Introduction
It seems just yesterday we were all feverishly hitting F5 on MSDN or TechNet, hoping, praying for those SharePoint 2007 downloads to appear. Fast-forward three years and now we have SharePoint 2010. SharePoint 2007 seems so quaint and antiquated compared to the shininess of SharePoint 2010. We have been using SharePoint since it was a wee lad in 2001 and our fascination with it has continued to grow with each version. In this book we packed in every SharePoint 2010 administration nugget we could. Most were learned after taking and retaking many classes at the school of hard knocks. It’s our hope that we can share some of these lessons with other like-minded SharePoint 2010 administrators.
Are you a SharePoint administrator who wants to know more about SharePoint 2010? Are you a SharePoint power user who wants to know how to translate your SharePoint 2007 prowess to SharePoint 2010? Are you trying to pretty up SharePoint so that it doesn’t look like SharePoint? Are you a SharePoint developer who has a devil of a time communicating with those blasted administrators? Then this is your book. This book was written mainly by SharePoint administrators, but we brought in experts in other areas to round it out. We brought in developers to help explain Features and Solutions with more definition. We brought in branding experts to explain how branding has changed in SharePoint 2010 and demonstrate all the marvelous things you can do. We brought in end user experts to cover all the different ways to leverage the Office clients with SharePoint 2010. They even covered workflows for us, at no extra charge. While this book was written with the SharePoint 2010 administrator in mind, it covers a variety of topics that are of interest to people in all areas of SharePoint.
From start to finish, this book is all SharePoint 2010. While no book can cover everything, we gave it the old college try. The focus is mainly on administrative topics. We cover some SharePoint 2010 theory to get the foundation built. We show you the new SharePoint 2010 user interface so that you can get around without too much fumbling. Then we cover the behind-the-scene changes in architecture to get you ready for the next part, installation. We walk you through the installation and upgrade next and show you all the options you have.
After you’re comfortable with installation and noodling around in the interface, we start exploring different chunks of functionality that SharePoint 2010 has to offer. All the fan favorites are here: Search, claims, the taxonomy service, Business Connectivity Services, Enterprise Content Management, and even social computing. It’s all in here.
Having the functionality isn’t enough; we also cover how to administer the server, both with Central Administration and our new best friend, Windows PowerShell. A functional website is nice, but having a good looking, functional website is even better. Our branding chapter can make that dream a reality.
We’ve tried to make sure this book is well rounded. To that end, we covered some non-traditional administrator topics, like how to build workflows, use SharePoint Designer, and how the Office clients and SharePoint 2010 interact. These lean more toward power user topics, but the questions still come to the administrators and it’s up to us to make it all work.
We even reached across the aisle and enlisted the help of a developer to get the scoop on how Features and Solutions have been improved in SharePoint 2010. Normally we wouldn’t associate ourselves with developers, but for the sake of making this book complete we did it, and we don’t regret it.
We organized this book so that it could be read front to back, like a romantic novel. Don’t read the last chapter first — you’ll ruin the ending. The first three chapters are SharePoint 2010 theory, outlining changes and explaining new terminology. Then we cover installation in excruciating detail. After you have SharePoint 2010 installed, the rest of the book covers discrete areas of functionality in each chapter. While you could stay up all night reading it cover to cover, you can also use it as a reference book. Did the boss just see Business Intelligence in bold print in a trade rag and decide your SharePoint 2010 installation needs it? No worries; read Chapter 20 and get up to speed on it.
What You Need to Use This Book
Having a SharePoint 2010 installation to noodle around with while reading this book will definitely come in handy. This will enable you to follow along with the examples in the book, and maybe you’ll provide helpful feedback for a subsequent edition.
If you don’t have a SharePoint installation yet, you can follow the directions in Chapter 4 and install one. Microsoft has a trial license available for SharePoint Server, so all you’ll need is a willing Windows 2008 server and some time.
Having some knowledge of SharePoint 2007 will help too, but it’s not necessary. Where we can, we compare the SharePoint 2010 experience with the SharePoint 2007 one. If you’ve used SharePoint 2007, you’ll find those comparisons helpful.
This book was written against a Release Candidate build of SharePoint 2010. While our SharePoint 2010 prowess is above reproach, our ability to predict the future is not so hot. We’ve done everything we could to make sure that what you read here matches the final product for SharePoint 2010. In cases where things are different, we blame sunspots, or maybe volcanoes.
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