What s In This Book

What's In This Book

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion is divided into six parts, as follows:

Part I: Planning Your Deployment and Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Part I of this book contains five chapters. Chapter 1 introduces SharePoint Server 2007. Chapter 2 covers the architecture of SharePoint Server 2007. It discusses how Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) and SharePoint Server 2007 work together to provide a solid foundation for the features and benefits that ship with SharePoint Server 2007. In addition, it covers the core, supporting, database, workflow, and operating system services that underlie SharePoint Server 2007 and create the environment in which SharePoint Server 2007 can function effectively.

For those needing to understand how to design and architect a SharePoint Server 2007 deployment, Chapter 3 is the chapter you'll want to read. This chapter discusses the design and architectural choices that you should consider before you implement a SharePoint Server 2007 deployment. It covers defining objectives and requirements. You'll take a look at your current infrastructure and what this means to a SharePoint Server 2007 deployment. This chapter outlines the system dependences of SharePoint Server 2007 and then finishes with some security best practices for your SharePoint Server 2007 deployment.

Chapter 4 focuses on the multilingual architecture and planning considerations that you should think through if you're going to be working in a deployment that crosses multiple languages and localizations.

Chapter 5 is the chapter you'll need to read if you want to learn how to install SharePoint Server 2007. This chapter presents the product matrix and the hardware and software requirements you'll need to meet before you install SharePoint Server 2007. It also describes how to add and remove servers from your farm, the changes that SharePoint Server 2007 makes to your servers, and how to uninstall SharePoint Server 2007 too, in case you ever need to do that.

Part II: Administrating and Configuring Your Implementation

Part II begins with Chapter 6. There are two parts to Central Administration: operations and application management. This chapter covers the operations side of Central Administration. As part of this discussion, you'll look at the Home page in Central Administration and at the main administration and configuration areas such as topology management, security configuration, logging and reporting, global configuration, and data configuration.

Chapter 7 focuses on the application management side of Central Administration. This chapter looks at how to create new Web applications, what the best practices are, how to manage Web applications, and how to configure core farm services. It also discusses application security, workflow management, and external service connections.

Once you've finished with Central Administration and configuring core and farm services, you'll turn your attention to administrating personalization features and taxonomies in Chapter 8. You'll start by looking at what taxonomies are, and then discuss some of the best practices on how to build them. You'll also look at managing My Sites. This chapter also provides an extended discussion about the Knowledge Network software that can be downloaded and installed with the SharePoint Server 2007 platform. It finishes with a discussion about how user profiles and audiences work in SharePoint Server 2007.

The next two chapters focus on records and document management. Chapter 9 includes a robust discussion on enterprise records management, including an extended discussion on the records repositories in SharePoint Server 2007. It also discusses how to secure records repositories and how to submit content to a records repository.

Chapter 10 focuses on document management. It discusses document workflow, document metadata, document versioning, and how the Microsoft Office client fits into the overall picture. It also discusses the document management site template.

Chapter 11 shifts gears once again and discusses the staging and publication model for SharePoint Server 2007. This chapter illustrates and describes how to stage a "rough draft" Web site and then how to publish that Web site to the public. You'll also learn how to publish individual Web Parts and how to set publishing schedules.

Chapter 12 introduces the new Business Data Catalog (BDC). The BDC is a new feature that is heavily used by a number of other components in the SharePoint Server 2007 family. You'll learn how to create a BDC, how to manage data connections within the BDC, and how to use BDC's features. This chapter also offers some best practices when it comes to creating and using the BDC.

For readers who want information on Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and SharePoint Server 2007, Chapter 13 focuses on performance monitoring using MOM 2005. You'll learn what a Management Pack is and how to install it. You'll also learn about the performance monitoring basics and how to troubleshoot problems indicated by counters whose readings land outside of normal behavior. This is an important topic for any administrator.

Chapter 14, "Information Security Policies," is one that you'll be tempted to overlook. It is full of dry, boring stuff that you'll never use-until you need to help your managers figure out new information security policies in light of a SharePoint Server 2007 implementation. Because information security policies form the foundation for security in our environments, you should read this chapter and get up to speed on some of the policies that you should consider implementing when you deploy SharePoint Server 2007.

The last chapter in this section on administration and configuration is Chapter 15, which focuses on two new elements: content types and features. In this chapter, you'll learn what content types and features are, how to work with them, and how to use them effectively in a SharePoint Server 2007 deployment.

Part III: Search, Indexing, and Shared Services Providers

Part III of the book focuses on the core services provided by the new Shared Services Provider (SSP). Chapter 16 focuses on the enterprise search and indexing architecture. In addition, this chapter covers the core technologies on search administration, such as creating content sources, site path rules, site hit frequency rules, search scopes, management properties and other details to search administration.

Chapter 17 is a follow up to Chapter 16. It discusses search topology models, sample deployment scenarios, and using Search as a feature.

Chapter 18 focuses on the other administrative options for shared services, including interfarm shared services. It also discusses design and planning issues surrounding changing SSP associations and running multiple SSPs in a single farm.

Part IV: Integrating Additional Server Platforms

This part of the book focuses on integrating additional server platforms into SharePoint Server 2007. Chapter 19 is a robust chapter on displaying SharePoint Server 2007 technologies on mobile devices. Included in this chapter is a discussion of the Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 mission, its architecture, and how to install it in a SharePoint Server 2007 environment. In addition, you'll learn how to set up and use Office Project Server 2007 in your environment.

Another server platform that can be nicely integrated with SharePoint Server 2007 is Microsoft Office Excel Calculation Services, which is discussed in Chapter 20. This chapter explains how to install and configure Excel Calculation Services, provides an overview of the components, and discusses how the server interacts with spreadsheets-both those consumed over the Web and those published to the server. Moreover, you'll learn about the Dashboard Web Parts and performance considerations as you work with this server product.

Forms now becomes a core feature and component of SharePoint Server 2007, so an entire chapter is devoted to Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007. In Chapter 21, you will learn about the new features in this server product as well as how to create forms that will be useful to your environment.

Part V: Upgrading to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Chapter 22 focuses on upgrading from previous versions of SharePoint Products and Technologies to the 2007 versions. This chapter discusses the tricky upgrade process to move from Microsoft Content Management Server 2001 or 2002 to Web content management on SharePoint Server 2007. It discusses how to prepare your site, how to create migration paths, and how to migrate your Web content. The chapter then outlines the post-migration tasks that should be performed to finish the migration correctly.

Chapter 23 focuses on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and looks at how to upgrade from version 2.0 to version 3.0. This discussion does not include information on how to upgrade from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to SharePoint Server 2007 because those scenarios are covered in Chapter 24.

Because custom site definitions are a part of many deployments, the need to upgrade those site definitions will be high. So Chapter 25 discusses how to migrate site definitions to SharePoint Server 2007.

Part VI: Extending Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

The final part of the book deals with extending SharePoint Server 2007. Chapter 26 starts this effort by looking at using features to build Windows SharePoint Services sites. Chapter 27 looks at how to use the SharePoint Designer 2007 to customize and brand sites in SharePoint Server 2007.

Chapter 28 drills down into the creation of workflows in SharePoint Server 2007. While the farm management of workflows is discussed earlier in this book, how to create workflows in the standard site UI and how to build them in SharePoint Designer are discussed in this chapter.

The next chapter is one that many have wished would have been written in the last set of books on SharePoint. Chapter 29 will focus on providing an overview of the more commonly used Web Parts that ship "in the box" with SharePoint Server 2007. You'll learn how to create and modify Web Part pages, how to add and remove Web Parts from a page, and how to configure the more common settings for Web Parts. In addition, the chapter provides a summary of over 30 common Web Parts that ship with SharePoint Server 2007.

Disaster recovery is always saved for the end of a book. It's a tradition, right? So Chapter 30 focuses on disaster recovery methods for SharePoint Server 2007. You'll learn how to use the built-in tools to both back up and restore a SharePoint Server 2007 farm, as well as about fail-over scenarios, IIS backup and restore procedures, and best practices when it comes to backup and restore.

Finally, Chapter 31 looks at a little-known issue that will grow in importance for administrators and that is Code Access Security (CAS). Increasingly, administrators will be asked to manage security for code just as they are tasked with securing information resources. Chapter 31 is the first chapter in an administrator's book that we know of that focuses completely on this topic from an administrator's perspective. Be sure to read this chapter. You'll need these skills in your toolbox moving forward.