Best Practices

• The improvements from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 make it easier for administrators and end users to interact with the documents and data stored in document libraries and lists and reduce the learning curve as well.

• There are a variety of ways to upload documents to SharePoint 2010 document libraries, including using the Open with Explorer button on the Library tab, the Upload Multiple Documents option, and using Windows Explorer to navigate to the SharePoint server, site, and library.

• Folders can be created within a document library, and as discussed in this chapter, there are pros and cons to using folders in SharePoint document libraries. A best practice is for the organization to understand the pros and cons of using folders and make informed decisions on where they make sense (for example, document libraries with tens of thousands of documents) and where they don’t (for example, smaller document libraries where the organization wants to promote the use of metadata for organization rather than folders).

• Although creating unique permissions for documents in a document library creates added overhead for administrators, the new Check Permissions tool allows administrators to check and see what permission levels are given to users or groups, which allows the administrator to quickly check whether specific users or groups have any access to the document.

• Alerts can be created for items or lists or libraries and are a very easy way to keep track of activities within a list or library or of any changes made to a document that a user is specifically interested in. Use daily and weekly summary alerts to keep the number of emails sent out to a minimum.

• Although document libraries provide tools in the toolbar that can make a copy of a document in another library (the Send To tool) and track that copy and maintain the connectivity to a certain extent by requesting updates, or can create a document workspace that contains a copy of the document, this can be a confusing and complicated process for less-experienced users and administrators. A best-practice recommendation is to recommend against using these tools unless specifically required for a business solution when the user base and administrators are new to SharePoint.

• Document library administrators have the ability to enable versioning in a document library, decide whether major and minor versions will be tracked, whether content approval is required, who can see draft versions, whether workflows are used to approve a document, and even whether scheduling is used to determine when the content is published. A best practice is to make sure that the right combination of these features is applied based on the content of the document library and the sophistication of the user base. Enabling too many of these features for a user base that is new to SharePoint 2010 may steepen the learning curve and make employees hesitant to use the document libraries.

• Although the Datasheet view is available for use in both lists and libraries, it is most often used in lists for rapid data entry or bulk changes, because many users use SharePoint lists for similar tasks as the normally use spreadsheets for. The Datasheet View is not compatible with 64-bit versions of Office 2010, which is an important point to take into mind when planning integration between Office and SharePoint.

• The Datasheet view also provides access to the task pane, which provides additional useful tools, such as Export to Access, Report with Access, Print with Excel, and Chart with Excel.

• Lists are another main building block of SharePoint collaborative environments, but are designed primarily for storing rows of information rather than documents. As discussed in this chapter, lists can store documents as attachments, but do not manage documents as well or as thoroughly as libraries. For example, lists do not manage versions of attachments.

• For lists to be useful, they must contain the appropriate combination of columns. A variety of lists come with SharePoint 2010 out-of-the-box, but an administrator should get familiar with the wide variety of columns that can be created, and the usefulness of the list will increase as these are properly leveraged.

• Views are also key to the efficacy of lists, and a list administrator should become familiar with the process of creating a new view, setting it as the default, and working with sorting, filtering, and grouping within list views.

• Mobile views are created by default with any new view, and the URL is available on the Edit View page (ViewEdit.aspx), in the Mobile section at the bottom of the page.