Built-In Features of SharePoint | Software Testing Fundamentals: Methods and Metrics

So, what features can you expect in SharePoint 2007? The answer depends on what version you implement: MOSS or WSS. Following is a list of everyday scenarios showing you how SharePoint can make things easier for you and your users. Chapter 10 provides more detailed steps on how to create a SharePoint environment that solves these problems.

Alerts (WSS and MOSS)

One feature that both WSS and MOSS offer is something Microsoft refers to as alerts. An alert is a request you create in SharePoint to be notified by e-mail when SharePoint content changes (for example, when a document is updated, a contact is deleted, or a News item is added). Using alerts, you can be sure to keep yourself updated about changes to information that is important to you! SharePoint will send you an e-mail to notify you what has happened. The following information types are examples of what can be watched by alerts:

q Complete document libraries, or single documents and files.
q Complete picture libraries or single pictures.
q Contact lists or single contacts.
q Link lists or single links.
q News lists or single news items.
q Event lists or single events.

Alerts can watch a lot more places and types of information, as you will see in Chapter 10. This is extremely useful - you will no longer miss any important updates!

RSS (WSS and MOSS)

A new feature in SharePoint 2007 is support for the relatively new Really Simple Syndication technique. Using this feature a user can also be notified when new items are added to any type of SharePoint lists, such as document libraries, contacts, news, and tasks lists. This is similar to alerts, but the main difference between them is that alerts send e-mails that will be stored in your Inbox along with other e-mail, while all RSS notifications will be collected in one folder (see Figure 1-2).

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Figure 1-2

File and Document Management (WSS and MOSS)

Today you organize your files by using a folder structure and giving your files descriptive names so that they are easy to find. But you also know that after some time, it gets harder and harder to find the file when you need it. And even worse, you may have several copies of different versions of the same file. How can you be sure you're looking at the right version? If you are looking for a file that somebody else created, it gets even harder because the folder structure may not be as intuitive as you would like it to be and the filenames may not be as descriptive as they should be.

This is where SharePoint comes in. All files and documents in SharePoint are stored in document libraries. This is very similar to a folder in the file system, but on steroids! The document library in SharePoint 2007 has lots of new features compared to previous SharePoint versions, which will help you organize, compose, and find the files you are looking for. The key features are as follows:

q Document Columns: Add your own columns to describe the files and documents, such as Document Type, Customer Name, Project Name, or Status. These columns can be local for a specific document library or they can be shared between libraries, using a feature called Site Columns.
q Document Views: Create your own view of how the files should be presented. For example, you could create a view that shows only documents of the type Contract for the customer Volvo, sorted by its status.
q Document Workflows: When adding or modifying a document, a workflow can start. For example, this workflow could send an e-mail to some people in your team to collect feedback or to get an approval by your manager before getting published.
q Content Types: Allows you to create multiple document templates for a document library. A user that creates a new document will be able to choose between these templates. These templates can be based on different file types (such as Word and Excel files), different content, and different workflows, columns, and policies. SharePoint 2003 users have been waiting for this feature for a long time!
q Individual Permissions: You can set a specific permission for each document if necessary. For example, if you remove the Read permission for a specific document, users will not see it at all.
q Check Out/In: You can force a user to check out (lock a document) before editing a document. Only when this document later is checked in (unlocked) will the updated version be visible for all users.

These features make it easier for you to name your documents. You no longer need files with names like Contract_Volvo_version05.doc. And more importantly, you can force the writers of documents to enter information in these columns when they save their files, which will automatically start the workflow you have defined.

There are many other interesting features in SharePoint related to document management. In this book, you will see and try all of the important features.

Project Management (WSS and MOSS)

Think about how you work with projects. What type of information is related to a standard project? Although it depends on the project, you will find that most projects share the following types of information among the project members:

q Gantt Schema: A list of project tasks, including start and due dates, displayed in a graphical calendar view.
q Documents: Examples include MS Word files, Excel spreadsheets, text files, and PowerPoint presentations.
q Members: A list of all the members in the project.
q Calendar: A list of events, such as meetings, conferences, and project milestones.
q Contacts: A list of external contacts, such as vendors, partners, consultants, and other resources.
q Tasks: A list of things to do, assigned to project members.
q e-mail: Questions, status, and comments regarding the project.

The problem without SharePoint and specific project-management tools is that this information is stored in several places. Documents and files are stored in a file share; members exist in an e-mail distribution list; calendar events, contacts, and tasks are stored in an Outlook public folder; and e-mail is, of course, stored in each member's personal Inbox. Another way to describe this is organized chaos. Each project member needs to know and remember exactly where each type of information is stored. If she does not, valuable time is wasted searching for the information. To make things worse, if a new member joins the project, you must explain to her where everything is stored and how it works. To make sure that the new member understands what has been going on, you must forward a copy of all mail related to this project - if you can find it. The new member then faces the challenging task of reading all this e-mail and understanding what it contains.

I am sure you recognize this situation! To solve this problem, you need something that can store all this information in a single place - or at least make all the information available through a single source. This is exactly what SharePoint does! Here is how you do it:

Create a SharePoint web site for the project.
Add the members to the site. SharePoint sends the members an e-mail with an invitation and a link to the site. SharePoint may also create a mailing list for this project team to make it easy for you to share e-mail.
Create a document library to store all files and documents, and copy any related file to this document library.
Create another document library to store all e-mail, and copy all project-related e-mail to this document library. Give this document library an e-mail address, and make that address a member of the project team mailing list.
Create a calendar, a task list, and a contact list, and then use these lists for the project data.
Create a project task list, and display it as a Gantt schema.

Such a project site could look something similar to Figure 1-3. Chapter 2 gives detailed steps on how to create this type of web site and all its lists and fill it with data. You will also learn how easy it is to design the page to make it easy to use.

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Figure 1-3

Managing Meetings (WSS)

If there is one thing that almost everyone agrees on, it is that most meetings are a huge pain! Why? The usual complaints are that they are a waste of time, boring, and too long; that meeting participants are unprepared; and that it's hard to follow up on tasks and activities after the meeting. That indicates that even a small step forward to make meetings more effective is important. With SharePoint, you will be able to change many tasks related to meetings into something more positive.

In a typical meeting, the meeting organizer uses Outlook to invite participants, as well as to reserve resources such as the conference room. A meeting is an event where the following steps occur:

A number of people are invited.
The invitees come together.
While together, they discuss a number of topics.
The discussion results in a number of actions and decisions.

The Typical Meeting Process

Let's look at a typical meeting process. In this example the meeting organizer creates an agenda and describes the meeting objective. (By the way, have you noticed how many meetings don't have a clear objective? Meeting objectives should be brief, clear, and easy for everyone to understand.) The meeting organizer then estimates the length of the meeting and sends an invitation to all participants. Some documents, with information needed for the meeting, may be attached to the invitation.

Later, the actual meeting takes place. Each participant has his own copy of the agenda and the attached documents. Well, actually, some participants forgot the agenda and need to print a copy; somebody else did not see the attached document, so he also needs to print a copy. About 15 minutes after the meeting should have started, everyone is ready to proceed. Because there is no clear indication as to how long each agenda point should take to discuss, the meeting takes 20 minutes longer than expected. This makes some people feel stressed because they have other appointments after this meeting.

During the meeting, someone takes notes about all the activities agreed upon, the tasks assigned, and the decisions made. This information is later listed in the meeting minutes. One more person also takes notes because, after this meeting, she will be the person appointed to check the minutes.

One week later, the meeting minutes are created and checked and sent to all participants by e-mail. A few of these participants actually read the minutes, some just take a quick glance at them, and some do not have time to even open the document. The next time this team has a meeting, only a few participants have read the previous minutes, and many have missed that they were assigned tasks. And the story goes on.

Using SharePoint for Effective Meetings

The preceding story might not be true for every organization, of course, but I am sure you are familiar with the ways meetings can go wrong. So, what can SharePoint do to make this process both more effective and more interesting? Thanks to the integration of Outlook and SharePoint, you can simultaneously send a meeting invitation, book a conference room, and create a meeting workspace, a web site where you can host all information regarding the meeting, including the following:

q Agenda: A list of all the items you will discuss during the meeting, including who is responsible for each one, how long it will take, and any comments regarding the items.
q Participants: SharePoint automatically creates a list of all invited participants. This list is automatically updated with the status of each participant so that everyone can see who will come or why someone declined the invitation.
q Tasks: A list of all the tasks agreed upon during the meeting.
q Decisions: A list of all the decisions agreed upon during the meeting.
q Document Library: Contains any document with information that will prepare the participants for the meeting, as well as documents created as a result of the meeting.

All this information is available to each participant directly when they receive the invitation. This means that the participant can see the agenda before it takes place, maybe add some extra items to it, and get access to any document with information related to the meeting. If needed, the participant can add her own documents.

When the actual meeting takes place, you use a video projector that displays the meeting workspace so that everyone can see it. No one needs a printed copy of the meeting agenda because it is listed on the meeting workspace. All documents are listed in the document workspace - if there is a discussion about what a document contains, the organizer can quickly open the document for everyone to see.

Any activities, tasks, or decisions that are agreed upon during the meeting are directly entered into the list. Everyone can see this, so there is no need for anyone to check the meeting minutes afterwards. The effect is that everyone will be involved in whatever decision is made. This makes the meeting more interesting and engaging. Because the agenda clearly states the amount of time it should take to discuss each item, the participants can focus on that subject and try to stay within the estimated time.

Because everything is recorded directly in tasks and decision lists during the meeting, you don't need any meeting minutes at all! If a participant afterwards needs to see what was decided in the meeting, she can simply go back to the meeting in the Outlook calendar and click the link to open the meeting workspace again.

In Chapter 7, you will see how to create a meeting workspace, configure what lists it contains, and fill it with data. You will also see that repeated meetings can be linked to the same meeting workspace, giving you one page for each meeting instance and making it very simple to go back and see what you discussed in a previous meeting.

Keeping Your Organization Updated (MOSS)

For many years now, organizations have used an intranet to make sure that everyone has access to general information, such as company news, information from the Human Resources department, or a list of all employees and their contact information. SharePoint is a great tool to help you create an intranet. With SharePoint, you often refer to the intranet as "the portal site," or simply "the portal."

Using SharePoint for your intranet has many advantages. It is fast, it can support organizations with millions of users, and it has several interesting features, such as the following:

q Content Management: MOSS has implemented and enhanced all the important features from MS Content Management Server. This allows you to edit web content, such as the intranet home pages and news, with features like check out/check in, approval procedures, version history, and workflows. This is the main feature that most users of SPS 2003 have been waiting for.
q News: This is a special site in MOSS where some, or all, users create news pages about the company and its customers and partners. This news site is based on the content management features mentioned above.
q Targeting: Helps you make sure that your news, links, and other information are visible to only a certain group of people, which is also referred to as an "audience."
q Active Directory Synchronization: Makes it possible to present relevant information about your users, such as e-mail addresses, departments, phone numbers, pictures, descriptions, and so on. SharePoint stores this information in its profile database.
q Document Center: Allows you to copy documents from a workspace area, such as a project site, to a specific document archive with its own set of permissions, policies, and workflows. For example, say that your teams develop documents, and some of these documents should be published to the intranet. Using a document archive makes it easy for the author to publish the document to that location.
q Report Center: This is a special site in MOSS where you can create, distribute, and manage important business data.
q Site Directory: Displays a list of existing web sites, including their names, descriptions, owners, and other properties. This makes it easy for a user to quickly find a specific web site.
q My Site: A personal site for each user that typically is used for displaying personal information, such as news, links, e-mail, and calendars, as well as document and picture libraries. There is also a public view of this site that displays information about the user, such as e-mail address, phone numbers, department, and a general description.

In addition, you will find that the News pages allow you to define when to display and remove the news from the list. News is not automatically deleted; instead, it is archived and will still be possible to find using the search feature in SharePoint. You can link pictures to your news, and you can make the news item show up in several places, such as on the organization-wide intranet and on a local intranet for a given department.

An intranet based on MOSS will automatically add links to the web sites you create for your projects, meetings, and other shared team sites. These links will show up in the site directory in MOSS, where the user can browse through different categories of sites, such as project sites, team sites and so on. The categories used in this site directory are created by the SharePoint administrator. The intranet also allows you to create any type of list, including document libraries, contacts, and events. If you decide to go with both MOSS and WSS, it is hard to find a good reason why you should use an additional product only for the intranet. Doing this will not only make things harder for you to support and manage (backup and restore), but it will also force your organization to pay two server licenses rather than one.

Now take a look at an intranet scenario. Say that your organization has three departments: Sales, IT, and Human Resources. You also have some special groups: The executive team, a project team, and an external sales force. Your task is to make sure each of them gets the right information, in an easy and intuitive way. Your CEO requires a common intranet where all important information regarding the company, its customers, and its employees are presented. Each department requires its own intranet. The IT folks tell you they are sick and tired of all the sales info, and the sales guys asks you politely if there is a way to filter out everything except the sales-related information. And all of them say they want a fast and easy way to find the right web site where all the information is stored for the projects, meetings, customers, and so on. And by the way, the executive group wants an easy way of finding all contracts, regardless of where they are stored. How do you solve this?

One simple solution would be to do this:

Install MOSS and WSS.
Create a common intranet portal for the organization.
Create a separate page on the intranet for each department, with its own news listing, document libraries, and contact lists. These pages are:
- q Sales
- q IT
- q HR
Create these audiences:
- q Sales Team
- q IT Team
- q HR Team
- q Executive Team
- q Project Team
- q External Sales Team
Instruct your general news authors how to target their news items to a specific audience so that each audience only sees information targeting their group.
Instruct local news authors in the departments on how to create news items only for their own areas.
Use the site directory in MOSS to create new web sites for each project, team site, and so on. This ensures that all web sites are listed in the site directory and are therefore easy to find.
Create a document library named Contract on the Document Center site. Tell the salespeople that whenever they create a new contract document to make sure that it also is submitted to this document library.
Make sure every user has updated information in the Active Directory (AD), such as phone numbers, department, company name, and e-mail address. Then synchronize the AD with SharePoint once every night. Make sure each user profile in SharePoint links to a photo of the user. Instruct everyone that whenever they see a name listed, they can simply click it to get more information about that user.

Finding Your Information Faster (MOSS)

How often do you search for information? I would guess at least once every day. Assume the average user spends 10 minutes every day searching for information. If you have 200 users, this would be about 2000 minutes, or 33 hours per day. You could also put it this way: Your organization pays for 200 employees, but it only gets the efficiency of 196 (4 people times 8 working hours = 32 hours in total per day). What this means is that even small improvements in efficiency may lead to big results. And not just for the owners of the company - the employees will be also happy because they can concentrate on doing their jobs instead of searching for information.

Both WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 has its own built-in search and indexing engine; the difference is that WSS will only allow the user to search in SharePoint sites, while MOSS allows the user to search almost anywhere, both in SharePoint and in external sources, such as MS Exchange server and file servers. Because the WSS search functionality is fairly intuitive, this section discusses the search and indexing features of only MOSS.

A number of client-based search tools are available, such as MSN Search and Google Search. At the time of this writing, these tools are not made for searching SharePoint information, so you need to implement MOSS in order to get a real search and index engine. But this is not just any search engine; it is a very sophisticated tool that enables you to search for any type of data in SharePoint, regardless of where it is stored. You can also instruct the index engine to make information outside the SharePoint database searchable, including these content sources:

q Every web site in the SharePoint environment (including all MOSS and WSS sites).
q Any file server in your IT environment (including older NT 4 and Windows 2000 servers).
q Your MS Exchange database (such as all public folders or role-based mailboxes such as Help Desk).
q External business and production databases, such as SAP and Oracle.
q Any Lotus Notes database you may have.
q Other internal web sites (such as your old intranet, your public web site, or similar sites).
q External web sites (such as your partner's web site - and why not your competitor's?).

What File Types Can You Search?

Before SharePoint allows you to search, it must index the content sources. So, the question should really be "What file types can MOSS index?" And the answer is: practically anything stored in a computer! You can index MS Office file formats, such as MS Word and MS Excel, and all standard file formats, such as text files, HTML, and RTF files.

What about other common file types, such as PDF, ZIP, and CAD files? In order to explain this, I have to tell you a little more about the indexing process. The process is more complicated than this, but the basic steps are these:

When the scheduled task for indexing starts, the index engine looks into every place you have instructed it to look in, also known as Content Sources.
When it finds a file, it looks at the file type (for example, DOC).
It checks a list in SharePoint where you have specified what file types you want indexed. In this example, DOC is a file type that should be indexed.
The index process now needs a program that understands how to read DOC files. Such programs are referred to as Index Filters (IFilters, for short). Every file type needs its own IFilter, including DOC files.
The IFilter opens the file and starts scanning it. Whenever it finds some text, it sends it through a filter that removes words that should not be indexed (such as "yes," "no," "one," and "two" and numerals like 1, 2, or 3). The resulting stream of words are then stored in an index file, along with information about the name and location of this file.
When all the text in the file is read, the IFilter closes the file, and the process starts again with step 2, looking for next file.

So if you want to make file types like PDF searchable, you need to do two things: Configure SharePoint to look for PDF files and install an IFilter for the PDF file type. The index engine does not include this by default. You may wonder why Microsoft has not added common file types such as PDF or ZIP. The answer is simple: At the time MOSS was released, Adobe owned the PDF format, so Microsoft could not include an IFilter for legal reasons. So, Adobe is making the IFilter for the PDF - and the good news is that Adobe is giving it away for free to encourage people to use the PDF format for storing all kinds of content. In Chapter 8, you learn how to find and install common IFilters, including the PDF version.

What Type of Searching Can You Do?

The default configuration of the SharePoint search engine allows you to search for whole words and their stemmers only. For example, you can search for "write" and you will also find files with "writing" and "wrote." However, if you search for the word "Admin," you will not find "Administrator" because "Admin" is not recognized as a whole word.

You can also search for document properties, also referred to as metadata, such as author, title, and file size. The list of properties is different for different types of documents. For example, if you want to see what properties a standard MS Word document has available, you can do this:

Open any Word 2007 file.
Choose the Office button Prepare Properties.

Now you will see all standard properties for this document, such as Author and Title, in the document property pane directly above the document text. You will also see any custom columns in the document library where this document is stored, since Word and SharePoint automatically synchronize, or propagate, custom columns between them.

All the standard properties on the document property pane are searchable. You can also make combinations, such as searching for documents containing the word "Viking" with the standard attribute "Author" equal to "Göran Husman." This is satisfactory for most search scenarios. But sometimes you want to search for a document that matches your own custom column value. You may recall that you can add any number of columns to a document library, for example "Doc Type" or "Status." As you learn in Chapter 8, even these column properties can be searchable if you configure SharePoint properly.

If your SharePoint search engine has indexed many documents, the search result may give you too many matching documents. If so, you want to limit the search to a given area. This is made possible by configuring search scopes. For example, you can create one search scope for MS Exchange, another for files on the file system, and a third that only shows results from a specific SharePoint site. This reduces the number of search results, but it requires that you know in what search scope your document belongs.

Finally, you can define keyword best bets. This feature helps your users to find frequently requested information. For example, suppose that when you talk with the sales manager, she tells you that members in her team often need access to the product specifications. The problem is that these products have several names. The bestselling product is article X2025A, but most customers refer to this as the "Super Gadget." To add to the problem, the internal name used by the sales team is the "Money Maker." She wants her team to be able to search for any of these terms and still find the product specification for the X2025A. With the keyword best bet feature in SharePoint, this is an easy fix. You simply need to create a list of each alias for the keyword X2025A and then link this keyword to the proper document. When someone later searches for any of these words, that person will find the product specification for X2025A at the top of the search results. Below it, he will find all other documents that match this search criterion.