MS SharePoint 2010 For Reader, Authors and Site Managers Part 1

What is Sharepoint?

Sharepoint is the platform where different kinds of people or differenet roles of people can sharedata, collaborate and customize as per the requirement.

It is central enterprise information portal where organization's different people could share their documents, works and various project related information with their colleagues.

Here, as a developer who could customize the functionality and appearance of WebSite in SharePoint portal.

Here, as a developer who could customize the functionality and appearance of WebSite in SharePoint portal.

History and Versions in SharePoint: 

SharePoint came in Two Main flavors (1) MOSS (2) MS SharePoint 2010 Server.

MOSS:

SharePoint Server 2010:

Hardware and Software requirement: 

Create demo SharePoint site in SharePoint Portal in below format

Solution For SharePoint Readers....

What is MS SharePoint 2010:

SharePoint allows people to create websites with different content and different purposes. Its many built-in features and components make it a comprehensive solution that can fit many needs. One common use of SharePoint in organizations is to create sites that are used for team collaboration. These collaborative sites, also known as team sites or group work sites, enable team members to better work with one another. They can use the site to share documents, assign tasks, track team events on a shared web calendar, and much more. This use is known as a team collaboration system.

Many companies use SharePoint for their central document storage, replacing network folders. This use is known as an electronic document management system.Another common use is as a corporate portal where the corporate employees can go and download forms, read corporate news, fill in surveys, and search for documents. This use is known as an electronic content management system or an intranet.

Finally, some companies choose the SharePoint platform as the platform for their Internet sites—where visitors from around the world can visit the company’s website and read about the company’s products, register for events, and do whatever it is the site has been configured to allow them to do. This use is known as a web content management system.

This variety of possible uses of SharePoint indicate the flexibility of the SharePoint platform. It is highly customizable—which means that one SharePoint site may look entirely different from another SharePoint site. This book shows mostly basic SharePoint sites (sites that have not been customized), and the sites that you will be using may look significantly different. 

Difference Between SPF and SharePoint Server:

SharePoint Server is an extension of SPF. SharePoint Server sites have features that are not available in SPF sites, and they enjoy all the features of SPF sites.

SPF sites work well for collaboration sites. Such a site gives groups of people the ability to upload and download documents, use discussion boards, assign tasks, share events, and use workflows. However, SPF does not have enough features to be a good platform for a corporate portal or for a corporate search solution. SharePoint Server offers extra features that upgrade SPF into a platform that can serve a corporation with enterprise searching (searching from one location across all the sites that corporate has and on documents and external systems that are stored in other locations, not just in SharePoint). It also has features for storing details about people and searching on them, and it enables employees to have their own personal sites where they can store documents (instead of on their machines). 

SharePoint Server has many more features related to business intelligence and business processes and forms.  SharePoint Server has a publishing feature that enables site managers to create publishing sites where it is easy to author pages (as opposed to documents) and publish them using workflows. This is very important for large corporations that want to, for example, publish corporate news using an approval workflow or build an Internet site where every page must go through a special approval process.

What Is Microsoft FAST Search?

FAST is an optional component of SharePoint Server that an organization can have installed on top of SharePoint. It adds further intelligence to the regular SharePoint search experience by enhancing the search options and how the search results are returned. If FAST is installed on a SharePoint site, you see more options than you would normally get in SharePoint. Chapter 4, “Searching in SharePoint,” provides some examples of these options.

How to Tell Whether a Site Is Based on SPF or SharePoint Server

There is no way to tell just by looking whether a site is hosted on a server that has SharePoint Server installed. Customizations that a company might have developed may cause an SPF site to look as if it has some extensions that come with SharePoint Server. On the other hand, customizations can cause a SharePoint Server site to look simpler; for example, it might remove the SharePoint Server–specific links that help identify a site as a SharePoint Server site.

However, there is one thing you can look for in most SharePoint sites to determine with a fair degree of certainty whether a site is SharePoint Server or SPF: You can look for the My Site link under the name drop-down at the top of the screen. If you see that link, you are viewing a site that is running on a server with SharePoint Server. Not having the link does not necessarily mean that the site does not have SharePoint Server, however, because the administrator can choose to disable that functionality.

What Is a Site?

The structure of SharePoint sites (sometimes referred to as webs) is very different from the structure of typical Internet sites that contain only pages. In SharePoint, a site can house more than just pages. It is a container that holds lists and libraries (discussed later in this chapter), and it can have other sites under it.

For example, a corporate portal might have a home site called SharePoint Intranet that contains information that people see when they browse to that site. That portal also might have a subsite called Human Resources that stores forms such as travel requests, expense claims, and other forms. The two sites are linked because the Human Resources site is under the SharePoint Intranet site. The two sites may share some attributes, such as security (who is allowed to do what in the sites) and navigation (so that visitors to the sites can navigate between the sites), but they have separate contents. 

Every SharePoint site is a member of a site collection. As the name implies, a site collection is a collection of sites. Every site collection has a single site as its root site, and other sites can be built under the root site. A site collection has some attributes that are common to all the sites in that collection (for example, some search settings, a Recycle Bin for deleted items).

What Is a Personal Site?

A personal site is a site that belongs to a specific user and is used to show user information that belongs, personally, to that user. The user can upload documents to a personal document library in the personal site, and only that user will be able to see and manage these documents. The personal site is also a place where users can manage their personal favorite items and comments that they have tagged throughout SharePoint or even outside SharePoint (see “What Is Tagging?” later in this chapter). The personal site has special pages with information that might be important to track. A user can track information by using news feeds that tell you what your colleagues are up to. In addition, users can run searches and stay up-to-date on those subjects. In addition, the personal site is usually the place from which users can modify their personal details in the corporate directory.

A personal site usually has components that display information targeted specifically to that user. For example, it might have components that show the user’s e-mail, or upcoming meetings from the person’s calendar, and a list of documents the user has recently worked on and tasks assigned to the user.

What Is a Ribbon?

As part of the Microsoft Office product family, SharePoint 2010 uses a design concept called a ribbon to display different menus and buttons, depending on what you are looking at. It is important to know how to use the ribbon so you can move around in a site and perform actions in it.

What Is a List?

A SharePoint list is a container for information, similar to a very simple database or spreadsheet. Using a list is the most common way to manage information in a SharePoint site.

In a list, data is gathered in rows, and each row is known as a list item. A list can have multiple columns—also known as properties,fields, or metadata. So a list item is a row with data in those columns.

For example, a list of contacts may have the following columns:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company
• Phone

These columns may have the following list items:

• First Name: John
• Last Name: Doe
• Company: Extelligent Design
• Phone: 1800-000-000

Lists can be used in many cases. For example, you might use lists for links, tasks, discussions, announcements, or events. In SharePoint, users can create lists and columns. Lists can be used for almost anything that can be described by a group of columns.

Different lists can have different security settings. For example, list managers can define who is allowed to add items to a list, who is allowed to edit items, who is allowed to read the items, and so on. Similarly, each list item can have its own security settings, so different list items can be visible to different people. For example, an item that is a link to a restricted site can have security settings that prevent users who don’t have access to that site from seeing it.

In some lists, you can attach files to list items—very much like attachments in e-mail. For example, in a contacts list, you could attach to each contact a picture and a resume. Or in a list of tasks, you might attach documentation of what needs to be done to the task.

What Is an External List?

An external list is unlike other SharePoint lists. Strictly speaking, it is not a SharePoint list at all because it doesn’t store information inside it. An external list is a view on external data—that is, data that is contained not within SharePoint but in external databases and systems.When you add external lists to SharePoint sites, they are displayed in an interface that looks almost exactly like a regular SharePoint list. An external list also allows most of the same interactions with the items in the list that are offered with a regular SharePoint list. 

What Is a Document Library?

A document library a special instance of a list, in which every list item is a file, as shown in Figure 1.8. Files can be Microsoft Office documents, Adobe Acrobat documents (PDF files), or any other type of file that the system administrator allows. 

Most of the attributes of lists exist in document libraries. In fact, lists and documents libraries are similar in many ways. However, each item in a document library is a file. Therefore, when creating a new item in a document library, you need to either upload a file or create one. 

Additionally, unlike in lists, in document libraries, each row can hold only one file. There isn’t an option to attach more files to the row. Essentially, the file itself is the row. Also, because a file can be downloaded, visitors to document libraries have different options available to them when browsing a document library than they have with lists. Several special document libraries templates are available in SharePoint. These templates are designed for specific types of content, but they are essentially document libraries. 

What Is a Wiki Page Library?

A wiki page library is a special instance of a document library that is designed to store web pages. On those web pages, you can display different types of content—text, images, videos, and web parts. 

What Is a Form Library?

A form library is much like a document library, but it is supposed to host only Microsoft InfoPath forms. Microsoft InfoPath is electronic form-creation software that integrates with SharePoint. Forms created with InfoPath can be published to SharePoint form libraries, and users can then fill out these forms.

With SharePoint Server, you can load some InfoPath forms without having Microsoft InfoPath installed on your machine. In this case, the form opens in a browser, as a web form. If you have a program that can edit InfoPath forms, such as Microsoft InfoPath 2007 or Microsoft InfoPath Filler 2010, the form opens in that program.

What Is an Asset Library?

An asset library is a special instance of a document library that is specially designed to store digital assets such as images, audio files, and videos.

This kind of library (shown in Figure 1.9) can be used as a repository for media files that will be used throughout the SharePoint environment—for example, corporate logos, training videos, and podcasts.

What Is a Slide Library?

A slide library is a special type of library that has features not available in other types. This library type (shown in Figure 1.10) is designed to help people in an organization collaborate to create PowerPoint presentations by sharing slides. One user can allow other users to import those slides into their presentations.

What Is a Picture Library?

A picture library is a special type of a document library that is dedicated to images. A picture library is useful for sharing photos with other people. For example, you can have a picture library as your stock photo repository

What Is a View?

Using views is a useful way for a list manager to create different ways to show the information in a list or library. Different views may show different columns and have different sorting and filtering, grouping, and styles.

In SharePoint, views can be either public or private:

Public— The list’s or library’s managers create public views, and these views are available to anyone to use.

Private— Users create private views. Only the user who created a private view can use that view. You may, for example, create a private view and customize it to show the information that you usually need to find the items or files that you usually work with.

There are several types of views in SharePoint. Most of the views that you will see are the standard tabular views that resemble printed worksheets—with column headers and values in rows but no ability to edit the data directly. However, some special view styles show the information in the list in different ways. For example, the Datasheet view allows directly editing the data, and a Calendar view shows items as part of a calendar.

A Calendar view shows the items in a list based on dates that are set on the items. Other views include the Gantt view and the Datasheet view. The Gantt view is similar to the Calendar view: It shows information based on dates in the list items’ properties. The Datasheet view is a Microsoft Excel–like view that allows copying and pasting of data into the list or library.

What Are Web Parts?

Web parts are the building blocks of pages in SharePoint. They are components that show data, and they can be placed in certain regions of a page—known as web part zones. A page can hold many web parts, in different zones or in the same zone. They may be one under another in some zones and side-by-side in other zones.

For example, to show on the home page of a site the contents of a list of links, you can use a web part that displays the content of a list.

What Are Alerts?

Using alerts is a great way to be notified by e-mail of changes in lists and libraries or even specific documents or list items.

SharePoint has a built-in alert mechanism that enables users to register for different kinds of alerts. Basically, a user selects the piece of content she wants to be alerted on and requests that SharePoint send her an e-mail when that content changes.

For example, you might use alerts with a document library that is supposed to have documents regarding a specific topic. You might want to know immediately when a new document is added to that document library (see Figure 1.24). As another example, you might want to know when a particular policy document is changed (for example, the corporate travel policy might be very important to people who travel a lot). Alerts enable you to request to be notified when changes like these occur.

What Is a Site Column?

A site column is a column for a list or a document library that can be used in all document libraries or lists in the site in which it is created, as well as in the subsites for that site.

A site manager can define a specific column of data once and manage it from a central location instead of creating that column many times in many lists and libraries. In addition, content types can only use site columns. (In lists and libraries, on the other hand, columns can be created separately.)

What Is a Content Type?

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, lists and document libraries can store different kinds of content, known as content types. A site manager can create and manage the content types in a site. The content types are then available in that site and in all the sites under it. The different types of content may have different site columns and/or different settings, such as policies and workflows, associated with them. Content types can use site columns only for column definitions. This means that to create a content type, you must choose what site columns should be included in that content type.

A simple example of a content type is a list of contacts that stores two types of contacts—an internal contact and an external contact. The Internal Contact content type is used for a contact inside the company—and as such does not need the company property because all internal contacts are from the same company. However, the External Contact content type does require the company property because every contact may be from a different company. Hence, a single list has two different column requirements.

As another example of the use of content types, consider a document library where you store many different types of documents. Some documents are presentations, and some are financial reports, while others are user guides and product whitepapers. The differences between those content types are possibly more than just different columns: The content types can also specify different templates that users should use when creating documents of these types. For example, when creating a presentation, a Microsoft PowerPoint template will be used. When creating a financial report, a user will get a specific Microsoft Excel workbook as a template from which to start. User guides may be from a certain Microsoft Word template, while product whitepapers may be PDF documents. Some of these examples are shown in Figure 1.25, which shows the content type options for creating a new document in a document library.

What Is Tagging?

Tagging is a social web mechanism available in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Server (not in SPF) that enables you as the user to tag a document or a list item or a even a page—in the SharePoint site or outside it. You can tag something to help remember it and find it more easily later on.

One tag that SharePoint comes with is the I Like It tag. This tag enables you to signify that you like a document or a page, and then other people can see that you liked it. You can easily find that document or page again by looking at the list of items you’ve tagged as things you like (usually from your personal site).  Tagging isn’t limited to I Like It, however. You can add new tags as shown in Figure 1.26, and you can remove and rename tags. Depending on what the tag manager configured for the site, you might be able to tag objects in your site under different tags.

What Is Managed Metadata?

Available only through Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Server (not SPF), managed metadata is a mechanism that enables administrators to create hierarchical term sets that can then be used in document libraries and lists as columns.

A term set is similar to a list that contains items, except that these items can contain more items under them in a hierarchy. For example, if you have a term set called Products, you could have a term for each product that you have in the organization.

What Are Versions?

Document libraries and lists in SharePoint have an option to track versions. This option stores old versions of files or items each time a change is made. For example, if a user uploads a document, and then another user edits the document and saves it, SharePoint saves the original document as a version of the file. Later, users can look at the version history of the file and choose to open a specific version or restore it (that is, make that version the current one).

SharePoint supports two types of versioning. In the first type, each change is regarded as a major change, and the version numbers go from 1 (the first time a document was uploaded) to 2 (after the first change) and then 3 and 4 and so on as shown in Figure 1.28. In the second type, each change is regarded as a minor change, unless the user specifies that it is a major one. The version numbers go from 0.1 (the first time a document was uploaded) to 0.2 (the first change) and so on, until a user selects the option to perform a major change, and the version number changes to 1.0, and subsequent changes raise it to 1.1, 1.2, and so on.

What Is a Workflow?

In SharePoint, a workflow is a series of steps—some automatic, some manual—that must be performed as part of a business process for a document or a list item.

For example, the most common workflows for documents are review and approval. Some important documents (for example, contracts) need to go through several steps of approval from different people before they can be officially considered final and published