About this book

Part 1 is designed to acquaint you with SharePoint and to teach you about its functionality. Part 2 will then guide you through the different components of SharePoint. You’ll learn about the functionality associated with each of these components in a step-by-step fashion, while building out a usable scenario. Each situation is drawn from a real-world scenario that I’ve encountered, and you may be able to adapt them for your own use.

Who should read this book

This book is intended for tech-savvy business users:

• An end user of SharePoint who doesn’t have a computer science degree but wants to optimize the technology they have at hand
• The developer who doesn’t understand SharePoint’s built-in capabilities
• The SharePoint developer/user who is new to SharePoint 2010

Roadmap

This book consists of 11 chapters divided into two parts as follows:

Part 1 “Getting started with SharePoint” introduces you to SharePoint terminology, capablities, and out-of-the-box features.

Chapter 1 is an introduction to SharePoint—what it is and why you should be using it—and a look at what is new in SharePoint 2010.

Chapter 2 offers a broad overview of SharePoint 2010 and its out-of-the-box capabilities, along with a look at the functionality associated with the different releases of SharePoint.

Chapter 3 covers the core components of SharePoint and shows how to create a site with out-of-the-box templates.

Part 2 “Implementations using real-world scenarios” will show you how you can customize and create your own site templates, based on real-world scenarios.

Chapter 4 guides you in how to set up a document collaboration site and covers site branding, document libraries and collaboration features, as well as custom lists and lookup fields.

Chapter 5 discusses how to leverage enterprise content management features, such as content types, information management policy, and retention schedules.

In chapter 6 you will learn how to publish content to the web, using hosted internet-facing sites, blogs, lists, discussion boards, and surveys.

Chapter 7 focuses on the business intelligence capabilities of Share-Point and describes different scenarios to show you how you can use it knowledge-mine your data to create business reports.

Chapter 8 covers how to create application sites with SharePoint Designer, including how to manage and create lists, apply conditional formatting, and configure out-of-the-box list workflows.

Chapter 9 discusses how to collect and manage data and integrate it with InfoPath, using forms libraries, InfoPath forms, and forms services.

In chapter 10, you will learn how to use Access with SharePoint, including Access features like linked and local tables, queries, reports, forms, and Access Services.

Chapter 11 helps you to pull it all together with search, My Sites, and web parts that enable you to pull data across sites.

The book has two appendixes: appendix A helps you set up your test environment and install and configure SharePoint on your computer; appendix B will walk you through the steps needed to create your first site.

Code conventions and software requirements

This book doesn’t require you to be a developer or do any coding. The solutions will be just as powerful as solutions that are developed from code and will be implemented through the SharePoint user interface and Microsoft Office tools. You’ll quickly see how easily you can develop your own solutions using a no-code approach.

Ideally, you should have access to a SharePoint environment for experimenting. If you don’t, appendix A will walk you through the steps to set up an environment for building the scenarios. It will also include the details of any software requirements. Appendix B helps you create your first site.

Author Online

Purchase of SharePoint 2010 Site Owner’s Manual includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/SharePoint2010SiteOwnersManual. This page provides information on how to get on the forum once you’re registered, what kind of help is available, and the rules of conduct on the forum.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It’s not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the book’s forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions, lest her interest stray!

The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.

About the author

Yvonne M. Hamilton (Harryman) is a Solution Architect at Microsoft, specializing in SharePoint technologies. She has implemented and designed SharePoint solutions for clients such as the White House, US Air Force, National Institute of Health, Iron Mountain, the Gap, State of California, Peter Kiewit and Sons, WellPoint, Baxter, Ingersoll-Rand, and many others. Her key focus areas are Cloud solutions, Microsoft Rapid Application Development tools, Object Oriented Programming and Governance. Yvonne and her teammates have received many awards for the projects that they have designed. Her top awards include a letter of recognition from the White House Chief of Staff and the prestigious Circle of Excellence award at Microsoft; as important are some of the top team awards received directly from clients for work done at the National Institute of Health and Ingersoll-Rand.

Yvonne holds two degrees, a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science in Computer Information Systems. Her undergrad was completed at the College of Charleston and the Master’s was received from Johns Hopkins University. Yvonne is very active in the SharePoint community. You can find many of her past contributions under Yvonne Harryman; prior to the publication of this book she got married in Ireland and is now Yvonne Hamilton. Yvonne frequently travels around the US designing solutions for clients, but her home is in Seattle, WA, where she lives with her husband Luke, son Luca, and two rescue German Shepherd mixes.