Chapter 1. Introduction to SharePoint Foundation 2010
Chapter at a Glance
In this chapter, you will learn | |
✓ | What SharePoint Foundation is. |
✓ | How SharePoint Foundation enables team collaboration and sharing. |
✓ | What user permissions are found in SharePoint Foundation. |
✓ | What differences exist between SharePoint Foundation and Windows SharePoint Services. |
✓ | How Office integrates with SharePoint Foundation. |
✓ | What relationships exist between SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint Server 2010, and SharePoint Designer 2010. |
In the modern business environment, with its distributed workforce that assists customers at any time and in any location, team members need to be in closer contact than ever before. Effective collaboration is becoming increasingly important; however, it is often difficult to achieve. Microsoft SharePoint Foundation addresses this problem by incorporating a variety of collaboration and communication technologies into a single web-based environment that integrates easily with desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office.
In this chapter, you will learn what SharePoint Foundation is and how it works with Office applications, providing enhanced productivity environments for users and teams. You will also learn the differences between SharePoint Foundation and its predecessor, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, as well as the relationships between SharePoint Foundation, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 and how to decide which product is right for you.
Important
The exercises in this book involve a fictitious business called Wide World Importers. In the scenarios, Wide World Importers is setting up a SharePoint environment for team collaboration and information sharing. There are four people involved in setting up and providing content for this environment: Olga Kosterina, the owner of Wide World Importers; Todd Rowe, her assistant; Bill Malone, the head buyer; and Peter Connelly, the help desk technician.
What Is SharePoint Foundation?
SharePoint Foundation 2010 is a technology that enables organizations and business units of all sizes to improve team productivity and to increase the efficiency of business processes. SharePoint Foundation is provided as a free download and gives you a powerful toolset for organizing information, managing documents, and providing robust collaboration environments.
See Also
For system requirements for installing SharePoint Foundation, refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc288955.aspx.
SharePoint Foundation helps teams stay connected and productive by providing an infrastructure that allows easy access to the people, documents, and information that they need. With SharePoint Foundation, teams can create websites to share information and foster collaboration with other users. You can access content stored within a SharePoint site from a web browser and through desktop applications, such as Office.
Team Collaboration and Sharing
SharePoint sites provide places to capture and share ideas, information, communication, and documents. The sites facilitate team participation in discussions, shared document collaboration, blogging, building knowledge bases using wikis, and surveys. The document collaboration features allow for easy check-in and checkout of documents, document version control, and recovery of previous versions, as well as document-level security.
Tip
A blog, or web log, is an online diary. A blog site allows the diarists, called bloggers, to post articles that readers can comment on.
Wiki (pronounced wee-kee) is a web environment that allows web browser users to add and edit quickly and easily text and links that appear on the web page. The term wiki originates from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means “quick.” A wiki site can be used, for example, to build a knowledge base, a community resource, or an online encyclopedia, such as Wikipedia.
See Also
For more information about blogs, refer to Chapter 12. For more information about wikis, refer to Chapter 6.
A SharePoint site can have many subsites, the hierarchy of which, on web servers, resembles the hierarchy of folders on file systems—it is a tree-like structure. Similar to storing your files in folders on file systems, you can store your files within SharePoint sites. However, SharePoint sites take file storage to a new level, providing communities for team collaboration and making it easy for users to work together on documents, tasks, contacts, events, calendars, wikis, and other items. This team collaboration environment can increase individual and team productivity greatly.
The collaborative tools provided by SharePoint Foundation are easy to use, so you can share files and information and communicate with your coworkers more effectively. You can create and use SharePoint sites for any purpose. For example, you can build a site to serve as the primary website for a team, create a site to facilitate the organization of a meeting, or create a wiki site to capture team knowledge. A typical SharePoint site might include a variety of useful tools and information, such as shared document libraries, contacts, calendars, task lists, discussions, and other information-sharing and visualization tools.
SharePoint site users can find and communicate with key contacts and experts, both with email and instant messaging. Site content can be searched easily, and users can receive alerts to tell them when existing documents and information have been changed or when new ones have been added. Custom business processes can be attached to the documents. Users can customize site content and layout to present targeted information to specific users on precise topics.
In this exercise, you will locate your SharePoint site and familiarize yourself with its home page.
On the browser Address bar, type the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), or location, of your SharePoint site: http://<yourservername/path>.
The yourservername portion of the URL is the name of the SharePoint server that you will be using for the exercises in this book. The path portion might be empty, or it might include one or more levels in the site hierarchy on your SharePoint server. If you are in doubt about the location of the SharePoint site, check with your SharePoint administrator.
Important
For exercises in this book, we use a site located at the server wideworldimporters. Its URL is http://wideworldimporters. However, in your environment, you will be using a different site installed on a different server. You will need to use your site location http://<yourservername/path> in place of http://wideworldimporters throughout the book.
If prompted, type your user name and password.
Click OK.
The home page of your site appears. Although it might look somewhat different from the typical SharePoint Team site that Wide World Importers starts with, it is still likely to include links to a variety of information, as well as the information-sharing tools provided by SharePoint Foundation.
On the left side of the page, you might see links to one or more of the following: Libraries, Lists, and Discussions. This collection of links to frequently used site resources is called a Quick Launch. Quick Launch, as the name suggests, enables you to navigate straight to the information and tools that you require.
Below Quick Launch, on the left side of the page, you can see links to Recycle Bin and All Site Content. The panel that contains Quick Launch, Recycle Bin, and All Site Content is referred to as the left navigation panel.
The area at the top of the page is referred to as the top navigation area. This area contains a top link bar that appears at the top of each page. It consists of several tabs with links, such as the default Home tab. It may also include other tabs with links to the subsites of this website; for example, the second tab on the left says Travel. In our scenario, because the Wide World Importers staff travel extensively worldwide, this links to a subsite that provides Wide World Importers employees with the necessary information and guidelines for arranging business travel.
On the left of the top navigation area, there is a link to a menu called Site Actions. This menu provides access to various actions that allow you to change the site, including site configuration.
Important
Your screen might not include links to all parts of the site, such as the Site Actions link, because of the way that security permissions on your server have been set up. SharePoint site users see only the parts of the site that they can actually access: if you don’t have access to a part of the site, the link to it is not displayed. To obtain additional access, contact your SharePoint administrator.
In the top-right part of the page, click the round Help icon with the question mark. SharePoint Foundation Help opens in a separate window.
Familiarize yourself with the Help categories and contents, and then close the window.
See Also
For more information on SharePoint site navigation, refer to Chapter 2.
SharePoint Foundation User Permissions
In SharePoint Foundation, access to sites is controlled through a role-based system that uses permission levels. Permission levels specify what permissions users have on a SharePoint site. These permissions determine the specific actions that users can perform on the site; in essence, each permission level is a collection of permissions. SharePoint Foundation has five default permission levels:
Read. This permission level gives you read-only access to the website.
Contribute. In addition to all the permissions included in the Read permission level, the Contribute permission level allows you to create and edit items in existing lists and document libraries.
Design. In addition to all the permissions included in the Contribute permission level, the Design permission level allows you to create lists and document libraries, approve items, and edit pages in the website.
Full Control. This permission level gives you full control.
Limited. The Limited permission level allows access to a shared resource within a site, such as a specific list, document library, folder, list item, or document, without giving access to the entire site.
Important
You will need Read or Contribute permission levels for most of the exercises in this book. We will instruct you to verify whether you have a sufficient permission level before introducing exercises, particularly those in which a higher level of access, such as Design or Full Control, is needed. If you are not sure what permissions are set on your SharePoint site, check with your SharePoint administrator.
See Also
For more information about permission levels, refer to Chapter 3. A full list of permissions and their associated permission levels is provided in the Appendix A at the back of this book.
Versions of SharePoint Foundation
SharePoint Foundation 2010 is an evolution of Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services. Previous versions of this technology include:
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
SharePoint Team Services
SharePoint Foundation provides many new, enhanced, and updated features in comparison with its predecessors. In particular, it provides a more robust and manageable collaboration platform with a significantly enhanced user interface that includes a new contextual Ribbon. The new features include the following:
A new user interface that includes the SharePoint Ribbon, which provides a primary command surface and is designed to help you quickly locate the commands that you require. It is similar to the Ribbon in other Office programs such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 enables you to work offline with SharePoint sites, libraries, and lists. When you are reconnected to your network, the changes are synchronized with the live site automatically.
The Rich Text Editor allows you to insert and format content directly on wiki web pages and in blog posts.
The redesigned themes in the Themes Gallery enable you to customize the look and feel of your site, with multiple color options.
A co-authoring capability allows you to work simultaneously with your team members on the same document.
Enhanced Calendar functionality, including displaying multiple calendars within a page, inline editing of items, and dragging within the calendar.
Improved mobile access to your SharePoint site.
In addition, SharePoint Foundation 2010 includes Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS), which enables SharePoint integration with external data, including line-of-business applications. BCS connects SharePoint-based solutions to sources of external data and provides a way to define external content types based on that data. Using the new External list, BCS also allows you to work with external back-end business data offline.
Office Integration with SharePoint Foundation
Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 are designed to create an integrated productivity environment across the client and the server. They work together to provide you with a set of seamlessly integrated capabilities. In other words, many Office commands, menus, and features are integrated closely with SharePoint Foundation features. You can use SharePoint Foundation functionality not only from a browser, but also from within your Office applications. The new Backstage view feature of Office provides the ability to expose SharePoint 2010 capabilities in the context of Office applications, including access to document libraries and SharePoint sites. For example, you can create a new SharePoint site and save your files to it without leaving your Office client application. A SharePoint site’s collaborative content—including documents, lists, events, calendars, task assignments, blogs, wikis, and membership rosters—can be read and edited within Office applications.
To share a particular document or task, SharePoint Foundation provides a specific site environment called a Document Workspace. You can create a Workspace site from an Office 2010 application or from a browser. When using Microsoft Word 2010, Microsoft Excel 2010, Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Microsoft InfoPath 2010, and Microsoft OneNote 2010, users can create Workspaces, post and edit documents, and assign tasks from within Office 2010 applications while working on documents stored in SharePoint sites.
See Also
For more information about working with Document Workspaces, refer to Chapter 12.
Office 2010 includes a new SharePoint Workspace 2010 client application, a successor to the Office Groove client. SharePoint Workspace 2010 provides an ability to work offline with SharePoint content and to synchronize the changes when you are reconnected to your network. You can view, add, edit, and delete SharePoint library documents or list items while you are offline. While you are connected to the network, updates to data on your computer and on the network are automatic, providing bidirectional synchronization between your computer and the live SharePoint sites, libraries, and lists.
In addition, SharePoint Foundation 2010 provides integration with Office Web Apps. Office Web Apps is a collective name for the online companions to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote applications that enable users to view and edit documents using the browser. Office Web Apps services include the Word Viewing Service, PowerPoint Service, and Excel Calculation Services, which run within the context of the services provided by SharePoint Foundation.
Office Web Apps give you a browser-based viewing and editing experience by providing a representation of an Office document in the browser. For example, when you click a document stored in a SharePoint document library, the document opens directly in the browser. The document appearance in the browser is similar to how it appears in the Office client application. While an Office Web App provides lighter editing functionality than the associated Office client application, it provides the user an opportunity to open a document for editing in the associated client application (if an application is installed on the client device) by using a button within the Office Web App page. On a SharePoint site where Office Web Apps have been installed and configured, you can view and edit Office documents in the browser from anywhere you have a connection to your SharePoint site.
See Also
For more information on Office Web Apps, refer to http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/web-apps.
There are different levels of integration between various versions of Office and SharePoint Foundation. The Office 2010 family of products provides a tight, native, rich, built-in integration with SharePoint Foundation. Office 2007 is also well integrated with SharePoint Foundation, providing contextual interoperability between SharePoint and Office client applications. Earlier versions of Office, such as Office 2000 and Office XP, provide some integration, but it is considerably simpler and more basic.
Office 2000 provides a file save integration with SharePoint Foundation. For example, you can open and save files stored on SharePoint sites from your Office 2000 applications and receive alerts in Microsoft Outlook 2000. Office XP provides additional data integration, including interactive access to data stored on SharePoint sites. For example, you can export list data from SharePoint sites to Excel 2002 and view properties and metadata for files that are stored on SharePoint sites. However, Office 2000 and Office XP are not integrated with many other features of SharePoint Foundation. For example, you cannot use Office 2000 or Office XP applications to create Workspace sites.
Office 2003 adds more integration features. With Office 2003, you can use SharePoint Foundation to create documents and Workspaces, organize team meetings and activities, and access and analyze data from SharePoint sites. You can also use data integration between Office 2003 and SharePoint Foundation, moving data to and from SharePoint sites and creating databases linked to data stored on SharePoint sites.
Starting with Office System 2007, integration with SharePoint Foundation is enhanced much further. You can interact directly with information stored in SharePoint sites from within Office client applications without manually downloading the content. For example, using Word 2010 and Word 2007, you can create and post to a blog on your SharePoint blog site. Word 2010 and Word 2007 allow you to check documents into and out of a SharePoint library from within Word.
While all Office 2007 and Office 2010 client applications are well integrated with SharePoint Foundation, Outlook provides the closest, most feature-rich integration. With Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007, you can create and manage sites for sharing documents and organizing meetings. Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007 provide read and write access to SharePoint items such as calendars, tasks, contacts, discussions, and documents, as well as offline support.
See Also
For more information about integration between SharePoint Foundation and Outlook 2010, refer to Chapter 13.
SharePoint Products
SharePoint Foundation 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, and SharePoint Designer 2010—known collectively as SharePoint 2010 Products—facilitate collaboration both within an organization and with partners and customers. However, each of these products has a different set of capabilities.
SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server 2010
SharePoint Foundation is a collection of services for Windows Server 2008 that you can use to share information and collaborate with other users. It provides a common framework for document management, a common repository for storing documents of all types, and a platform for collaboration applications.
SharePoint Server 2010 is built on top of SharePoint Foundation. It extends SharePoint Foundation by providing flexible organization and management tools for SharePoint sites and by making it possible for teams to publish information to the entire organization. Because SharePoint Server 2010 requires SharePoint Foundation, all features of SharePoint Foundation are available in SharePoint Server 2010. However, SharePoint Server 2010 provides significant additional enterprise-level capabilities:
Sites capability provides a single infrastructure for all your business websites, both internal and external.
Communities capability delivers powerful collaboration tools—and a single platform to manage them.
Content capability makes content management easy, including compliance features like document types, retention polices, and automatic content sorting.
Search capability provides a unique combination of relevance, refinement, and social cues to help you to find the information that you require and to cut through the clutter.
Insights capability gives you access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications. It also helps you locate the information you need to make decisions.
Composites capability offers tools and components for creating do-it-yourself business solutions without coding, so that you can rapidly respond to business needs.
There are two editions of SharePoint Server 2010: Standard and Enterprise, each of which has a different feature set. To decide whether you need SharePoint Foundation by itself or an edition of SharePoint Server 2010, you need to assess how your requirements are met by the particular features and functionality of these products.
Important
A comparison between the feature sets of the different editions of SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation is provided in the SharePoint2010EditionComparison.xls spreadsheet in the Chapter01 folder under Practice Files that can be downloaded from the book’s catalog page at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?Linkid=206096.
SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Designer 2010
While SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010 provide the technology and platform, SharePoint Designer 2010 provides the tools with which to tailor SharePoint sites. SharePoint Designer 2010 is an evolution of SharePoint Designer 2007. It is available as a free download and provides tools for the rich customization of sites, as well as the creation of reporting tools and application templates, without writing any code.
See Also
For more information on SharePoint Designer 2010, refer to http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/product/Related-Technologies/Pages/SharePoint-Designer.aspx.
Key Points
SharePoint Foundation provides a powerful set of tools for information sharing and document collaboration.
SharePoint websites provide places to capture and share ideas, information, knowledge, and documents.
You can access content stored within a SharePoint site both from a web browser and through client applications, such as Office.
Access to a SharePoint site is controlled through a role-based system predicated on permission levels. The five default permission levels are Read, Contribute, Design, Full Control, and Limited.
There are varying levels of integration between different versions of Office and SharePoint Foundation, with Office 2010 having the closest integration.
SharePoint Server 2010 is built upon SharePoint Foundation. In addition to SharePoint Foundation functionality, SharePoint Server 2010 provides other significant enterprise-level capabilities, including Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, and Composites.