What Is SharePoint?

SharePoint helps you gather information together, regardless of what type it is. It may be MS Word documents or any other type of file, but it may also be information that you usually store in other types of applications, such as contact lists, team calendars, product databases, project planning, or news lists. SharePoint also helps you find information, even when you don't know where it is stored, and SharePoint helps you keep track of updated information. In other words, SharePoint does not invent any new information type; instead, it helps you get the right information when you need it without spending lots of time looking for it. Even more importantly, all this information is easily shared among users, such as project teams, departments, or even entire organizations.

Microsoft has performed a thorough analysis of how people use their computers in most types of organizations. Microsoft has a very good understanding of what types of problems these users have and what things that need to be changed or removed in order to help the users work more effectively. One of Microsoft's findings indicates that people tend to become frustrated when they need help from the administrator or Help desk to do even simple things, such as creating a place in the network for sharing information within a team or adding a new team member. Users want to have more power to do what they want, when they want, and exactly how they want. This concept is sometimes referred to as selfservice and is a new trend in the computer business. For example, you can find applications that allow the user to reset her password, change her properties in the Active Directory (AD), and so on.

SharePoint is built around this concept, and the main idea is to allow the ordinary user to create web sites for projects and other activities without any support from the server administrator or Help desk. This requires some training for the SharePoint user, but SharePoint is straightforward and easy to learn. Your role, as the SharePoint Server administrator, is to install, maintain, and configure SharePoint. You are also the person people will contact when they need help understanding how do things in SharePoint, such as creating sites and managing lists of information. That's why this book tells you how to do these things and gives you tips and hints to make things easier for you and your users. I am sure that you will like it for your own personal use, too - SharePoint is simply a fantastic application with enormous potential, if you know how to use it correctly!

It is actually hard to describe what SharePoint is in just a few words, but let's give it a try. Using this application, you can build a web-based environment that includes the following, and more:

• q A public Internet site

• q An intranet portal for the organization and each department

• q An extranet portal for your customers and partners

• q A team site for your sales department

• q A project site for the development team

• q A document management system that is compliant with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and ISO-9000

• q A personal site for each user where they can store personal data and create links to their team sites

• q A digital dashboard for storing business intelligence data such as key performance indicators

• q A place to search and locate any type of information, regardless of where it is stored

• q A record management system for storing legal information in a secure way

The list goes on and on. Since SharePoint is such a flexible and powerful application, it is almost only your own imagination that limits what you can do with it. It is also very fun to work with, since it is so easy to build an impressive solution with it. Microsoft has most certainly created a killer application - again! Figure 1-1 shows a typical SharePoint 2007 site, just to give you an idea about how it looks.

Figure 1-1