Making Basic Decisions About the List or Library

After the template has been selected, the administrator will need to enter in information such as a name for the library, descriptive text, decide whether to enable versioning, and make other choices based on the type of list or library such as whether to email enable the list or library. A general tendency is to “wing it” and make decisions when the individual lists and libraries are configured, but this should be resisted, because lack of consistency will make the environment harder to manage. For example, lack of standards for a list of library names can make it more confusing for visitors to the site, whereas lack of standards on versioning, or whether libraries are configured to allow in-bound emails, can also cause confusion.

For more managed and controlled environments, it is recommended that the organization make decisions on standards for the following items:

• Name and description for the list or library— Although this sounds pretty self-evident, coming up with a naming scheme can be helpful. It is generally recommended that the name of the list or library include the type of list or library used that is then customized to the specific site that holds it. For example, a slide library created in the HR site could be titled HR Slide Library or HR Slides. If there are multiple document libraries on a site, names like HR Document Library 1, HR Document Library 2 may not seem as memorable as HR Shared Documents or HR Private Documents but scales to dozens of libraries, whereas the “creative” process in coming up with unique descriptive names for a dozen document library can result in confusion.

• Choose whether to display the document library on the Quick Launch— The Quick Launch can get cluttered quite quickly in a site that is highly utilized and end users are allowed to create new lists and libraries as they need them. Typically, only the most utilized lists and libraries should be included on the Quick Launch. Users should be reminded to use the All Site Content link to get the full listing of lists and libraries (and subsites).

• Decide whether the list or document library can receive email, and what the email address should be— Although not all lists and libraries support in-bound email, a number do, and this requires that in-bound email has been configured for the farm and is enabled for the site collection. After the basic decision is made, the administrator will need to follow up with configuring the email options from the list or library settings Incoming E-Mail Settings page. This topic is covered in more detail later in this chapter.

• Decide whether versioning is enabled for the document library— This is a complex decision, and options are discussed later in the chapter. The organization should ideally set a standard for whether versioning is encouraged and supported.

• Select a document template for the document library— Typically this will be a Word document, but the organization may choose to have different document libraries for different types of templates and then customize the templates once the library is created.

There are also some unique requirements for certain lists or libraries that need to be defined when creating the list or library. For example:

• When creating a tasks, project tasks, or issues list, an option is given to Send Email When Ownership Is Assigned. This is a great feature to enable to convey the power of SharePoint alerts to end users, and project managers will love the fact that the person the task is assigned to (or issue) immediately gets an email, so they can’t claim they didn’t know about the assignment!

• When creating a calendar, the administrator must determine whether the calendar is a standard SharePoint calendar, or a Group Calendar, and can be used to share members’ schedules. Figure 20.1 shows a calendar that was created to share member’s schedules. It will default to only showing the events for the logged-in user, but other users’ calendars can be shown by entering their account name in the Add Person field.

Figure 20.1. Group calendar.

• When creating a survey, usernames can be shown in survey results, or hidden, and multiple responses can be allowed, or only single responses. The survey wizard will immediately start, allowing the administrator to create the survey on-the-fly, and of course, to return later to modify or add more questions.

• An external list requires an External Content Type to be defined before it can be created. External Content Types will be covered in Chapter 22, “Managing Metadata and Content Types in SharePoint 2010.”

• Before an import spreadsheet list can be created, an Excel spreadsheet must be selected. The administrator then defines the range of data to be imported from the spreadsheet, and clicks Import. SharePoint then attempts to match the type of data stored in the Excel columns to the columns it creates in the list, but because SharePoint doesn’t offer all the same columns that Excel does, there may be some differences in how the data is treated, so the results of the import should be reviewed.

For organizations that see the value in more extensive planning and testing, it is strongly recommended that each of the lists and libraries available in the version of SharePoint 2010 that will be implemented be created and then tested to determine its relevance to the user community and goals of the project, ease of use, and anticipated support challenges. For example, a form library requires InfoPath 2007 or 2010 to publish forms to it, and then requires trained users to create the forms, and some training for end users to use the forms, and may overcomplicate an implementation that has a limited timeline, and no explicit requirement for SharePoint-based forms. Another example would be the status list, which allows the creation of graphical key performance indicators, which are generally considered essential to dashboards and are visually impressive to end users and managers alike.