Introduction

When we sat down to write the original SharePoint 2003 Unleashed book more than a decade ago, we had a hunch that the technology would be popular, but did not anticipate how quickly the product would take off and how much interest the IT industry would end up taking in SharePoint products and technologies. In the interim years, as we worked with implementing the product in companies of all sizes, we learned what the product did well and what it didn’t do so well, and further refined our knowledge of SharePoint best practice design, deployment, and administration.

Our exposure to the latest version of SharePoint started well before its release when SharePoint v15 was still being developed. We developed experience through our company, Convergent Computing (CCO), deploying it for early adopters through our close relationship with Microsoft as a Gold Partner. In addition, we collaborated with and provided input to the SharePoint development team and the broader SharePoint community through Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program. The richness of features and the capabilities of what became the SharePoint 2013 version became evident to us during this time, and we used our hands-on experience with the early stages of the product to begin designing this book, which provides a comprehensive look at SharePoint 2013 functionality, administration, and infrastructure.

A major challenge of this book was trying to identify and cover the most important tools, topics, practices, and skills that the range of our readers will find valuable in their interactions with SharePoint 2013. To do this, we drew upon our experiences over the last decade with hundreds of different organizations and distilled out the most common requirements in the areas of design, architecture, integration, and customization.

We endeavored to provide value to readers who may never have used SharePoint products before and those who are well versed with the products and may currently be using SharePoint. You might be an IT manager, IT architect, SharePoint administrator, SharePoint power user, developer, and, of course, a SharePoint end user. Therefore, we carefully crafted the book to cover what we felt would add the most value to our audience. A key piece of this strategy is to expand beyond the out-of-the-box features of SharePoint 2013 and share our experience on some of the most common integration points of SharePoint 2013, such as SQL Server 2012; Exchange Server 2010 or 2013; Edge Security products; and tools such as SharePoint Designer, Visual Studio, and PerformancePoint. Since SharePoint is such a powerful development platform, we made sure to include content that educates readers on a number of development processes and best practices. In this way, the book becomes more than a treatise on what SharePoint 2013 can do in a vacuum, but what it can do in a complex technology ecosystem.

This book is the result of our experience and the experiences of our colleagues at CCO and our clients in working with SharePoint 2013 products and technologies, both in the beta stages and in production deployments. We wrote this book to be topical so that you can quickly browse to a particular section and follow easy-to-understand, step-by-step scenarios. These exercises, instead of just giving simple examples of a feature, are designed to give examples of real-world applications of the technologies and tools that provide you with business value. In addition, if you need a comprehensive overview on SharePoint 2013, the book can be read in sequence to give you a solid understanding of the higher levels of security and functionality SharePoint can provide. Topics in the book are divided into six sections, each with topics in similar categories.

Part I, “Planning for and Deploying SharePoint Server 2013,” provides an introduction to the products in the SharePoint 2013 stack and includes prescriptive advice for how to architect and implement them. In addition, it covers upgrade advice from legacy versions of SharePoint and also details advanced installation scenarios with SharePoint 2013.

Part II, “Administering and Maintaining SharePoint Server 2013,” focuses on the day-to-day administration and monitoring required for a SharePoint back-end environment. It details how to use new tools, including Windows PowerShell for SharePoint 2013 Administration, and covers backup and restore. It also focuses in particular detail on how to administer and maintain the SQL databases used by SharePoint.

Part III, “Securing, Protecting, and Optimizing SharePoint Architecture,” covers security concepts in detail that focus on edge, transport, and content security. Topics such as SQL Transparent Data Encryption, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Certificates, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) encryption, Active Directory Rights Management Services, Edge Security, and more are detailed. In addition, this part includes information on how to virtualize a SharePoint 2013 farm using server virtualization technology.

Part IV, “Using SharePoint 2013 Technologies for Collaboration and Document Management,” starts with a comparison of SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server 2013, then moves to the tools and capabilities provided by libraries and lists, customization of libraries and lists, and then to managing the sites and pages that house these components. One chapter is dedicated to metadata and content types; another chapter focuses on the greatly improved social networking tools; and another covers the process of SharePoint 2013 governance.

Part V, “Leveraging Office Applications with SharePoint,” focuses on key features in Office 2013 applications that power users and administrators should be familiar with, including protecting documents, document versions, and coauthoring. The SkyDrive Pro product line is demystified, and Outlook connectivity is reviewed. Next, topics including Excel Services, Access Services, Visio Graphics Services, the new and improved Office Web Apps 2013 product, and out-of-the-box as well as SharePoint Designer 2013 workflows are covered.

Part VI, “Extending the SharePoint Environment,” dedicates one chapter to the topic of application development with SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visual Studio 2013, one chapter to PerformancePoint Services, and one chapter to Business Connectivity Services. This part is written with power users and developers in mind, and contains more complex exercises and examples that will be of great value to these readers.

If you, like many out there, were recently tasked with administering a SharePoint environment, or are looking for ways to bring document management and collaboration to the next level and need to understand how SharePoint 2013 can fit into your IT ecosystem, this book is for you. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed creating it and working with the product.