A corporate portal is a gateway through which members can access business information and, if set up properly, should be the first place an employee goes to access anything of importance. Portals differ from regular websites in that they are customized specifically around business processes. In SharePoint, a portal may actually consist of numerous websites, with information stored either directly on those sites or in other systems, such as file shares, business applications, or a regular Internet website. This allows SharePoint to be the central location users may visit to find information regardless of its actual storage location. Because making informed business decisions is key to becoming and remaining successful, it's important that the information you place on a portal be secure, up to date, and easily accessible. Because a business's marketplace may span the globe, an organization also needs to have the information that reflects the needs of employees from multiple specific regions.

As an example, consider a new employee who has just joined an organization. In addition to learning her new job responsibilities, this employee must quickly get up to speed on the various company processes and policies. A good portal should provide all the company reference and policy information that the employee needs to review, as well as links to all the information systems and websites that employee needs to do her job. Information should be stored in easy-to-browse locations, based on subject or topic. In situations where the location of a document or information is not obvious, the employee should be able to type words into a search box and receive suggestions. The employee should also be able to share information with others. In many ways, a good portal should act as a table of contents for all the information and websites related to an organization or topic.

The following list provides just a few of the reasons why many enterprise organizations opt to invest in portal technologies:

The primary features of SharePoint Foundation revolve around document management and collaboration. The following sections outline the major features of the platform that have been responsible for its wide adoption in businesses.

In short, SharePoint Foundation represents the core content storage and collaboration features of SharePoint 2010. It is the ideal edition for teams and small organizations looking to improve on their ability to work with one another in a secure, easy-to-use collaborative workspace.

SharePoint Server provides a set of enterprise tools that connect people, processes, and information in a central location. The following list outlines some of the more common benefits of using SharePoint Server.

The Ribbon is a new tool within SharePoint aimed at making management and navigation activities much easier than the traditional menu-based system that was available in previous versions of the tool. The Ribbon was originally introduced in Microsoft Office client applications such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint in 2007. The goal of the Ribbon is to provide a simpler user experience when interacting with the site. Small icons are used rather than text to give a quicker visual indication of the setting you may be seeking. In addition, as you select various objects on a page, the Ribbon will adjust itself to display tabs that may be of interest to you based on your selection. An example of the Ribbon can be seen in Figure 1-1. In the image, because a media web part is selected on the page, the Ribbon is displaying options that relate to managing the media web part.

The list is a fundamental component of SharePoint Products and Technologies. A list is a storage location for a group of items. Items can be defined as any object that you are tracking information about. To create an item, you must fill out a form that describes the item. The data from this form is then stored in a list. For example, you may have a list in SharePoint to track customer orders. Each customer order would be added to the list through the completion of the form. The form provides a controlled manner to collect information in a structured manner to ensure that all information tracked about customers is the same. Each customer order is considered an item. A list can have many items. However, an item may only belong to a single list.

Figure 1-1. FIGURE 1-1

Although advanced and dynamic, SharePoint lists are easy to create, requiring absolutely no code, special development skills, or tools. In the past, such lists took time to create and required using an application and hiring a developer or having a user with technical skills. By using SharePoint, users most familiar with the information-tracking and -sharing needs of the organization can create the tools they need.

You can use lists to store virtually any type of information. The most commonly used list types are Contacts, Tasks, Issues, Announcements, and Calendar. You can create other lists for just about any usage scenario to track and share information related to a single item. Chapters 2 and 4 examine the common list templates and how you can extend them to meet your team's goals and objectives.

Libraries are much like lists with one major difference: their intended content. Whereas lists store information about items such as events, contacts, or announcements, libraries store documents. You can think of libraries as superfolders that help users find files faster and easier than ever through the use of special properties or keywords such as status, owner, or due date. Once you add a number of properties to documents, you can create special views or reports to filter, sort, and organize documents based on those properties.

Through SharePoint-specific technologies, such as content types, document libraries can now manage multiple types of files and templates from a single library, making it possible to quickly create and manage common document types such as those from Microsoft Office Word or Excel right from the browser. Chapters 3 and 4 explain how you can use document libraries within your SharePoint sites and further customize them to meet your team's needs.

When you create a list or library, SharePoint automatically generates a corresponding web part that you can later add to a web part page. You can think of web parts as mini-applications or modules that display information on a page or perform a special function. Web parts can perform any number of functions, from allowing a user to add custom text and images to a web page without using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) code, to displaying a financial report based on information stored in a completely separate application.

While many common business web parts come with SharePoint, the model is extensible, and you can create custom web parts to accommodate the specific needs of your organization. You store web parts in a web part gallery, and you place them on a web page by dragging and dropping them into an appropriately marked web part zone or content area. Users can reuse, move, and customize web parts on multiple pages. For example, you can place a small module on the page to display the weather and have each division in your organization decide whether and where to display it on their site. Chapter 7 examines the various types of web parts that are available in SharePoint and discusses common usage scenarios for each primary category.

A workflow automates a business process by breaking it into a set of steps that users must take to complete a specific business activity, such as approving content or routing a document from one location to another. Automation eliminates manual tasks and reduces the chance of data entry errors or documents getting lost in the system.

A workflow can be as simple or complex as your organization's needs. They can be very rigid and clearly defined or offer a greater level of flexibility and decision making. You can use several built-in templates as a starting point for facilitating more customized processes for your organization. Templates exist in SharePoint to represent common processes that exist within collaborative scenarios such as review and approval. If users fail to respond to a task that has been assigned to them by the workflow, the system can generate email messages to remind them of these tasks once they have become overdue.

You can customize basic workflow templates directly from within a SharePoint list or library to facilitate a process, such as giving approval, responding to a request for feedback, or signing a document. You can also design more specialized and complex workflows using SharePoint Designer 2010 or Visual Studio 2010. You will learn more about the various alternatives for participating in and creating workflows in Chapter 5.

A content type represents a group of informational items in your organization that share common settings. They allow you to manage multiple types of information from a single location. You can associate content types with a document library, for example, to manage multiple file types, such as Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents. Content types can also manage multiple templates of the same document type such as a Sales Presentation or Customer Order. As you associate a content type with a document library or list, it appears in the library's or list's New Document drop-down menu, as shown in the Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2. FIGURE 1-2

Content types make extensive use of global properties known as site columns, which means you can associate metadata, which is descriptive information, with your item to more easily find it. Columns are properties that help define an item; you use them similarly to the way you can use a field in a form. For example, for a task list, the field value for describing when an item is due is a column, used much like a field is for identifying who is responsible for completing a task. Content types make use of site columns because they, too, can be associated with multiple lists or libraries across a number of sites.

A more advanced use of content types involves templates known as page layouts, which you use to publish only certain types of content on your site. For example, you can create a newsletter article content type so that the web pages reflect your content, in this instance a column for the title, another for the date, and a third for main text body. You can create page layouts via the browser or using SharePoint Designer; after creation, they become available in the Site Actions menu under the Create Pages option as page templates. Content types are introduced and explored in Chapter 6.

Both the terms sites and workspaces, and the term site collections refer to SharePoint sites. These websites, which you can create using available SharePoint templates, are also called team collaboration sites, and they store and share information using web parts, lists, and libraries as their various components. The following list explains how they differ:

Figure 1-3. FIGURE 1-3

In the first exercise for this book, you create a new site collection based on the Collaboration Portal template, which will be known in all future exercises as the Corporate Intranet site. If you do not have the ability to create a new site collection within your SharePoint environment, you may ask your system administrator to complete this task for you and specify that your account is a site collection administrator account. Ideally, you should have a unique site collection to complete the exercises in this book; this will give you the most flexibility and a complete learning experience. If for some reason, you are unable to get your own site collection, you will still be able to complete the exercises, but you may need to complete some additional steps in certain cases.

So far, you have examined SharePoint's basic features; however, you've yet to discover the components called enterprise features, so named because they often represent the functionality that large enterprises require and demand from their collaborative applications. These features also highlight some of the key differences between SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server.