies that support the collaboration and sharing of information within teams, throughout the enterprise and on the web. The total package is a platform on which you can build business applications to help you better store, share, and manage digital information within your organization. Because you can build with or without code, the package empowers the average business user to create, deploy, and manage team websites, without depending on skilled resources, such as systems administrators or developers. Using lists, libraries, and web parts, you can transform team websites into business applications built specifically around making your organization's business processes more efficient.

SharePoint 2010 is composed of two primary components:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010 is the free product that focuses specifically on the features and functionality related to content storage, team collaboration, and document control.
• SharePoint Server 2010 is the enterprise portal technology that includes all the features and functionality of SharePoint Foundation 2010, as well as more advanced capabilities related to business intelligence, search, content management, and data connectivity. For the purposes of this book, we have chosen to focus specifically on the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2010. In some cases, there will be overlap and features described in this book will also be available within the Foundation version of the product.

Comparing SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server

Many organizations struggle with understanding which of the SharePoint products is most appropriate for their needs. The following sections identify some differences between the editions and usage scenarios for each. While this book has been written specifically to review features and functionality from the perspective of SharePoint Server, the following section discusses some comparisons between SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server. To start you off, you should remember the following:

• SharePoint Foundation 2010, previously known as Windows SharePoint Services, contains the core document management and collaboration platform features. With Foundation, the average information user can build web-based business applications without the need for technical resources or code. Because Foundation is available free with the Windows Server system, it has become a very popular collaborative tool for teams. This is largely because of the templates and existing site modules, which allow users to add documents, images, and information via a simple form rather than by using code. Users can create a new site based on an existing template in just a few seconds. SharePoint Foundation is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook, so users can create and share content using a familiar, comfortable environment.
• SharePoint Server 2010 is the nexus of Microsoft collaborative and portal technologies. It can accelerate the adoption of business process management, content management, and business intelligence across the intranet, extranet, and Internet. SharePoint Server 2010 delivers the tools to create, publish, and manage web-based content from a cohesive environment. SharePoint Server 2010 also offers the tools to automatically aggregate content from the SharePoint team sites, rolling up content from multiple sources to a central location, making information management even easier.

SharePoint Foundation Primary Benefits

The primary features of SharePoint Foundation revolve around document management and collaboration. The following sections outline the major features of the platform that have been responsible for its wide adoption in businesses.

• Effective document and task collaboration: Team websites offer access to information in a central location as well as the following capabilities:
  • Workspaces for teams to share documents and information, coordinate schedules and tasks, and participate in forum-like discussions. These workspaces can be used by team members to share information regardless of their physical proximity or boundaries. Because of the use of user interface elements, such as the Ribbon, navigation within the workspace is familiar and easy to use for most business users.
  • Libraries provide a better document creation and management environment. Libraries can be configured to ensure that a document is checked out before editing, track a document's revision history, or allow users to collaborate on its review and approval.
  • Role-based security settings ensure that sensitive information is secure and available only to select individuals.
  • Adv...