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

In this chapter, you learned about the basic content storage mechanism in SharePoint called lists. Lists allow you to collect information on a SharePoint site and share it with other team members in a manner that is easy to update and maintain. You learned the following:

• Lists contain columns of data that describe an item. Columns can contain a variety of formats of information, such as single line of text, multiple lines of text, date, or numerical data.

• You can link some lists such as tasks, project tasks, discussion boards, contacts, and calendar to Outlook to allow users to update and create new content on the SharePoint site directly from their email client. This is convenient for those users who are less familiar and comfortable in a web environment, but very much at ease when they work with their email program.

• By linking lists to Outlook, you can create an offline store that you can synchronize later when the SharePoint site is available.

• You can link some list templates with an Access database. This also creates an offline store and provides a rich reporting environment for users on data that is stored on the SharePoint site.

• SharePoint 2007 has a variety of list templates that you can use to create task assignments, event management, and issue tracking. You can use these templates exactly as they are created, or you can customize them by creating custom views or columns.

• You can subscribe to information that is stored within lists via RSS feeds that you associate with the list or via Alerts, which are customizable email notifications that you can define directly from the List toolbar menu.

• When you need to share information stored on a SharePoint site with stakeholders who do not have access to the physical environment, you can export SharePoint list views into Excel spreadsheets and save it offline for further analysis or sharing.

This chapter focused mainly on list basics, describing the various functionalities and features. In Chapter 4, you learn how to customize and manage lists to create working environments that suit your specific business requirements and needs.