Preface

There is a lot to SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services; even so, it is finite. We originally wanted to write a book about everything that Share-Point has to offer. As we were writing, books kept coming out, more and more content was available on the Internet, and we didn't want to write about topics that were covered well elsewhere. What we ended up with is a book jammed full of information that was noticeably absent from the SharePoint community.

The techniques we talk about in this book were born out of necessity. We worked on completely different projects and realized that we were having the same problems. Not readily finding solutions to our problems, we discovered the need for this content. When we approached Addison-Wesley, there were already several books on the market. The publisher wanted to know why our book was going to be a good one. The answer was pretty simplewe have lived and breathed the product and have had to solve real business problems. We've been in the trenches with the product and know it intimately. We know what works and what doesn't work in the real world. We're not a couple of authors who have friends or went to college with folks in the product group. We are hands-on architects/programmers who know the product and how to will it to our ways.

To keep things interesting for both the reader and for us, we wrote in a way that will expose you, the reader, to many of the inner workings of SharePoint without becoming a boring reference manual. You'll see problems that we tried to solve and what we did to come up with solutions for those problems. Your problems might not be exactly the same as ours. As a matter of fact, I'm sure the problems won't be identical. But you should find that the problems you encounter with SharePoint in your enterprise can be solved with the solutions we describe. Exposure to these solutions will enable you to explore other areas of SharePoint otherwise hidden from view.

The SharePoint product family seems to touch everything in the Microsoft world. The SharePoint product line relies on servers such as the Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server and leans heavily on Active Directory, ASP.NET, and even a lot of JavaScript. From the user interface side, the Office products make an appearance. All these technologies make SharePoint a tough animal to deal with in terms of a technical tool set. Working with SharePoint sometimes takes relying on a small army of highly skilled folks to pull off a successful implementation or modificationpoint being, the technologies that are used are many. This certainly shouldn't be your first technology book and probably shouldn't even be the first SharePoint book you own. This book is for people who have wrestled with SharePoint and have tried to make SharePoint behave in a way that it probably wasn't originally designed to do. The person who will benefit most from a book like this might be saying something like, "If I could just make it do this one thing, then everything else would just fall together!"