Introduction

When I first started planning for this book, I took some time to think about the challenges that face a beginning SharePoint 2007 administrator. The many SharePoint courses I have conducted as a SharePoint trainer have given me a good understanding of these challenges. All my SharePoint consulting has also been very helpful, because theory is one thing, but real-world experience is another. I also remember my own frustration and the numerous questions I had when I was trying to learn what SharePoint 2007 was all about. I have written the book that I wished I had when I started to work with SharePoint. My hope is that you will find it full of practical and easy-to-follow instructions that will help you get your SharePoint environment up and running in no time.

The goal of this book is to be your practical guide when building your SharePoint 2007 environment. I have tried to be very clear and focus on the steps that you must understand to build a production environment. Because SharePoint is a very broad subject with lots of details, I had to make sure that the book contains information that you most likely will need to know, such as how to install SharePoint, how to administrate it, how to customize it, and how to perform backup and restore procedures.

But administration is not the only important aspect of SharePoint. I know that most beginning SharePoint administrators also want to know what SharePoint is and what it can be used for. As the administrator, you will most likely be consulted by your users when they want to know how to get the most out of SharePoint 2007. That is why the book also contains several chapters on how to use the features of SharePoint.

Finally, the book has several references and tips for smart add-ons and utilities that will enhance the functionality of SharePoint, such as better navigation, integration with other systems, and workflow solutions. The book describes many free utilities and commercial third-party products. It also shows you where to find new utilities, because there is almost no other Microsoft product that has as many related new products and utilities constantly showing up.

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for the beginning SharePoint administrator and for the administrator who has been working with SharePoint 2007 for some time but wants to know more about how it works. It will also help you understand the differences between SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 and help you find the arguments for upgrading. The book assumes that you have a basic understanding of the MS Windows 2003 operating system, including the Active Directory, as well as web applications in general. There is no need to be an expert in these areas, because the book explains everything you must know, but as always it helps to know the environment a product lives in. The book's main focus is planning, installation, configuration, and administration, but it also covers the basic information about customizing SharePoint—for example, how to create templates, how to build your own Site Definition, and how to use SharePoint Designer for extending the look and feel of SharePoint.

The book covers the differences between MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and helps you decide whether you need only WSS or if you should also implement MOSS. Regardless of your choice, the book describes how to use that environment in an optimal way. If you already have a SharePoint installation up and running, you can either skip Chapter 2 for WSS installation and Chapter 4 for MOSS installation, or you can explore them to get a better understanding of how your SharePoint environment was set up.

What This Book Covers

This book covers Windows SharePoint Service 3.0 (WSS) and MS Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). It does not describe how to migrate from earlier versions of these products, because that task must be very carefully tailored to your specific needs. It will help you install and configure a SharePoint environment for most types of organizations, both small and large. The book takes a very practical point of view. It is meant to be read from the beginning to the end, although you should also be able to use it as a reference book. It focuses on typical scenarios and tasks that a SharePoint administrator will face, such as configuring an intranet, setting up document management, and project management.

This book also covers how to use SharePoint 2007 together with MS Office, including Office 2007, and especially MS Outlook 2007. It shows you how these products work together to address typical situations for information workers (users working with projects, document management, and meetings).

You will also find an introduction to SharePoint Designer 2007 and how to use it for extending and customizing SharePoint sites; for example, how to customize master pages and page layout files, and create workflows.

How This Book Is Structured

The book begins with an introductory chapter to give you a sense of what SharePoint 2007 can do. It then continues with four more chapters of detailed instructions on how to install and configure WSS and MOSS, along with explanations of what you must think about when selecting the type of MS SQL database for your SharePoint server. These chapters include information that describes how to configure specific features of WSS and SPS, such as how to control what the users can do in SharePoint, how to work with intranet news pages, and how to set up Active Directory synchronization. In Chapter 5 you will also find information on how to customize MOSS, including how to change the colors, menus, and logos, how to configure SharePoint to accept incoming e-mail, and how to work with a records repository.

The remaining chapters are independent of each other, so you can read whatever interests you, but the book is written to encourage reading from beginning to end. Some of the content is hard to understand if you have skipped previous chapters, so I suggest that you read it from the beginning and skip parts that do not interest you at the time. Later, if you find that you need to understand those parts, you can go back to them then.

Chapter 6 describes the different site templates, including both MOSS and WSS site templates. It also describes how to use My Sites in an optimal way. You will also find an introduction to the web content management feature that now comes with SharePoint 2007.

Chapter 7 shows you the many ways that SharePoint integrates with other MS Office products, especially Office 2007. It also discusses the differences between Office 2007 and previous Office versions, including MS Outlook and MS InfoPath.

Chapter 8 focuses on advanced administration, mainly for the MOSS environment, such as managing the search feature, creating audience groups, managing user security, handling site definitions, creating templates, and more. Even if you are mainly focusing on WSS, you will still find some interesting information here about important MOSS features and how using MOSS differs from using WSS.

Chapter 9 shows you how the web content management features work in MOSS 2007. It also explains the difference between a page and a web site and how to configure them.

In Chapter 10 you will find a lot of tips on how to use SharePoint with MS Office for better file and document management. The chapter covers the ways you can configure and customize document libraries, such as activating version history, custom properties, and custom views. It also explains what Document Workspaces are used for and how to achieve workflow functionality in SharePoint 2007.

Chapter 11 shows you a practical way of building an intranet with either WSS or MOSS and how they differ from each other. This chapter summarizes a lot of features described in the earlier chapters, and will help you understand how to use SharePoint 2007.

Chapter 12 describes how to customize SharePoint sites without using a tool such as SharePoint Designer; for example you will learn how to create your own site definitions, how to create a custom CSS file, and how to customize the navigation in SharePoint 2007.

Chapter 13 describes how to use SharePoint Designer 2007 for customizing SharePoint sites and extending their functionality. You do not need any previous SharePoint Designer or FrontPage 2003 knowledge to get important information from this chapter.

Chapter 14 finally discusses one of the most important tasks for a SharePoint administrator: how to make backups and perform restores of your SharePoint environment. Sooner than you may think, this SharePoint server will become business critical, because it will contain lots of important documents, lists, and contacts. You don't want to lose that information. Make sure to read Chapter 14 to understand how to restore your SharePoint environment.

What You Need to Use This Book

This book is full of practical step-by-step instructions. To get the most out of this book, you should run SharePoint so that you can test these instructions. If you don't have a SharePoint environment, the book tells you how to find either the full WSS version or the evaluation version of MOSS and install it. You will also need a Windows 2003 server up and running, preferably in an Active Directory domain, to install SharePoint. A tip is to use an MS Virtual PC 2007 or VMware environment for building your test environment.

Some of these instructions and examples require you to run other programs, such as MS Office 2007, MS Outlook 2007, MS InfoPath 2007, and SharePoint Designer 2007. You can follow many, but not all, of the instructions if you have earlier versions of MS Office, such as Office 2003.

Conventions

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

Tips, hints, tricks, and asides to the current discussion are offset and placed in italics like this.

As for styles in the text:

We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them.

We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A.

We show URLs and code within the text like this: persistence properties.

We present code in two different ways:

In code examples we highlight new and important code with a gray background.
The gray highlighting is not used for code that's less important in the
present context, or has been shown before.

Source Code

As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually or to use the source code files that accompany the book. All of the source code used in this book is available for download at www.wrox.com. Once at the site, simply locate the book's title (either by using the Search box or by using one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book.

Once you download the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternately, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.

Errata

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