Beginning SharePoint 2007: Building Team Solutions with MOSS 2007 (Programmer to Programmer)

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

• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, often referred to as WSS, has the core document management and collaboration platform features. With WSS, the average information user can build web-based business applications without numerous technical resources. Because WSS is available free to the Windows Server 2003 system, deploying web-based applications has never been easier. This is largely because of templates and existing site modules that allow users to add documents, images, and information via a simple form rather than by using code. You can create a new site based on an existing template in just a few seconds. Windows SharePoint Services is also tightly integrated with Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and Outlook so users can create and share content using a familiar, comfortable environment.

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, often referred to as MOSS 2007, is the nexus of the Microsoft Office system. It delivers the robust, enterprise-targeted features of SharePoint Products and Technologies, which accelerate business processes across the intranet, extranet, and Internet. SharePoint delivers the tools to create, publish, and manage web-based content from a cohesive environment. SharePoint also offers the tools to automatically aggregate content from the Windows SharePoint Services team sites, rolling up content from multiple sources to a central location, making information management even easier.

WSS Primary Benefits

The primary features of WSS revolve around document and information management and collaboration. The following sections outline the major features of the platform that have been responsible for its wide adoption across the enterprise.

• More Effective Document and Task Collaboration:   Team websites offer access to information in a central location as well as the following capabilities:

  • An extranet-extendable single workspace for teams to share documents and information, coordinate schedules and tasks, and participate in forum-like discussions.

  • Libraries provide a better document creation and management environment. Libraries ensure that a document is checked out before editing, track a document’s audit history, or allow users to roll back to past revisions.

  • Document level security settings ensure that sensitive information is secure and available only to select individuals.

  • Advanced task-tracking lists and alert systems keep users updated on current and upcoming tasks.

  • Templates for creating wikis and blogs to share information across your organization quickly and easily.

• Reduced Implementation and Deployment Resources:   Because WSS is available to Windows Server 2003 customers as a free download, implementation time and cost is greatly reduced, resulting in the following benefits:

  • Deploying team collaboration sites is easy, so organizations can free up skilled resources and focus on more important tasks.

  • Users can immediately apply professional looking site themes.

  • Customized workspaces have prebuilt application templates for most common business processes, such as workflows.

  • Because WSS offers seamless integration with the Microsoft Office system, employees can use common applications such as Outlook email to create and manage documents without the need for a custom implementation.

• Better Control of Your Organization’s Important Business Data:   Windows SharePoint Services offer the following enhancements for data and information management and security:

  • Enhanced browser and command-line based administrative controls allow you to perform site provisioning, content management, support, and backup. Subsequently, a business can become more efficient and reduce costs.

  • You have more control over your corporate infrastructure. IT has access to security and policy settings at the lowest item level using enhanced administration services. WSS’s increased security and easy deployment mean your organization can reduce its dependency on skilled IT resources.

  • Using advanced administrative features, IT can set the parameters under which business units can provision sites and allow access, ensuring that all units fall within an acceptable security policy.

  • The Recycle Bin item retrieval and document versioning capabilities provide a safer storage environment.

• Embrace the Web for Collaboration:   By extending and customizing WSS, you can:

  • Create collaborative websites complete with document libraries that act as central repositories for creating, managing, and sharing documents with your team.

  • Create, connect, and customize a set of business applications specific to scaling your organizational needs.

  • Take advantage of Sharepoint Designer to customize and brand your team sites and applications.

Why Choose Windows SharePoint Services?

This section has a fictional but realistic scenario to illustrate how an organization uses Windows SharePoint Services to cope with the overwhelming amount of information generated by projects from their various teams. The fictional organization, Rossco Tech Consulting, offers professional services and technology mentoring to startup companies. The following scenario outlines the Rossco’s experience with SharePoint Products and Technologies, beginning with WSS and later expanding to SharePoint. Because so much of Rossco’s business revolves around process documentation, having a central repository to manage information surrounding projects is imperative. Because Rossco was using Windows Server 2003, Windows SharePoint Services became the obvious and most cost-efficient foundation on which to build solutions to manage their projects.

Planning

To identify what improvements they needed to make to enhance efficiency, the company asked team leads about the problems they were encountering when they shared information within their respective teams. From these results, the company identified the common issues each team shared and created a site hierarchy that best represented the organization’s corporate culture and business processes. Because the organization consisted of only three divisions (Finance, Marketing, and Operations), they opted for a single collection of sites: a main site for the organization as a whole, and three subsites, one for each division.

Because each division followed similar processes for most projects, the company could use SharePoint’s template system to create a single “project” site template that all teams could use to create a collaborative project location. The sites created from this template would then have the following features:

• A document library to create, store, and organize any documents related to the project

• A contact list to store and organize important contacts involved with the project

• A task list to coordinate important tasks for team members involved with the project

• An issue tracking list to highlight any potential project concerns

The template was created and then saved in a central site template gallery where each division could use it to generate a new site for each project.

Because Rossco had invested heavily in the creation of its corporate identity, it was imperative that this brand be carried over to the intranet and extranet sites. Using a combination of the built-in site themes, custom style sheets, master pages, and free downloadable application templates, Rossco transformed the default SharePoint environment into a more familiar, corporate-branded interface.

Moving from Plan to Practice

After defining the organization structure via team sites on the intranet, it was time to for Rossco Tech Consulting to put their hard work and planning into real-world practice. As teams began to understand the tools that they now had available, the following practices started to drive more efficient operations within the organization:

• Projects were quickly defined via sites created using the project site template. This allowed teams to set up a central environment to create, store, and share information about a particular project with the entire organization in just seconds.

• Appointments and important deadlines were created and tracked from a single shared calendar on the project site that everyone on a team could easily view.

• Contact information was added to a central location so that team members could easily contact one another and other key partners or stakeholders for the project.

• Important project documents were moved to the document repository of their respective project sites where changes became easier to track and security became more manageable.

• Users began to create email alerts on the task and issues lists, ensuring that tasks and issues were dealt with in a timely manner.

As each division began defining its role in important projects, executives realized that they now had a bird’s eye view of operations within the organization - a discovery which was met with great enthusiasm.

SharePoint Primary Features

SharePoint provides enterprise tools that connect people, processes, and information in a central location. The following sections outline some of the more commonly used Enterprise features in SharePoint.

• Web Content Management:   You use familiar applications, such as email or a web browser to create and publish web content. Built-in tools make it easy to:

  • Control documents via rights management and extensible policy management.

  • Centrally create, store, and manage documents using built-in document library settings to define workflow and retention settings or even add new content types.

  • Manage web content using page layouts and master pages to create reusable templates and variations to control multilingual content.

  • Reduce the need for manual data entry with electronic web-based or InfoPath client-based forms.

  • Use workflow tools to automate content approval and publishing processes.

• Monitor Key Business Activities:   Using enterprise tools, you can effectively manage and monitor business events across your organization to:

  • Manage critical business data through business intelligence portals using Dashboard capabilities, key performance indicators, and a sophisticated Report Center.

  • Quickly connect people with information using enterprise search. Use the Search Center to find people and information in your SharePoint environment and external systems.

  • Access important business information in real-time right from the browser, using features such as the Business Data Catalog and Excel Services.

  • Aggregate information from a wide variety of SharePoint sites onto a single page to provide a personalized rollup of relevant information based on customizable criteria.

• Simplify Collaboration:   SharePoint’s collaboration tools allow you to:

  • Enhance customer and partner relationships by connecting them with important data through intranet, extranet, and Internet-facing portals.

  • Work offline with SharePoint lists and libraries using Outlook, making it easier to work with information even when not connected to the corporate network.

  • Use people networks to connect people inside and outside your organization, ensuring that your organization has easy access to subject matter experts.

  • Personalize operations using My Sites. Display personal information about colleagues, managers, and groups.

Why Choose SharePoint ?

You commonly use SharePoint in enterprise-level organizations where you must track and maintain operations via multiple mini-portals and business applications within the same main infrastructure. You can then gather the important data from all units up to a central location. A common place you might see SharePoint is a software support company. This section again presents the fictional company, Rossco Tech Consulting, to show how SharePoint operates. Rossco Tech Consulting has expanded operations to support a major software manufacturer. This means providing English-, French-, and German-speaking customers with an Internet support portal where they can access up-to-the-minute information on the manufacturer’s various software offerings.

Planning

While doing needs analysis, the following factors were major contributors in Rossco’s decision to use SharePoint as the platform on which to build its customer support portal:

• The portal must accommodate multiple products from a central Internet-facing location. Each product has its own unique support materials.

• The portal must serve up content in multiple languages, though the original content would be created in English and then translated.

• For legal reasons, support documentation must be published via a strict approval process involving several individuals in the organization.

• The portal must accommodate speedy publishing of up-to-date information on emerging products.

• Additional documentation exists beyond what is stored in the SharePoint sites. This content must be indexed and accessible via the SharePoint search interface.

• Specific reporting requirements exist for dashboard scorecards on progress related to specific requirements, as well as the aggregation of information from multiple sources on a single page.

Moving from Plan to Practice

With the planning needs in mind, Rossco set out to plan and implement a SharePoint solution. The following section outlines the company’s experience.

• Internet-Facing Sites in SharePoint:   Because users will access a major part of the portal via the Internet, they created the initial site collection with a special publishing feature available only in SharePoint 2007 (this feature was previously in Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, and is now known as Web Content Management or WCM). This makes it possible to publish content through an automated and scheduled process from an internal and secured location to an external anonymous Internet-facing site.

• Multilingual Design:   Because the portal needed to service three languages, the company used Variations, a feature unique to SharePoint 2007, which helps you create a site hierarchy for each language. Variations simplify content management in multiple languages by creating a source site and a site for each language.

• Content Creation:   After creating the main subsites, the product teams created intuitively named lists and libraries (introduced later in this chapter) and added important documents and information. Making use of built-in features such as content types, site columns, and views, they created and presented the data more efficiently. To ensure that the portal was in line with the corporate brand, the portal was customized. Using the master pages feature, they created custom style sheets, page layouts, and content types to remodel the look and feel of the portal. This transformed the original site with its generic SharePoint look into an easy-to-use support interface. Using page layouts, they were able to empower key business users with no programming knowledge to create and publish branded web content such as newsletters and product updates.

• Automating Operations:   Taking advantage of SharePoint’s workflow features, Rossco created a strict content approval process that routed documents from approver to approver before they were finally publishing them to the Internet-facing portal.

• Content Aggregation:   Using built-in Web Parts, such as the Content Query Web Part, Rossco could gather the most sought-after and important information in its sub sites and funnel this information to the Internet-facing portal where users had quick and easy access to support information for multiple products at a glance.