SharePoint 2010 Site Owner's Manual: Flexible Collaboration without Programming

By Yvonne M. Harryman

Summary

SharePoint 2010 Site Owner's Manual teaches you what SharePoint 2010 is all about and how to get started using it. The book also includes step-by-step scenarios for implementing real-world scenarios. You will learn how to build powerful sites leveraging SharePoint's out-of-the-box functionality along with other helpful tools such as InfoPath, Access, and SharePoint Designer.
About this Book
This book is a guide for business users without programming skills who want to build their own SharePoint sites. With it, you'll learn how to set up document sharing, trackable workflows, and many other business applications. You'll go step-by-step through real-world scenarios like content management, business intelligence, sharing information on the web, and search. Along the way, you'll learn how to interact with other business tools like Access, InfoPath, and SharePoint Designer.

This book is designed for SharePoint users who want to become tech-savvy in configuring SharePoint's out-of-the-box functionality. No programming or system administration experience is required.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.
What's Inside

• Go from user to power user
• Build on out-of-the-box features
• Customize your SharePoint site

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Table of Contents

PART 1 GETTING STARTED WITH SHAREPOINT
1. Leveraging the power of SharePoint
2. A deeper dive into SharePoint capabilities
3. Creating sites using site and list templates
PART 2 IMPLEMENTATIONS USING REAL-WORLD SCENARIOS
4. Setting up a document collaboration site
5. Leveraging enterprise content management features
6. Publishing information to the web
7. Empowering users with business intelligence
8. Creating application sites with SharePoint Designer
9. Collecting and managing data by integrating with InfoPath
10. Reporting and web applications using Access
11. Pulling it all together with search, My Sites, and cross-site functionality

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manning
• Release date: Feb 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781638351795

Yvonne M. Harryman

Yvonne M. Harryman is an Architect at Microsoft, specializing in SharePoint technologies. She has implemented and designed SharePoint solutions for clients such as the White House, the US Air Force, National Institute of Health, Iron Mountain, Ingersoll-Rand, and many others.

Book preview

Copyright

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Dedication

To my husband and son

Brief Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

About this book

1. Getting started with SharePoint

Chapter 1. Leveraging the power of SharePoint

Chapter 2. A deeper dive into SharePoint capabilities

Chapter 3. Creating sites using site and list templates

2. Implementations using real-world scenarios

Chapter 4. Setting up a document collaboration site

Chapter 5. Leveraging enterprise content management features

Chapter 6. Publishing information to the web

Chapter 7. Empowering users with business intelligence

Chapter 8. Creating application sites with SharePoint Designer

Chapter 9. Collecting and managing data by integrating with InfoPath

Chapter 10. Reporting and web applications using Access

Chapter 11. Pulling it all together with search, My Sites, and cross-site functionality

Appendix A. Setting up a test environment

Appendix B. Creating your first site

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

About this book

1. Getting started with SharePoint

Chapter 1. Leveraging the power of SharePoint

1.1. Say hi to SharePoint

1.1.1. What is SharePoint?

1.1.2. Why SharePoint

1.1.3. What’s new in SharePoint 2010

1.2. SharePoint sample (Hello World)

1.2.1. The Hello World site

1.3. Summary

Chapter 2. A deeper dive into SharePoint capabilities

2.1. Introducing SharePoint 2010

2.1.1. SharePoint’s six core capabilities

2.1.2. SharePoint Foundation functionality

2.1.3. SharePoint Server functionality

2.1.4. SharePoint site terminology plain and simple

2.2. Summary

Chapter 3. Creating sites using site and list templates

3.1. Building templates with the different SharePoint editions

3.2. Core list and library templates

3.2.1. Document Library template

3.2.2. Picture Library template

3.2.3. Asset Library template

3.2.4. Announcements list

3.2.5. Contacts list

3.2.6. Links list

3.2.7. Calendar list

3.2.8. Tasks list

3.2.9. Discussion Board list

3.2.10. Survey list

3.3. Learning about the site templates

3.3.1. SharePoint Foundation

3.3.2. SharePoint Foundation collaborative site templates

3.3.3. SharePoint Foundation meeting site templates

3.3.4. Out-of-the-box site templates for SharePoint Server

3.3.5. SharePoint Server Standard templates

3.3.6. SharePoint Server Enterprise templates

3.3.7. SharePoint Server Access Services templates

3.4. Summary

2. Implementations using real-world scenarios

Chapter 4. Setting up a document collaboration site

4.1. Managing business proposal resources

4.1.1. Situation

4.1.2. Business priorities

4.1.3. Solution

4.2. SharePoint Foundation features

4.2.1. Branding

4.2.2. Contacts list: tracking the human resources

4.2.3. Document libraries: managing the proposals and resumes

4.2.4. Web parts: customizing the Proposal Reviews homepage

4.2.5. Linking resources and resumes with proposals

4.3. SharePoint Server features

4.3.1. Publishing: working with publishing sites

4.4. Summary

Chapter 5. Leveraging enterprise content management features

5.1. Managing business proposal resources

5.1.1. Situation

5.1.2. Business priorities

5.1.3. Solution

5.2. SharePoint Foundation features

5.2.1. Content types: associating metadata with certain content

5.3. SharePoint Server features

5.3.1. Retention plan: creating an information management policy

5.4. Summary

Chapter 6. Publishing information to the web

6.1. Determining what information to make available for your guests

6.1.1. Situation

6.1.2. Solution

6.2. Setting up a SharePoint site for the internet

6.3. Configuring your site

6.3.1. Site pages: defining the information you want to share

6.3.2. Calendar

6.3.3. Discussion boards: let your audience communicate

6.3.4. Surveys

6.3.5. Embedded video

6.4. Blogs: creating a subsite to blog

6.5. Permissions: managing access to your site

6.5.1. Anonymous access

6.5.2. List-level permissions

6.5.3. Item-level permissions

6.5.4. Subsite permissions

6.6. Taking it further with SharePoint Server

6.6.1. Embedded video: SharePoint Server’s Media web part

6.7. Summary

Chapter 7. Empowering users with business intelligence

7.1. Determining what information to make available for your guests

7.1.1. Situation

7.1.2. Solution

7.2. Setting up a SharePoint Business Intelligence Center

7.3. Creating your data source

7.4. Configuring your Business Intelligence Center

7.4.1. Excel Web Access

7.4.2. Creating a KPI in a Status List

7.4.3. Adding dashboards

7.5. Summary

Chapter 8. Creating application sites with SharePoint Designer

8.1. Gathering certification status

8.1.1. Situation

8.1.2. Solution

8.2. Using SharePoint Designer with SharePoint Foundation

8.2.1. Creating your Foundation site

8.2.2. Custom list: creating a data store of current projects

8.2.3. XSLT List View web part (LVWP): displaying Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist

8.2.4. Default workflows: creating an approval process

8.2.5. Item-level permissions: configuring the items users can manage

8.2.6. Survey: getting input from your end users

8.3. Leveraging SharePoint Server to take it further

8.3.1. Approval workflow: adding actions to your workflows

8.3.2. Status indicators: tracking the certification goals

8.4. Summary

Chapter 9. Collecting and managing data by integrating with InfoPath

9.1. Gathering employee feedback

9.1.1. Situation

9.1.2. Solution

9.2. Using InfoPath with SharePoint Foundation

9.2.1. Creating your site

9.2.2. Custom list: creating a data store of current projects

9.2.3. Forms library: creating a library to manage the feedback form

9.2.4. InfoPath: creating your feedback form

9.2.5. InfoPath workflow: configuring how users see the data

9.2.6. Publishing: publishing the form to SharePoint

9.2.7. Form library views: displaying the forms

9.3. Leveraging Forms Services with SharePoint Server

9.3.1. Forms Services: accessing the form without InfoPath

9.3.2. Page Viewer web part: displaying your form

9.4. Summary

Chapter 10. Reporting and web applications using Access

10.1. Managing hardware reservations

10.1.1. Situation

10.1.2. Solution

10.2. Leveraging Access with SharePoint Foundation

10.2.1. Creating your Foundation site

10.2.2. Custom list: creating a data store to manage clients, hardware, and reservations

10.2.3. Linked tables: pulling the data into Access

10.2.4. Client query: integrating the data in the different tables

10.2.5. Client reports: displaying the data

10.3. Using Access Services with SharePoint Server

10.3.1. Local tables: managing the data in Access

10.3.2. Web forms: entering data using a web form

10.3.3. Web query: generating a web query

10.3.4. Web reports: generating reports to see reservations by type and client

10.3.5. Navigation web form: tying your reports and forms together

10.3.6. Access Services: publishing your data to SharePoint

10.4. Summary

Chapter 11. Pulling it all together with search, My Sites, and cross-site functionality

11.1. Search

11.1.1. Search Center

11.1.2. Search web parts

11.2. Cross-site configurations

11.2.1. Content Query web part

11.2.2. RSS

11.2.3. Site Aggregator

11.3. Site collection administrator capabilities

11.3.1. Information architecture

11.3.2. Web Analytics reports

11.3.3. Managing access requests

11.3.4. Custom permissions

11.4. My Site

11.4.1. Creating your My Site

11.4.2. Working with your colleagues

11.4.3. Setting your interests

11.4.4. Working with newsfeeds

11.4.5. Managing your content

11.4.6. Your public profile page

11.5. Summary

Appendix A. Setting up a test environment

A.1. Ensuring your computer meets the requirements

A.1.1. Is your system 64-bit?

A.1.2. Upgrading to a 64-bit operating system

A.2. Prerequisites and installing SharePoint

A.3. Configuring a site with Office 365

Appendix B. Creating your first site

B.1. Initial creation of your site

B.1.1. Site creation properties

B.1.2. Site creation

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

Preface

I’ve been working in SharePoint consulting for over 10 years, and with time I began to realize the lack of books on the market that showed tech-savvy business users just how easy SharePoint is to use. I would go in and build systems for major corporations and government agencies around the world, and in most cases toward the end of the engagement there would still be some hours remaining because I had completed the job ahead of schedule. I often would use this time to meet with the business owners and educate them on how to use the new system. I would listen to what their pain points were and make suggestions on how they could leverage SharePoint to help manage and automate their business needs. The reaction from this was amazing: clients would tell me that they had paid companies a significant amount of money in the past to implement similar solutions; they had no idea how easy it was to do this leveraging SharePoint functionality. This is what prompted me to write a book and to make it scenario-based.

You’ll find many technical books on SharePoint that discuss how to build out the infrastructure or do development with SharePoint, and you may find a few step-by-step books on SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality. What’s unique about this book is that it teaches you this functionality in a scenario format. I chose to use that format to ensure that you exercise your imagination to realize the many options for using SharePoint’s built-in functionality.

I’ve been working in the SharePoint space for a long time, and I feel strongly that other consultants and I should be going into organizations to help install and build out farms to scale and perform for their user base and to help migrate or implement complex systems on their platform. With that said, there are many systems that could be easily built and have big impact without requiring you to run to the techies. I hope this book educates you on how to spot and envision those opportunities so you can get started using SharePoint in a way that will impress your peers.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank Manning Publications, especially publisher Marjan Bace and my editor Cynthia Kane, and everyone who helped with the development and production of the book. Special thanks to Phil Cohen for providing his technical insights during the technical proofread of the final manuscript.

For their thoughtful comments on the content, I’d like to thank the readers who participated in the Manning Early Access Program and provided feedback in the Author Online forum, and to the following reviewers who read the manuscript at various stages during its development: Andrew Totmakov, Monty J. Grusendorf, Anil Radhakrishna, Sean Hogg, Nikander Bruggeman, Margriet Bruggeman, Richard Siddaway, Kunal Mittal, John Powell, Christian Siegers, John Timney, Linley Schaller, Sanchet Dighe, Prajwal Khanal, Ed Richard, Berndt Hamboeck, Rama Krishna, Paula Shank, Tony Niemann, and Amos Bannister.

To my parents, thanks for inspiring me to always achieve great things, and to my family, thanks for enduring the late nights of work on the book. I dedicate this book to my husband Luke, and my son Luca, and thank them for keeping me sane and making sure I always have balance in my life as well as freedom to pursue my passions. Tigy, your video game time may suffer now that the book is done!

Without all the people mentioned here, and also those who worked behind the scenes and whose names I don’t know, this book would have never made it to publication.

About this book

Part 1 is designed to acquaint you with SharePoint and to teach you about its functionality. Part 2 will then guide you through the different components of SharePoint. You’ll learn about the functionality associated with each of these components in a step-by-step fashion, while building out a usable scenario. Each situation is drawn from a real-world scenario that I’ve encountered, and you may be able to adapt them for your own use.

Who should read this book

This book is intended for tech-savvy business users:

An end user of SharePoint who doesn’t have a computer science degree but wants to optimize the technology they have at hand

The developer who doesn’t understand SharePoint’s built-in capabilities

The SharePoint developer/user who is new to SharePoint 2010

Roadmap

This book consists of 11 chapters divided into two parts as follows:

Part 1 Getting started with SharePoint introduces you to SharePoint terminology, capablities, and out-of-the-box features.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to SharePoint—what it is and why you should be using it—and a look at what is new in SharePoint 2010.

Chapter 2 offers a broad overview of SharePoint 2010 and its out-of-the-box capabilities, along with a look at the functionality associated with the different releases of SharePoint.

Chapter 3 covers the core components of SharePoint and shows how to create a site with out-of-the-box templates.

Part 2 Implementations using real-world scenarios will show you how you can customize and create your own site templates, based on real-world scenarios.

Chapter 4 guides you in how to set up a document collaboration site and covers site branding, document libraries and collaboration features, as well as custom lists and lookup fields.

Chapter 5 discusses how to leverage enterprise content management features, such as content types, information management policy, and retention schedules.

In chapter 6 you will learn how to publish content to the web, using hosted internet-facing sites, blogs, lists, discussion boards, and surveys.

Chapter 7 focuses on the business intelligence capabilities of Share-Point and describes different scenarios to show you how you can use it knowledge-mine your data to create business reports.

Chapter 8 covers how to create application sites with SharePoint Designer, including how to manage and create lists, apply conditional formatting, and configure out-of-the-box list workflows.

Chapter 9 discusses how to collect and manage data and integrate it with InfoPath, using forms libraries, InfoPath forms, and forms services.

In chapter 10, you will learn how to use Access with SharePoint, including Access features like linked and local tables, queries, reports, forms, and Access Services.

Chapter 11 helps you to pull it all together with search, My Sites, and web parts that enable you to pull data across sites.

The book has two appendixes: appendix A helps you set up your test environment and install and configure SharePoint on your computer; appendix B will walk you through the steps needed to create your first site.

Code conventions and software requirements

This book doesn’t require you to be a developer or do any coding. The solutions will be just as powerful as solutions that are developed from code and will be implemented through the SharePoint user interface and Microsoft Office tools. You’ll quickly see how easily you can develop your own solutions using a no-code approach.

Ideally, you should have access to a SharePoint environment for experimenting. If you don’t, appendix A will walk you through the steps to set up an environment for building the scenarios. It will also include the details of any software requirements. Appendix B helps you create your first site.

Author Online

Purchase of SharePoint 2010 Site Owner’s Manual includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/SharePoint2010SiteOwnersManual. This page provides information on how to get on the forum once you’re registered, what kind of help is available, and the rules of conduct on the forum.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It’s not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the book’s forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions, lest her interest stray!

The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.

About the author

Yvonne M. Hamilton (Harryman) is a Solution Architect at Microsoft, specializing in SharePoint technologies. She has implemented and designed SharePoint solutions for clients such as the White House, US Air Force, National Institute of Health, Iron Mountain, the Gap, State of California, Peter Kiewit and Sons, WellPoint, Baxter, Ingersoll-Rand, and many others. Her key focus areas are Cloud solutions, Microsoft Rapid Application Development tools, Object Oriented Programming and Governance. Yvonne and her teammates have received many awards for the projects that they have designed. Her top awards include a letter of recognition from the White House Chief of Staff and the prestigious Circle of Excellence award at Microsoft; as important are some of the top team awards received directly from clients for work done at the National Institute of Health and Ingersoll-Rand.

Yvonne holds two degrees, a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Computer Information Systems. Her undergrad was completed at the College of Charleston and the Master’s was received from Johns Hopkins University. Yvonne is very active in the SharePoint community. You can find many of her past contributions under Yvonne Harryman; prior to the publication of this book she got married in Ireland and is now Yvonne Hamilton. Yvonne frequently travels around the US designing solutions for clients, but her home is in Seattle, WA, where she lives with her husband Luke, son Luca, and two rescue German Shepherd mixes.

Part 1. Getting started with SharePoint

Part 1 will give you an introduction to SharePoint and a rundown of all the SharePoint out-of-the-box functionality. You won’t build out scenarios step by step until part 2. If you like to learn hands on, feel free to jump to part 2 once you’ve read chapter 1. If you opt to do that, I recommend that before you start implementing your own solutions in SharePoint, you go back and read the rest of part 1. There’s a plethora of built-in functionality that may get you 80 percent of the way to your final solution. You should be aware of what those options are so you don’t recreate anything that may already exist.

Chapter 1. Leveraging the power of SharePoint

This chapter covers

What SharePoint is

Why you should be using SharePoint

What’s new in SharePoint 2010

Introduction to SharePoint by creating a Hello World site

Increasing collaboration capabilities has become one of the top priorities of businesses around the world. Imagine emailing a document to a customer with edits and then finding out that they had also been making changes to the document; now you have to merge pages of changes. What if you’re required to work from home because of a snowstorm, and the latest copy of the report you need is accessible only via your desktop at work? Problems with collaboration have caused many lost hours in companies and have therefore become a priority for businesses to resolve.

Using the array of tools that Microsoft now offers, people are finding effective ways to communicate and share their information. One key tool that’s being used to do this type of collaboration is SharePoint. Share-Point is an application that you can use to create websites that help people collaborate and communicate information. End users are using its powerful capabilities in web content management to share information with other users around the world via the web, sharing information with users even if they don’t have Microsoft Office, using features such as Office Web Access, Access Services, and Visio Services. SharePoint also enables you to collaborate simultaneously on the information without fear of overwriting each other’s changes by using versioning and co-authoring features.

SharePoint tools released in 2007 brought a higher standard of effective collaboration to the workforce. The introduction of a new permissions model for document collaboration, enhanced search features, and the Windows Workflow Foundation, along with many other features, enabled a new level of information management solutions. SharePoint tools released in 2010 have taken collaboration to the next level. This release is packed with enhanced features such as the rich Silverlight UI, a new Ribbon interface, and enhanced tools, which enable the power user to build application sites.

Before you continue reading through a series of scenarios discussed in part 2 that walk you through common problems business users are faced with and how SharePoint comes to the rescue, you need to understand what SharePoint is. In this chapter I’ll introduce you to SharePoint, tell you about what’s new to SharePoint 2010, and finish with a short example to get you started.

1.1. Say hi to SharePoint

In the real world when you first meet someone you learn a bit about them; likewise, here I’ll introduce you to SharePoint. This is a great get-to-know-you chapter for those readers who aren’t familiar with SharePoint. Here you’ll see what SharePoint is and why it’s so great. For those of you already familiar with SharePoint, this should be more of a recap of what you already know. In addition to the initial introduction, I’ll also touch on the new features for SharePoint 2010. By the end of this chapter, you and SharePoint will be at the beginning of a long-standing, beautiful friendship.

1.1.1. What is SharePoint?

SharePoint in its most basic form is a website that helps people collaborate and communicate information. It has a wide set of features that, when fully leveraged and configured, is