Introduction

While organizations have been talking about knowledge management and team collaboration for years, Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services finally provided a feature rich, affordable and scalable solution to these needs. As we wrote in the introduction for the first edition of the book, "every organization can benefit from these technologies," and we have seen this proven as organizations from 5 users to 10,000 users adopt the technologies.

Another factor which has been driving the adoption of the SharePoint 2003 products is the tight integration between the SharePoint 2003 products and the Office 2003 family of products. Since most organizations have standardized on the Office applications, this integration allows users to quickly master the enhancements offered by SharePoint 2003 (such as the Shared Workspace task pane) and evolve to a more collaborative knowledge management environment.

While many other IT improvements and updates can't be seen or touched by the general user community, the SharePoint 2003 products will change (often dramatically) how users manage, access, and interact with their documents and data, and how they collaborate with others in the organization. It is therefore critical that the organization understand how these changes will impact the end users, and be able to define the benefits to end users. Without a clear vision from the decisions makers and managers in the organization, the end user community may be hostile to the changes and the work that will be involved on their parts to learn to effectively use the new tools and processes.

This book is designed to provide an overview of the vast feature set offered by the SharePoint 2003 products and to discuss strategies and processes for best levering these features. Time is devoted to walking through the discovery and design process to make sure that the goals for SharePoint 2003 are clearly defined, and to build a prototype testing environment as well as a production environment. The standard portal and site level features are covered for both the end user and administrators.

This book is not intended to be a developer's or programmer's guide except from the perspective of providing insight into the use of SharePoint technologies for satisfying business needs.

Colin and Michael have worked with SharePoint technologies in pre-beta and beta form prior to the product release and have worked with clients on implementing the products in test and production environments. The authors have been authors or contributing writers for several books over the past decade and are considered industry experts with SharePoint technologies.