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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Simplify SharePoint with this comprehensive, understandable guide SharePoint is a Microsoft technology that enables project collaboration through a single portal. It can be complex, but not when approached the Dummies way! This guide offers eight self-contained minibooks that examine each aspect of SharePoint 2010. Whether you're an experienced administrator or developer or you're just getting your feet wet, you'll find it's easy to locate what you need and learn to install, configure, and manage a SharePoint portal. You can dig as deeply into SharePoint as you want or need to. * SharePoint 2010 is the newest version of collaboration technology that allows you to aggregate SharePoint sites, information, and applications into a single portal * Administrators, page producers, and developers will be able to get SharePoint installed, configured, and running with the advice in this guide * Eight minibooks address the Microsoft Office SharePoint system, SharePoint services, collaboration, SharePoint Server, enterprise content management, managing users, architecting SharePoint, and SharePoint deployment * Covers planning, installation, configuration, performance, troubleshooting, data structure, and more If you work with SharePoint, you'll find Microsoft SharePoint 2010 All-in-One For Dummies provides what you need to get starting and keep going with SharePoint 2010.
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Seitenzahl: 1270
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
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SharePoint® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®
Table of Contents
Introduction
Who Should Read This Book
How to Use This Book
Foolish Assumption
How This Book Is Organized
Book I: Introduction to SharePoint
Book II: Architecture and Planning
Book III: Services Configuration and Management
Book IV: Using the SharePoint Services
Icons Used in This Book
Ready, Set, Go . . . but Go Where?
Book I: Introduction to SharePoint
Book I: Chapter 1: Getting to Know SharePoint
Catching up with SharePoint Evolution
Why SharePoint Evolution Matters to Your Company
How SPS 2001 adapted to match business needs
How SharePoint changed along with related products
SharePoint finds a renewed purpose
SharePoint gets new powers
Fitting SharePoint into Unified Communications
Knowing all the parts that make up SharePoint 2010
Putting the parts of SharePoint together for business collaboration
Book I: Chapter 2: Introducing Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
Spotlighting SharePoint Foundation
Putting SPS on top of SPF
SharePoint Foundation Basics
Untying some commands on the Ribbon
Setting up SharePoint sites
Designing your site framework
Creating a site collection
Securing access to content
Lists, libraries, views, and content types
Scaling your lists to fit the job
SharePoint as a Development Platform
Dissecting SharePoint Web solutions
Developing with a browser, SharePoint Designer, and Visual Studio
Turning on the Developer Dashboard
Connecting to data in various ways
Book I: Chapter 3: Getting Started with a Basic Site
Setting up SharePoint Sites
Creating your site with templates
Navigation
Setting themes for your sites
Multiple-browser support
Generating and Consuming Content
Creating pages for your site
Interesting Web Parts
Manage your libraries and lists
Building a relationship between two lists
Book I: Chapter 4: Introducing SharePoint Server 2010
Choosing Between SharePoint Foundation and Server
Looking at Core SharePoint Server Features
Managing Web content
Introducing the Enterprise Wiki
Building an Enterprise Wiki
Book I: Chapter 5: Enterprise Content Management
Generating and Finding Content
The Document Center
Assigning unique Document IDs
Utilizing Document Sets
Navigating by metadata
Doing the Right Thing by the Regs
Information Management Policies
Content Organizer
Managing records with SharePoint
Holds and e-Discovery
Automating with workflows
Book I: Chapter 6: Office 2010 and Office Web Applications
Office 2010 Integration
Going Backstage
Locating SharePoint Sites
Multi-user editing
Offline Working via the Office Documents Cache
Working with lists and libraries
SharePoint Workspace
Office Web Applications
Introducing the Office Web Apps
A brief look at Web App architecture
Configuring the end user experience
Book II: Architecture and Planning
Book II: Chapter 1: The Framework
Understanding the Server Roles
Web server
Application server
Database server
Search server roles
Understanding the Farm Components
Internet Information Services (IIS) components
Application pool
SQL databases
Web Application
Site collection
SharePoint site
Scoping a SharePoint feature
Creating a SharePoint site definition
SharePoint site template
Shared Services Provider (SSP) limitations
Service application architecture
SharePoint service
Service application
How a service instance works
Communicating by service application proxy
Service application proxy group
Service application associations
Remote connections
Book II: Chapter 2: Assessing Authentication Options
Understanding Claims-Based Identity
Classic Mode Authentication
Claims-Based Authentication
Understanding SharePoint’s Security Token Service
Configuring Claims-Based Authentication
Implementing Multiple Authentication Methods through Zones
Book II: Chapter 3: Considering the Logical Architecture
Logical Architecture Design for SharePoint 2010
Planning for Application Limits and Best Practices
Web Application and site limits
List and item limits
Security limits
SharePoint Search topology limits
Book II: Chapter 4: Designing the Logical Architecture
Getting Started with SharePoint Site and Services Topology Planning
Preparing SharePoint Server Farms
Planning for change management
Getting familiar with process isolation
Preparing for geographically distributed deployments
Operational considerations
Planning Service Applications
Deciding on provided services
Service applications and groups
Partitioning and isolating services
Providing distributed services
Planning Web Applications
Addressing authentication
Planning zones and policies
Planning SharePoint Site Topology
Organizing sites and site collections
Multilingual considerations
Book II: Chapter 5: Planning for Performance and Scalability
Core Terms and Concepts for SharePoint Planning
Latency
Throughput
Capacity and data scale
Reliability
Software Architecture Building Blocks
Main Platform Components
SharePoint Platform Components
Performance and Capacity Management
Overview of Performance Requirements
Estimating Requests per Second
Estimating SQL Server Requirements
Proactive Planning
Designing Server Topologies
Designing for high availability
Book II: Chapter 6: Touring Central Administration
Accessing Central Administration
Configuring access and granting permissions
Administering SharePoint 2010
Managing SharePoint Applications
Monitoring SharePoint 2010
Reviewing Security
Choosing Your General Application Settings
Investigating System Settings
Disaster Recovery with Backup and Restore
Managing Upgrades
Book II: Chapter 7: Automating with PowerShell
Introducing PowerShell
Getting Started With PowerShell
Learning the Language
Talking with PowerShell
Asking for Help
Understanding the Pipeline, Objects, and Variables
Understanding PowerShell Usage with SharePoint
Positioning STSADM and PowerShell
Accessing the SharePoint cmdlets
Using SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets
Automating Tasks with PowerShell
Understanding SharePoint and Variables
Choosing looping and selection options
Understanding Operators
Making use of .NET and COM objects
Using data providers to access data stores
Building and running PowerShell scripts
Book II: Chapter 8: Using Service Applications
Using the Service Application Management Pages
Creating a Service Application
Editing Service Application Properties
Managing Service Application Settings
Service Application PowerShell cmdlets
Retrieving service application information
Creating service application components
Removing service application components
Managing service application components
Assigning Service Application Administrators
Assigning Service Application Permissions
Connecting to a Local Service Application
Handling Remote Service Connections
Exchanging trust certificates
Publishing a service application
Connecting to a remote service application
Deleting a Service Application
Book III: Services Configuration and Management
Book III: Chapter 1: Analyzing Access Services
Access Services Architecture
Managing Access Services
Lists and Queries Settings
Application Objects Setting
Session Management Settings
Memory Utilization settings
Templates settings
Running Reporting Services
Reporting Services Modes
Reporting Services Components
Scaling out Reporting Services
Installing Reporting Services
Configuring Reporting Services
Report Server content types
Creating reports
Book III: Chapter 2: Burrowing into Business Connectivity Services
Business Connectivity Services Overview
Business Connectivity Services: The new and improved Business Data Catalog
Understanding the Business Connectivity Services value proposition
Interpreting the Business Connectivity Services lingo
Examining the Business Connectivity Services Architecture
SharePoint server-side components
Client-side components
Managing Business Connectivity Services
Starting the BDC Service
Creating a BDC Service application
Assigning BDC administrators
Accessing the BDC management page
Setting permissions on the BDC metadata store
Switching between views
Setting object permissions
Adding actions to an external content type
Configuring the profile page host
Creating and upgrading profile pages
Importing a new BDC model or resource file
Exporting a new BDC model or resource file
Book III: Chapter 3: Exploring Excel Services
Admiring the Excel Services Architecture
Understanding the Excel Services Components
Scaling Excel Services
Managing Excel Services
Configuring the Global Settings
Defining your trusted file locations
Defining your trusted data providers
Defining your trusted data-connection libraries
Registering your user-defined function assemblies
Defining your trusted data-connection libraries
Configuring the Secure Store
Configuring the Unattended Service Account
Book III: Chapter 4: Investigating InfoPath Forms Services
Evolving InfoPath Forms Services
InfoPath Forms Services
Microsoft Office InfoPath client
Configuring InfoPath Forms Services
Accessing the InfoPath Forms Services Configuration page
Configuring form template settings
Configuring data-connection settings
Configuring postback settings
Configuring session state
Configuring the State Service
Understanding Data Connections
Data-connection files
Data Connection Wizard
Centrally managing data connections
Managing Administrator-Approved Form Templates
Uploading form templates
Categorizing form templates
Activating form templates
Deactivating form templates
Removing form templates
Upgrading form templates
Book III: Chapter 5: Maneuvering the Managed Metadata Service
Reviewing the Managed Metadata Lingo
Managing the Managed Metadata Service
Assigning Managed Metadata Administrators
Accessing the Term Store Management Tool
Setting the Managed Metadata Service Properties
Assigning Term Store Administrators
Creating a group
Creating a term set
Adding a term
Sorting terms
Moving terms
Copying terms
Reusing terms
Handing orphaned terms
Surfacing Metadata in your Sites
Creating Managed Metadata Columns
Configuring Metadata Navigation
Enabling Enterprise Keywords
Book III: Chapter 6: Submerging into Search
The Importance of Search
Positioning search in SharePoint
Major Search Concepts
Creating The End-User Experience
Building and executing queries
Understanding and Working with Search Results
Federating searches and using search locations
Search Results Page
Did You Mean & Related Searches
Refiners
Keywords, Definitions, and Best Bets
Search Actions
View In Browser
A Closer Look at FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010
Book III: Chapter 7: User Profiles, Organization Profiles, and Audiences
Understanding the User Profile Service Application
Working with User Profiles
Understanding Profile Synchronization
Configuring Profile Synchronization with Active Directory
Defining Connections to the Active Directory
Using Organization Profiles
Audiences as targets for content
Book III: Chapter 8: Considering PerformancePoint Services
Reviewing PerformancePoint Services
Peeking at the SharePoint Business Intelligence Center
Understanding the PerformancePoint Lingo
Storing PerformancePoint Content
Reviewing the PerformancePoint content types
Reviewing the PerformancePoint Web Parts
Using Web Parts to create dashboards manually
Examining the PerformancePoint Architecture
Managing PerformancePoint Services
Configuring the PerformancePoint Service Application Settings
Configuring PerformancePoint Security
Configuring the locations of trusted data sources
Configuring Trusted Content Locations
Configuring the Secure Store
Configuring the Unattended Service Account
Activating PerformancePoint Services
Creating a Business Intelligence Center Site
Enabling PerformancePoint on an existing site
Introducing PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer
Launching the Dashboard Designer
Introducing the Workspace Browser
Reviewing the Ribbon Menu
Saving PerformancePoint Items
Deploying a dashboard to SharePoint
Book III: Chapter 9: Considering Visio Services
Reviewing Visio Services
Managing the Visio Graphics Service
Configuring the Visio Graphics Service Settings
Configuring the Unattended Service Account
Publishing Visio Diagrams to SharePoint
Saving your Visio Drawings to SharePoint
Saving your Visio Web Drawings to SharePoint
Integrating Visio with SharePoint Workflow
Creating a SharePoint workflow diagram
Exporting your SharePoint workflow diagram
Importing Workflow into SharePoint Designer
Publishing Visio Workflow to SharePoint
Exporting your SharePoint Workflow to Visio
Importing your SharePoint Workflow into Visio
Creating a Strategy Map
Book IV: Using the SharePoint Services
Book IV: Chapter 1: Publishing Access Applications
Designing SharePoint-Compatible Access Databases
Creating an Access Web database
Creating an Access Web database from SharePoint
Access Web Database Objects
Setting the default form
Publishing to Access Services
Mapping Access Objects to SharePoint Objects
Checking Web compatibility
Publishing your Access Web database
Viewing the Application Log
Opening your Access Web database application
Synchronizing your changes with SharePoint
Saving your Web Database as a Site Template
Book IV: Chapter 2: Connecting to External Data
Understanding External Content Types
External content type XML definition
Tooling for Business Connectivity Services
Creating External Content Types with SharePoint Designer
Opening your site in SharePoint Designer
Launching the External Content Type Designer
Configuring your external content type general settings
Connecting to an external SQL database
Connecting to a Web service
Connecting to a .NET assembly
Adding operations to an external content type
Defining filter parameters
Editing operations for an external content type
Removing operations for an external content type
Saving an external content type
Book IV: Chapter 3: Using External Content
Creating an External List
Creating an external list with the browser interface
Creating an external list with SharePoint Designer
Creating External Data Columns
Taking External Content Offline
Enabling offline sync for your external lists
Connecting your external list to Microsoft Outlook
Synchronizing to SharePoint Workspace
Synchronizing from SharePoint Workspace
Using the Business Connectivity Services Web Parts
Creating a blank Web Part page
Adding the Business Data List Web Part
Adding the Business Data Item Web Part
Creating associations by using SharePoint Designer
Adding the Business Data Related List Web Part
Adding the Business Data Actions Web Part
Adding the Business Data Connectivity Filter Web Part
Book IV: Chapter 4: Working with Excel Services
Reviewing a Snapshot of Excel 2010 New Features
Publishing Your Excel Workbooks
Checking for compatibility issues
Configuring your external connections
Finding the Secure Store Service Application ID
Configuring the authentication options
Verifying the Unattended Service Account
Exporting data connection files to SharePoint
Checking Trusted Resources
Verifying your SharePoint library is trusted
Verifying your data connection library is trusted
Configuring your Publishing Options
Publishing your workbook
Viewing Your Workbooks in the Browser
Reviewing the Excel Web Access Menu Options
Using the Parameter Pane
Configuring the Excel Web Access Web Part
Excel Web Access Web Part Settings
Adding the Excel Web Access Web Part
Understanding Excel Web App
Book IV: Chapter 5: Investigating InfoPath Designer 2010
Understanding InfoPath Roles
Accessing InfoPath Filler 2010
Accessing InfoPath Designer 2010
Touring InfoPath Designer 2010
InfoPath Designer Backstage view
InfoPath ribbon tabs
Accessing the Designer task panes
Exploring Form Templates
Understanding form templates
Cracking open the form template
Considering the Designer templates
Understanding template parts
Browser-compatible form templates
Book IV: Chapter 6: Designing Browser Compatible Forms
Designing Web Browser InfoPath Forms
Creating a browser compatible form
Adding fields and groups
Designing your form layout
Adding controls to the page
Adding secondary data sources
Creating form views
Storing connections in a Data Connection Library
Adding business rules and logic
Configuring Security and Trust
Verifying your form template
Deploying Form Templates
Publishing User Form Templates
Book IV: Chapter 7: Examining the InfoPath Forms Services Tools
Customizing SharePoint List Forms
Embedding InfoPath Forms in Web Pages
Creating a blank Web Part page
Adding the InfoPath Form Web Part
Connecting the InfoPath Form Web Part
Using InfoPath Forms with External Lists
Working Offline with InfoPath Forms
Book IV: Chapter 8: Designing and Administering Search
Designing the Search Experience
Creating an Enterprise Search Center site
Defining a search scope
Associating the search scope with a team site
Configuring the search dialog box on team site pages
Creating a custom search landing page
Creating a federated search location for images
Configure a Federation Web Part to display the images
Creating a managed property for a custom site column
Configuring a Refinement Web Part to use a managed property
Administrating and Monitoring Search
The Search Management Dashboard
Book IV: Chapter 9: SharePoint Gets Social
Understanding People-centricity in SharePoint
My Site at the Center
Understanding the My Profile page
Understanding the Overview tab of a profile page
Understanding the Organization tab of a profile page
Understanding the Content tab of a profile page
Understanding the Tags and Notes tab of a profile page
Understanding the Colleagues tab of a profile page
Understanding the Memberships tab of a profile page
Understanding the My Content page
Understanding personalization links
Understanding the My Newsfeed page
Searching for People
SharePoint 2010® All-in-One For Dummies®
by Emer McKenna, Kevin Laahs, and Veli-Matti Vanamo
SharePoint 2010® All-in-One For Dummies®
Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2010935587
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About the Authors
Emer McKenna is the founder of N2C, Inc. a Sacramento based corporation, through which she provides independent consulting services to her clients. Emer focuses on Microsoft technologies including Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint Products and Technologies, SharePoint Workspace 2010 and Office Communications Server. Prior to branching out on her own Emer worked as a Technology Consultant for Hewlett Packard; Emer spent 15 wonderful years with HP working initially as a Digital employee, then a Compaq employee and finally as an employee of HP. Emer has had the good fortune of working with SharePoint from its initial beta release (code named Tahoe) and is the co-author of three previous SharePoint books coinciding with each major version release. Emer looks forward to continuing her exploration of Microsoft technologies and sharing her knowledge through published media. When Emer is not working she joins her husband in the wonderful, glittery, sparkly world of parenting their two little girls, Caoimhe (7) and Niamh (4). You can catch Emer on her blog http://nut2craic.com or through e-mail at [email protected].
Kevin Laahs lives in Scotland and has been in the IT industry for more than 30 years. He is a Technology Strategist with HP Enterprise Services and works as astrategic advisor to many of HP’s worldwide customers with his main technical focus being Messaging and Collaboration technologies. He helps clients plan, design and implement infrastructures that help them meet their business goals. Kevin is a frequent speaker at industry events and writes regularly for industry publications. Outside of his working life Kevin enjoys golf and music – neither of which he is as good at as he would like to be. Kevin can be reached at [email protected]
Veli-Matti Vanamo is a Technical Consultant in the HP Software & Services Information Management practice. His main focus is designing, developing and deploying enterprise knowledge management systems based on Microsoft SharePoint. Veli-Matti has worked with over 20 major global customers including The Walt Disney Company, Procter & Gamble, Bank of America, World Health Organization, Sygenta, General Motors and Bank of Montreal. Veli-Matti was the Lead Technical Architect responsible for the internal HP Services Global Knowledge Management Systems and deployment of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server architecture. Veli-Matti is a member of number of Technical Review Boards, including Microsoft Developer Advisory Council for SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Veli-Matti is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Microsoft TechEd, Microsoft TechNet and MSD2D Web Casts and a co-author of three books on Microsoft SharePoint.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to our ever-patient families: Michael, Caoimhe, and Niamh; Wendy, Jenny,and Euan; Audrey, Christian, and Cora. Thanks for supporting us through yet another writing adventure.
Authors' Acknowledgments
We did it! And I say that with pride and incredulity. The pride bit is obvious. This book is the product of a lot of hard work, perseverance, dedication and determination. The incredulity comes from the fact that I actually got to write another book with Kevin — this is the fourth book I have had the pleasure of co-authoring with him and after our last book I believed him when he said that he was done writing techie books. I wasn’t ready to hang up my writing boots and was resigned to the fact that I would proceed with my next book sans Kevin and Veli. Imagine my surprise when Kevin actually agreed to Veli’s proposition of coauthoring another SharePoint 2010 book! Thank you for saying yes Kevin, it was an honor to write with you again, and thanks to Veli for giving you the bait. We had initially planned on going the self-publishing route, but that changed when Wiley came knocking on the door with an offer to write SharePoint 2010 All-In-One Desk Reference for Dummies. We jumped at the chance.
Thank you to my literary agent Carol Jelen from Waterside Productions for introducing me to Katie Feltman from Wiley Publishing. Thank you to Katie for the opportunity to write for such a wonderful series and a reputable publisher. It has been an incredibly satisfying, rewarding and educational experience. The Wiley staff are brilliant! Thank so much to Katie and Pat O’Brien for their incredible patience and support throughout this whole process. Thanks to Pat, Barry, Lisa, Laura, and Matthew for your very thorough and enlightening edits — you really brought our text to life.
Special thanks to the wonderful folks at Temple Coffee (29th and S) in Sacramento. Lori, Leslie, Bethany, Ben, Spencer and Lauren, thank you all so much for being such gracious hosts and for putting up with me for hours on end while I tapped away on my laptop. The coffee creations that you all make are true works of art, without which this book would never have been completed.
Thanks to you, the reader, for purchasing our book. We hope you find this book useful in your SharePoint journey as that’s what makes all the hard work put into writing this book worthwhile. If you have any feedback or questions regarding the content, feel free to contact us and we’ll try our best to help you out.
Thank you to my ever loving and supportive family. To my Mum, Dad, sisters and their hubbys, thank you for your constant encouragement. Love you all. To Caoimhe and Niamh, my sweet, sweet girls. Thank you for being so patient with me and excited for me as I completed each chapter. Your smiles and voices light up my whole world. I love you with all my heart. And finally — and most importantly — to my husband Michael, thank you for being, and continuing to be, my rock. I love you.
— Emer McKenna
I recall saying to myself, “Have you lost your mind?” when agreeing to embark on yet another book. In fact I recall saying those exact words to Veli when he first mooted the idea. And my co-authors and those closest to me will doubtless say that I have indeed lost my mind when I tell you that, overall, I did actually enjoy the experience. They would be correct in stating that all the evidence during the writing process was to the contrary but, now that our fourth book is complete, I can reflect that I enjoyed writing in a different style to our previous books. Writing a For Dummies book is a great way of cutting through the hype and simply explaining how to get stuff done. To achieve this you need to learn the subject matter in great detail and then think about it in practical terms. This is what I enjoyed from the experience since, in the end, technology is all about making people’s lives simpler. So I’d like to acknowledge Wiley for being patient with us as we mastered the style and for all their help in getting the book to print. Thanks to Emer for handling all the logistics this time through and Veli – don’t you ever come to me again with such a ridiculous idea as writing another book since my wife, Wendy, and children, Jenny and Euan, have been put through enough.
— Kevin Laahs
Thanks to Emer and Kevin for once again agreeing to co-author our third book together, once I saw SharePoint 2010 at the Microsoft Airlift in June 2009 I just knew we had to do this. I’m sorry my timelines were ever shifting, Emer & Kevin -- you will always be my favorite Goose & Maverick.
Thank you Audrey, my ever wonderful wife and our two little ones, Christian and Cora, for putting up with me through the process and giving me the time to put into this project. I love you guys. Thanks to my family around the world for encouraging and pushing ever forwards, especially my mother.
Thanks to our colleagues at HP and Microsoft for being a sounding board and an anchor throughout the process; especially Brian Carter, Eric Tipton, Paul Turner, Doron Bar-Caspi and Kimmo Forss. Thanks to the rest of the HP Academy crew for not making feel bad about missing few parties to finish off the last few chapters; Wendy, Lex, Mark, Matthew and Amish. And lastly, thanks to the best customer I could ask for; Department of Social Protection-- Helen, Dave, Pat and the rest of the crew.
— Veli-Matti Vanamo
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.
Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:
Acquisitions, Editorial, and Media Development
Project Editor: Pat O’Brien
Acquisitions Editor: Katie Feltman
Senior Copy Editor: Barry Childs-Helton
Copy Editor: Laura Miller
Technical Editor: Matthew McDermott
Editorial Manager: Kevin Kirschner
Editorial Assistant: Amanda Graham
Sr. Editorial Assistant: Cherie Case
Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)
Composition Services
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Layout and Graphics: Ashley Chamberlain
Proofreaders: John Greenough, Lisa Stiers
Indexer: Broccoli Information Management
Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies
Richard Swadley, Vice President and Executive Group Publisher
Andy Cummings, Vice President and Publisher
Mary Bednarek, Executive Acquisitions Director
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Publishing for Consumer Dummies
Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher
Composition Services
Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services
Introduction
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is chock full of goodies for you to explore and leverage within your organization. When you start looking at all the functionality that SharePoint 2010 provides, you may — understandably — find yourself feeling a tad overwhelmed and frustrated. Probing at just one little area of the product reveals layer after layer of new features, making you feel like you just opened Pandora’s box.
Much of the new functionality emerges as services that can be consumed by your users, and SharePoint 2010 has lots of new services available right out of the box. For example, PerformancePoint Server used to be a standalone server offering from Microsoft, but with SharePoint 2010 it has been rolled up into the product and is now provided as one of the many service applications. Understanding what each service has to offer and knowing when and how to utilize it in your organization is the key to a successful SharePoint 2010 deployment.
With SharePoint 2010 All–In–One For Dummies, we demystify the product and show you how to get the most out of your SharePoint deployment.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is intended for SharePoint administrators who are responsible for deploying and managing SharePoint, and also for the technically savvy business users that want to get the most out of their organization’s SharePoint 2010 deployment.
Others who may benefit from this book include:
♦ Developers: When it comes to building solutions for SharePoint 2010, writing code is typically a last resort. By understanding and knowing how to maximize the services that ship with SharePoint, developers can save themselves a lot of time and effort, and impress their managers by quickly producing solutions with very little underlying cost.
Developers will find Books I and IV most useful to their needs.
♦ Power Users: Since its inception SharePoint has always been a great technology for empowering the end user, and SharePoint 2010 is no exception. Technically savvy end users, also known as Power Users, will be eager to take advantage of all the goodies that SharePoint 2010 has in store for them, and knowing what those goodies are is half the battle.
Power users will find Books I and IV of most immediate benefit to them.
♦ Business Decision Makers: If you are responsible for deciding whether your department should purchase SharePoint 2010, or for deciding whether to leverage an existing SharePoint 2010 implementation within your organization, then you need to understand what the product has to offer. SharePoint 2010 All-In-One For Dummies can help you do exactly that.
How to Use This Book
SharePoint 2010 All-In-One For Dummies is a reference book. You don’t have to read it from cover to cover. So, if you’re interested in finding out about a particular topic, pick up the book and dive in. Throughout the book we direct you to any related chapters so you don’t miss a thing.
If you want to learn about SharePoint from top to bottom, just start with Book I, Chapter 1, and keep going until you hit the Index!
Foolish Assumption
Please forgive us, but since SharePoint Server 2010 is such a huge topic we made one foolish assumption about you, the reader of this book. We assumed that you have access to a development environment that has SharePoint Server 2010, Enterprise Edition installed.
Microsoft has a SharePoint 2010 evaluation Virtual Machine available for download on their Web site.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is your guide to planning for SharePoint 2010 and getting the most from the product once you’ve got it up and running in your organization. It’s jampacked with how-to’s, advice, shortcuts, and tips. This book contains four minibooks, with each minibook focusing on a particular stage of your SharePoint implementation.
Book I: Introduction to SharePoint
The first minibook provides an overview of the SharePoint product suite, describing the various flavors of SharePoint and the differences between them. Use this minibook to get an overall understanding of SharePoint 2010 and its underlying SharePoint Foundation Server platform. This minibook also examines the integration points with Microsoft Office 2010 products, such as Microsoft Outlook, which gives you an idea of how you can leverage SharePoint in your daily activities.
Book II: Architecture and Planning
SharePoint isn’t one of those products that you can just rip the cover off the CD, stick it into your computer and have a successful implementation up and running in mere moments. For SharePoint 2010 to be truly successful in your organization you must take the time to understand the product, know how you want to use it, and plan appropriately. This isn’t as scary as it sounds, especially if you’re armed with this book; at the end of the day a lot of your planning will be based on common sense. For example, if you want your users to still be able to access their SharePoint sites even when your SharePoint server crashes, that means you’re going to need more than one server.
This minibook examines the underlying SharePoint architecture, explaining the different types of servers and authentication methods that you may need, and shows you how to plan for both performance and growth. This minibook also explains the new service application architecture that is the heart and soul of SharePoint 2010, and introduces you to the plethora of services available out of the box. If you are in the planning stages of your SharePoint 2010 deployment you should read this minibook for guidance on how to deploy the various SharePoint components so that you have the best possible chance of success.
Book III: Services Configuration and Management
Much of the functionality that comes with SharePoint 2010 is implemented as a service application. For example, Access Services is a new feature that ships with SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition and enables you to publish your Access databases as a SharePoint Web based database application. This minibook examines the architecture of the various services that ship with SharePoint 2010 and shows you how to configure and manage them using SharePoint’s administrative Web site.
Book IV: Using the SharePoint Services
This minibook focuses on how to use the plethora of services that ship with SharePoint 2010. Want to know how to publish your Access databases to SharePoint? Want to know how to leverage Excel Services in your sites? Then this minibook is the place for you. We give you step-by-step guidance on how to use the services in your SharePoint sites so that you and your users can get the most out of your SharePoint 2010 implementation.
Icons Used in This Book
To help you get the most out of this book, we’ve placed icons here and there. Here’s what the icons mean:
Next to the Tip icon, you can find shortcuts and tricks of the trade that help you to understand SharePoint and have more fun using it. Also, there are references to other chapters that can expand your knowledge.
The Warning icon doesn’t appear often in this book, but when it does it’s to warn you of potential problems or common pitfalls.
When we want you to pay special attention to a specific detail that bears remembering, we mark it with a Remember icon. Committing these little details to memory along the way will make your SharePoint journey more enjoyable.
When we are forced to describe high-tech stuff, a Technical Stuff icon appears in the margin. You don’t have to read what’s beside the Technical Stuff icons if you don’t want to, although these technical descriptions often help you understand how a specific feature works.
Ready, Set, Go . . . but Go Where?
So you’ve read the introduction and you’re ready and raring to go . . . but where do you start? Well, the answer is easy. Start anywhere you’d like. If you’re new to SharePoint 2010, a good place to start is Book I, Chapter 1. If you’re a Power User with access to a SharePoint 2010 environment and you’re ready to get your hands dirty, then any of the chapters in Book IV will work for you. If you’re interested in a specific topic — for example, Access Services — take a peek at the index at the back of the book for all the chapters related to Access Services and start with the first one.
Read on!
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Book I
Introduction to SharePoint
Contents at a Glance
Chapter 1: Getting to Know SharePoint
Catching up with SharePoint Evolution
Why SharePoint Evolution Matters to Your Company
Fitting SharePoint into Unified Communications
Chapter 2: Introducing Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010
Spotlighting SharePoint Foundation
SharePoint Foundation Basics
SharePoint as a Development Platform
Chapter 3: Getting Started with a Basic Site
Setting up SharePoint Sites
Generating and Consuming Content
Chapter 4: Introducing SharePoint Server 2010
Choosing Between SharePoint Foundation and Server
Looking at Core SharePoint Server Features
Chapter 5: Enterprise Content Management
Generating and Finding Content
Doing the right thing by the regs
Chapter 6: Office 2010 and Office Web Applications
Office 2010 Integration
Office Web Applications
Chapter 1: Getting to Know SharePoint
In This Chapter
Getting a handle on SharePoint’s evolution
Spotting where SharePoint fits in a Microsoft ecosystem
Figuring out what SharePoint can offer your business
If you’re new to Microsoft SharePoint, you should know it’s an integrated suite of software programs designed to help organizations make the best possible use of their intellectual assets. SharePoint combines Web browsing with client-server networking to manage in-house information in some powerful ways:
♦ Discovering and sharing the important business information that lurks unused within many organizations
♦ Managing Web content by regulating access to documents and data
♦ Boosting collaboration through social networking
♦ Providing tools for business intelligence — turning raw data into usable business information
♦ Serving as a flexible environment for developing custom software to meet differing business needs
This chapter gets up close and personal with SharePoint, lays out how it has evolved since it first popped up in the marketplace, and gives you a glimpse of how it fits into a Microsoft strategy called Unified Communication (which some folks consider a whole new way of doing business). We figure a quick overview of where SharePoint has been will shed light on SharePoint features and functions as they are now. For example, SharePoint 2010 is highly integrated with Microsoft Office and can be deployed in a mind-boggling variety of ways — but it got to that point version by version, getting smarter with each release. A look at how this happened can give you a leg up on planning the evolution of your organization as it uses SharePoint.
Catching up with SharePoint Evolution
Every new release of any software product brings change for the people who use it — “Here it comes, ready or not.” New features (and learning curves) for the end user, better and easier ways for developers to put SharePoint capabilities to work, or more options that IT professionals can tweak to support the needs of the business. If a new product release didn’t bring any benefit to anyone, why spend time, resources, or money on implementing it? So goes the industry reasoning, anyway.
How much a software product changes between releases (and which features and functions ultimately make their way to the users) often will depend on the software’s basic technical design — its architecture. That design typically has a limited lifespan. No, it isn’t all planned obsolescence; rapidly changing business requirements demand new capabilities and ways of working. If a software product’s architecture stays the same, sooner or later it can’t accommodate that demand, and its market share shrivels.
As an example, consider what’s happening to information systems in the current economic climate — in particular, cloud computing, which has nothing to do with the weather: Many organizations are looking to save money by moving away from maintaining their own IT infrastructures. Instead of installing more big server computers and mazes of network cable, they put their utility computing “in the cloud”: The services that their end users require — including software programs they use every day — are managed and maintained by a third party and used via a secure connection to the Internet. That’s a shift in platform — away from isolated, standalone computers, even away from “hard-wired” company networks. It’s no wonder that software products have to change to meet business needs in new operating environments. SharePoint, in fact, can handle both the old and the new — zipping happily through network cables or going out to users via the Internet cloud. Many features, such as claims based authentication (discussed in Book II, Chapter 2), allow SharePoint to co-habitate in the different environments that you find both inside and outside of the Enterprise.
As you might expect, a software product’s architecture also changes in response to how well it does in the marketplace — and not just if it fails. Many products actually get revamped because of their success — as when demand emerges for a larger-scale version of the product — and that’s exactly what happened to SharePoint when support for large farms was initially introduced in SharePoint 2003.
If a software product changes its architecture between releases, that usually happens in one of two ways:
♦ A total redesign. Redesign tends to happen early in a product’s life — often requiring a massive amount of re-engineering that has to meet a tight development deadline. Sometimes the features that end users, developers, or IT professionals looked forward to end up unfinished or dropped completely. (The much-anticipated Shared Services capability of SharePoint 2003, for example, had to wait until 2007 before it got anywhere close to delivering on its original promise.)
♦ An evolution of the current architecture. As a software product matures and finds its rightful place in the computing ecosystem, its architecture proves effective for a while and then changes gradually, one release at a time. This process usually results in the greatest benefits across the board.
Over the years, SharePoint has undergone both kinds of architectural changes (Table 1-1 sums them up). The current version — SharePoint 2010 — is not a redesign, but an evolution. At the core, it’s much the same as its immediate ancestor with the long name Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or MOSS. In fact, SharePoint 2010 (let’s hear it for simpler product names!) builds on the parts of MOSS that were tried and tested in the real world, and found to work well — in particular, these:
♦ The Site Framework: The same MOSS mechanism that supports team sites is still in the mix. (Get a look at how it works in Book I, Chapter 2.)
♦ Business Connectivity Services: The Business Data Catalog from MOSS has been enhanced to allow both reading and writing of external data — another winner. (See Book III, Chapters 2, 3, and 4.)
♦ Social Networking Features: Microsoft had connecting people together in mind when it came up with this part of SharePoint — and they called it right.
That said, SharePoint 2010 does contain some significant architectural changes — these, for example:
♦ Indexing is far more flexible. This means you can index more content and, more importantly, help users find relevant information.
♦ Service applications are available via SharePoint for the first time. The architecture allows for flexibility in deployments and sharing of resources across multiple SharePoint farms.
♦ Office Web Apps. These allow users to view and edit Office content (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) through the browser allowing fast access to such content from essentially any environment.
In effect, you can think of SharePoint 2010 as “the second release of the third generation of SharePoint” (if you like to trace lineage). This evolution has added features for end users, options for developers, and flexible deployment for the IT crew. (And the crowd goes wild!)
Whatever you call this episode of the SharePoint journey — evolution or redesign — the resulting product is, in Microsoft-speak, “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise and the Web.” Clearly the product is aimed at “the cloud” but also at home on a good old-fashioned corporate intranet. And keep that “collaboration” part in mind; you’ll be seeing a lot of it in this book.
Table 1-1: The Redesign and Evolution of SharePoint
SharePoint Version
Release Date
Type of Architectural Change
Result
SPS 2001 (Tahoe)
2001
N/A
A portal that could be used for knowledge management. Design favored consumers of information more than creators. Commercialized the digital dashboard that delivered content in Web pages via Web Parts.
SPS 2003
2003
Redesign
Combined SharePoint Team Services (STS) and SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) to give companies total control of their information from start to finish.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS)
2007
Redesign
Significant architectural changes included item-level permissions and flexible deployment options — which laid the groundwork for SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010
2010
Evolution
Many new collaboration features were added to the 2007 version, including easy-to-use tools for the end user and multiple ways to deploy SharePoint — both on-site and “in the cloud”.
Why SharePoint Evolution Matters to Your Company
This section takes a whirlwind look at the evolution of SharePoint, how it got to be what it is today, and how you can make best use of it.
How SPS 2001 adapted to match business needs
SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2001, code-named Tahoe while it was undergoing design and development, started life as an application intended for knowledge management — essentially coordinating business administration, IT, and the processes of doing business so that everybody in the company could have access to what they needed to know, could apply it to best advantage, and could get more efficient about sharing what they learned.
SPS 2001 commercialized the Digital Dashboard — a Web-based feature that delivered content to Web pages via Web Parts (chunks of ready-to-use computer code). This concept is still in use today; it’s part of the .NET Framework, a set of programming routines used for developing custom software and extending the capabilities of Microsoft products such as SharePoint.
While SPS 2001 was being designed, an old standby product — Microsoft Exchange — was starting to have an identity crisis: Exchange 2000 had outgrown its origins as an e-mail-and-messaging program (it was an ancestor to Outlook); now it was marketed as a “Messaging and Collaboration” server product — the whole collaboration side was new. Microsoft added a slew of features to make Exchange “Web-enabled,” and stuck on a plethora of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) so developers could build complete, Web-based, collaborative applications based on Exchange.
Well, if a horde of people were going to collaborate online, they needed some convenient online place to keep what they were working on. Thus the Web Storage System was born.
SPS 2001 (the SharePoint ancestor) needed a database to store all the knowledge everybody expected it to manage — but still had to serve as a “portal” to the Web. So it made sense at the time to build SPS 2001 on top of the Web Storage System — but that ambitious system never caught on, probably for two main reasons:
♦ Exchange worked just fine as a messaging server — and had a big, loyal, relatively happy throng of users — so the product went back to doing what it did well, and only that: messaging.
♦ Microsoft wanted to make SQL Server the data-storage engine of choice where applicable. (Of course, there was also some loose talk back then about getting Exchange to use SQL — but that still hasn’t happened, and for good reason: The input/output patterns for e-mail are more sporadic and unpredictable than those used in other applications. By using its Extensible Storage Engine (ESE), Exchange can handle those I/O patterns better than SQL (or, for that matter, SQL Server), and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
So it was back to the e-mail only focus with Exchange, and the Web Server System died on the vine (for the time being).
How SharePoint changed along with related products
With Exchange returned to its focus on messaging, Microsoft promoted SharePoint as the platform for collaborative applications — but the product’s “identity crisis” continued: How would it get collaboration to work, and what else was it good for?
Of course, the SharePoint engineering team could have embraced the Web Storage System and started evolving WSS as the main storage product, but other factors contributed to the need for a change in SharePoint architecture.
Tucked away in a whole other product — Microsoft Front Page Server — was a little-known program that had essentially been dwarfed by the marketing given to SharePoint Services. This unassuming product — SharePoint Team Services (STS) — could do many of the same things SPS 2001 could do (for example, document publishing), but it was focused on smaller teams formed to execute specific tasks.
Slowly STS gained traction — both inside and outside Microsoft — because it could aid in the collaborative creation of business information and Web content, which SPS couldn’t do. At the time, each product had its own bailiwick:
♦ SPS could connect people and information across departments and entire organizations.
♦ STS enabled small teams — practically any number of them — to create content and collaborate on team-specific information.
Surely there was potential here for a single product that would cover all the bases and give a company large-scale, detailed control of its information.
And so Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (SPS 2003) were born — which required a core architectural change in order to strengthen the “abilities” of SharePoint — scalability, availability, reliability, and manageability. Neither STS nor SPS 2001 had addressed all these features completely — but the first generation of SharePoint had piqued market interest, so version 2.0 was highly anticipated and was expected to meet the needs of the enterprise.
Three tiers, no waiting!
These days a common practice is to group multiple servers that perform similar roles into tiers. This arrangement is especially good for redundancy in the system; if you lose one server, the other servers in the same tier (which perform the same role) can take on the load.
Typically you see the following in a three-tier server architecture:
The first tier also known as the presentation tier is normally a bank of dedicated servers that interact directly with end users, and can handle user requests interchangeably. SharePoint calls these Web Front End (WFE) servers; they receive all requests from users and applications and render (create and display) every Web page that makes its way to the users’ screens.
The third tier (we’ll get to the second tier in a minute!) is also known as the database tier. It’s where data is kept and served to the network users. Multiple applications make use of the database tier; the database itself provides data to any and all of them. Typically, large servers that run SharePoint use SQL Server as the database and achieve redundancy by using various techniques — up to and including the duplication of entire servers (mirroring).
For many applications these two tiers — the presentation tier and the database tier — are actually sufficient; the applications run on the Web server that provides Web pages to the users. In fact, WSS runs as a two-tier application (as shown in Figure 1-1). If your company is huge (or nearly huge), however, large-scale applications require multiple servers to perform roles that they do best in tiers.
Some types of processing are resource-intensive (indexing, for example, uses a lot of processor cycles and is disk intensive).
Spreading the output of processing across a tier is more efficient than having each server do its own processing.
So the middle tier is usually called the application tier — where specific applications are provided as network services and commands to those applications are executed.
In the case of SharePoint, the best example is the Index service. No point making all those servers index the same content — so the Index service itself runs as an application in the middle tier, sending its results to all the servers that use the search service.
SPS 2001 used the Web Storage System to store data — but STS split that task, mainly using SQL to store metadata and NTFS to store content (such as documents). This design limited the scalability of WSS — and its availability to users. In effect, it was a hybrid storage system that used Web Server, the installed file system, SQL, and the Windows Registry (configuration information) to store data. To make some sense of this complexity, all Web content had to be tied to the same server — specifically, the one responsible for rendering Web pages. These days, fortunately, SharePoint 2010 handles this problem by a three tier architecture with all data being stored in SQL. This allows SharePoint 2010 to meet the needs of the smallest to the very largest of organizations.
One way to meet the expectations for SharePoint version 2.0 was to design it to run on multiple physical servers and divide up the processing among them. Doing so brought some advantages:
♦ Multiple servers allowed redundancy; if one of them failed, others could take over, which improved the reliability of the system.
♦ Organizations could scale up SharePoint as required, whether vertically (by adding larger servers) or horizontally (by adding more servers).
♦ Multiple servers could be grouped according to the roles they performed — into tiers.
At this point, three-tier architectures were starting to crop up nearly everywhere. So they became the starting point for the next generation of SharePoint. (For a look at how this arrangement works, see the accompanying sidebar, “Three tiers, no waiting!”)
To take advantage of a tiered server structure, the second generation of SharePoint used three role-based tiers (see Figure 1-1); this model persists today in SharePoint 2010. Early on, however, that meant a big architectural change — because SPS 2003 now had to depend on WSS.
SharePoint finds a renewed purpose
The success of SharePoint Team Services told Microsoft that small teams needed better ways to collaborate than the Windows operating system could give them. Windows provided file-sharing — and sure, that meant teams could share documents — but they couldn’t share much else. What they needed to share these days was richer information about documents and items that were required for stronger collaboration such as calendars, tasks, and project lists.
The grand Microsoft plan was to enhance the basic Windows operating system and augment it with collaboration services that any application could use — even non-Microsoft applications (what a concept!). The idea was to allow collaboration among a wide range of applications.
And so Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) was built on the .NET Framework harnessing ASP.NET as well as SQL Server.
“Windows” was part of the name because WSS was intended as part of the operating system (initially a free download, later an optional installable service). Figure 1-2 shows how WSS fit into the whole SharePoint picture.
Figure 1-1: SPS as a three-tier application.
Of course, this approach made WSS both part of the operating system and an application that used the operating system. It was really a sample of how collaborative applications could be built. Your team could use WSS to create team Web sites that took advantage of the various frameworks built into WSS:
♦ The Web Part Page framework could be used to build feature-rich user interfaces for various Web browsers.
♦ The site framework could be used to create collections of Web sites that had features based on consistent templates.
♦ The document library and list frameworks could be used to store data and provide flexible views of this data.
Figure 1-2: WSS software architecture is in the upper part of the picture.
Teams could customize and extend the capabilities of these Web sites so multiple individuals could work on the same documents and different types of list items (contacts, tasks, calendar entries, announcements, and such). Web services and improved management of information encouraged the expansion of collaboration. The following are examples of this in action:
♦ Outlook 2003 could set up a team site as a shared workspace to accommodate online meetings linked to meeting requests.
♦ Outlook 2003 could synchronize lists; you could view, for example, a shared calendar in a team site side-by-side with your own personal calendar.
♦ Word 2003 could harness document workspaces that allowed users to see relevant related files from within Word.
♦ Both Access and Excel could synchronize SharePoint lists.
♦ The new InfoPath feature could store its forms and publish fields from those forms in a form library made available for collaborative use.
♦ Users could navigate to document libraries directly from Windows Explorer.
♦ Eventually (after Microsoft purchased Groove in 2005 and brought its features into the Office Suite) users could synchronize document libraries and lists for offline use.
So there you have it — Windows SharePoint Services formed the platform upon which SharePoint Services 2003 was built. This meant
♦ If WSS was not already present when you installed SPS 2003 the installation process would install it for you.
♦ Installing SPS 2003 on top of WSS would augment the features that your WSS team sites already made available.
♦ SPS 2003 delivered the newest version of MSSearch; it could index multiple content sources and deliver aggregated search results.
♦ With SPS 2003 in place, the scope of a search done from a team site could now include all team sites — or all sites within the organization.
SharePoint Services focused on connecting people and information. The Site Directory provided with SPS 2003 improved on WSS by giving each team site automatic awareness of the other team sites. Instead of piling up information in isolated, little-used islands and letting duplicate documents run rampant, the Site Directory kept information sources organized, tidily indexed, and searchable — automatically — from the get-go. Result: information assets were a lot easier to find, access, and use. Figure 1-3 shows the software architecture of SPS 2003, which made all this magic possible.
SharePoint gets new powers
By 2003, the third generation of SharePoint was well underway; the changes in its architecture had paid off with market success. The three-tier server architecture was flexible, but Microsoft had limited the number of physical implementations to three — for small, medium, and large server farms. But larger enterprises wanted larger-scale deployments so they could save costs by running (and supporting) fewer software products. The success of SharePoint led to a cry for more functionality — especially in the area of Web content management (managing the information that is ultimately published on Web pages). If enterprises could use SPS 2003 for internal Web sites, why couldn’t they use it out there on the World Wide Web as well?
Figure 1-3: SPS 2003 software archi-tecture.
Having purchased Ncompass Labs, Microsoft could address Web content management with Ncompass Content Management Server (CMS). But there was confusion in the market over whether to use SharePoint or CMS. Both software products were fine for creating content and publishing it for use with a Web browser. Much of the same functionality needed for putting external content on the Web could put internal content on internal Web sites. Microsoft figured that out and integrated CMS 2002 into SharePoint 2003. This addition, probably more than anything else, sparked the next generation of SharePoint.
As Microsoft developed the 2007 version of SharePoint — in particular, Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) — the focus was on meeting enterprise-scale needs by getting content management to work seamlessly with collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services delivered the central platform services (in particular, storage and security). Building on this strong foundation, Microsoft targeted six “solution areas” (as shown in Figure 1-4):
♦ Collaboration: To bring collaboration up to date, WSS included more “modern” ways of collaborating through wikis and blogs.
♦ Portal: MOSS offered portal features that allowed relevant content to be targeted at people and supported the first social features in its “My Site” implementation.
♦ Search: MOSS provided search capabilities that were well suited to large Enterprises that had information held in multiple repositories.
♦ Content management: MOSS provided features that allowed you to apply policy to your information assets and workflows to help automate their life cycle.
♦ Business forms: MOSS embarked into the electronic forms arena allowing forms to be more accessible through the browser.
♦ Business intelligence: MOSS provided tools that would make it easier to analyze business data resulting in better business decisions
Figure 1-4: MOSS solution areas.
MOSS also changed how Web pages would be constructed: Master Pages, Page Layouts, and Content Pages worked together to ensure a consistent user interface across all sites.
Authentication was as desperately needed as the six solution areas — and because MOSS used ASP.NET 2.0 as its underlying platform, improvements were also possible in that area. After all, if your company is building Web sites that have to grapple with the wilds of the Internet, then it needs an industrial-strength authentication mechanism. Standard Windows authentication just won’t cut it. So MOSS added pluggable authentication — authenticating users by plugging the credentials they supply into the appropriate resource — whether a simple list of names or a database that supports more elaborate verification. Authenticated users could then have authorized access to internal content.
MOSS also provided capabilities that could “light up” individual sites by giving them custom features that could be independently developed, installed on the server, and then switched on and off within each site. The simplest example was what you could do with lists: All standard lists in a team site (Announcements, Contacts, and so on) were contained in a feature called “Team Collaboration Lists” — and switching off this feature in a team site would disable access to all its standard lists. In effect, the company could now have more control over who could see what lists — and team sites could be custom-tailored to match access privileges.
To support the business intelligence and business forms, MOSS gave the server more roles to play in managing applications — chiefly these:
♦ Excel Services allowed Excel spreadsheets to be published to the server and provided browser access to the data they contained.
♦ InfoPath Services
