Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Pro SharePoint 2010 Administration. My name is Rob, and together we are about to spend 10 chapters discovering administration of the latest version of SharePoint.

SharePoint administration can be intimidating to anyone looking at the platform for the first time, and so I have written this book to cover all the major areas and demonstrate configuration in a step-by-step fashion. Chapter 1 kicks off with an overview of the new SharePoint 2010 platform, its changes from the previous product version, and what you can expect of the new features.

In this book you and I will walk through the installation of a SharePoint Server 2010 on a new Windows server. I'll highlight the prerequisites for the installation and the minimum hardware and operating system software requirements. If you're a seasoned SharePoint administrator and have performed many installations of SharePoint before, you might gain additional insight in what I have written; if you are not, Chapter 2 serves as a great instruction set for anyone looking to install SharePoint 2010 for the first time.

With SharePoint installed, we embark on the journey through the various areas of SharePoint 2010 throughout Chapters 3-10, which include detail on these topics: Security and Policy; Users and User Profiles; Social Networking; Documents, Records, and Metadata; Business Intelligence; Microsoft Office Integration; and Health and Disaster Recovery.

You may be asking “Why no chapter on Search?” I considered it, but the search capabilities in SharePoint 2010 are vast, and with the new FAST Enterprise Search Platform included as an option in SharePoint 2010 Enterprise, I decided that search was best left to a dedicated book on the subject.

Thank you for your interest in my book. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it. I am always interested in reader feedback, so feel free to visit my blog at http://blog.robgarrett.com or write me an email at [email protected]. Enjoy.