by Mike Walsh

When PCs were new, there were two main computer magazines—Byte from McGraw-Hill and PC Magazine... more

by Mike Walsh

When PCs were new, there were two main computer magazines—Byte from McGraw-Hill and PC Magazine from Ziff-Davis. The older Byte covered not just PCs, but also Apples, and was a tough read in parts, whereas PC Magazine concentrated entirely on PCs and was placed at the ability level of most of its readers. Ziff-Davis covered the “professional” market with a magazine called PC Tech Journal, and despite hardly being able to understand much of it, I subscribed to this because I thought that in time I would. Two years later, I was just about able to start following the articles, so naturally Ziff-Davis then pulled it and that was the end of that.

If you bought this book without having been responsible in some way for any previous SharePoint product, you are roughly at the level with SharePoint where I was with PC computing more than 20 years ago—that is, you have a good knowledge of computing in general, just no specific experience of the SharePoint products. Because I’m assuming that you don’t have a couple of years available to you while things click into place, this first chapter is for you. This chapter provides the basic knowledge you need to be able to follow the rest of the book.

Note

This chapter is not for people with existing knowledge of SharePoint products. You have the choice of going directly to Chapter 2 or (and this seems most likely) picking and choosing among the chapters that follow. Some chapters will talk about SharePoint areas that are completely new to you, and others will add to your knowledge of other areas.

I start by briefly showing you how “SharePoint” became the multifaceted set of applications we have to choose from today. I equally briefly outline the differences between the various applications before showing how to install the simplest SharePoint 2007 version in the simplest way possible, so that you quickly will have something concrete to look at when reading the rest of the chapter.

The rest of the chapter goes through what is installed and is available for your use when you do an installation of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 (that “simplest version”).

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by Stacy Draper

Forms Based Authentication (FBA) is a technique developers can use for authenticating users into... more

by Stacy Draper

Forms Based Authentication (FBA) is a technique developers can use for authenticating users into Web applications. As a capability built into ASP.NET 2.0, FBA has become a very popular method for providing authentication functionality. FBA is the technology that challenges users to identify who they are. Once the credentials are obtained, the user identity is cached in a cookie. In its most basic form, an FBA challenge is a Web page that consists of a request of a username, password, and in what manner to persist the cookie. Because the SharePoint 2007 platform is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0, you essentially get FBA for free.

It’s “essentially for free” only because there is no money changing hands, but what an investment in time it seems to have been in trying to figure out how to set it up. When you first take on configuring SharePoint for FBA, it seems that it’s either the most counter-intuitive process, or it just simply doesn’t work. After the community has invested several months collaborating, comparing notes, and working through it, we found out it does indeed work. It’s simple, actually, once you know where everything is and how everything works and interacts with each other. This chapter covers the basic assets of FBA by utilizing the following:

• A user store—In this case, I will use a SQL database. If the application must be migrated to Active Directory (AD) later, using ADAM would be a better approach.

• Modified web.config files—There are a few things to remember about SharePoint:

• Central Administration is a separate site

• Shared Service Provider (SSP) is a separate site

• The sites your users access are all separate sites

• Configuring SharePoint and Permissions—These are discussed in more detail later in the chapter.

This chapter also covers some more complicated techniques, caveats, and ways to work around them where applicable.

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by Todd Klindt

SharePoint is fun. SharePoint is great. I started working with SharePoint on a lark years ago when... more

by Todd Klindt

SharePoint is fun. SharePoint is great. I started working with SharePoint on a lark years ago when it was still code-named Tahoe, and came bundled with Office 2000. My boss saw it at a Microsoft conference and was smitten. Even then, SharePoint provided us with amazing and much needed collaboration capabilities. When the next version of SharePoint came out in 2003, I was blown away. It had so many more capabilities, and with that came greater complexity. Of course, the 2007 version of SharePoint raised the bar even higher in power, but also complexity.

In this chapter, I cover some of the issues I’ve encountered in the field as an IT professional moving from Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v2 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007/WSS v3. I’ll share with you how the tasks I performed in WSS v2 have changed to WSS v3. This includes the new ways that WSS v3 interacts with Internet Information Services (IIS), and how managing WSS is different now. I also cover SharePoint’s command-line administration tool, STSADM, and what new functionality it has. Any good SharePoint administrator has to script things from time to time, and STSADM is the way to go for that. Plus, there are a few tweaks to SharePoint you can only do in STSADM. After you read this chapter, your users will thank you.

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by Andrew Connell

The latest release of the SharePoint platform, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007,... more

by Andrew Connell

The latest release of the SharePoint platform, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007, introduces new capabilities to the SharePoint platform: hosting content-centric Web sites on SharePoint and providing a robust publishing infrastructure. This publishing infrastructure enables site owners to delegate to certain individuals the creation and management of content on the site. Other users have rights to approve and publish content for readers to see. Interwoven in this process is a robust controlled publishing infrastructure founded on the Windows Workflow Foundation (WFF). Combined with significant performance enhancements and improvements to the underlying foundation of MOSS, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3, SharePoint is now capable of hosting content-centric Internet sites! This component of MOSS 2007 is commonly referred to as Web Content Management (WCM), and sites utilizing the WCM features are called Publishing sites.

A major component to Publishing sites is the development story: the process behind constructing a content-centric site. Most development concepts surrounding Publishing sites are really SharePoint concepts, because a Publishing site is just another WSS site with some extra functionality. So, how are you supposed to develop a Publishing site? To date, only one approach has been the leader in the WCM community. This is the approach you will find in virtually all documentation, every whitepaper, every Webcast, every conference or trade show presentation, and every magazine article. However, this approach poses certain challenges in the real world when many organizations have a strict change control process.

An alternate development process is presented in this chapter. It addresses many of the pitfalls associated with the conventional approach. Though many of the concepts in this chapter are tailored to work specifically with Publishing sites, they will also work with little or no modifications in general WSS v3 sites. Before any concerns arise from the process outlined in this chapter, rest assured everything is 100 percent supported by Microsoft. In fact, this is the process Microsoft’s out-of-the-box site templates (Collaboration Portal and Publishing Portal) utilize to create the site infrastructure and layout files to implement the default sites!

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by Dustin Miller

In this chapter, I’m going to take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most interesting... more

by Dustin Miller

In this chapter, I’m going to take you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most interesting features of SharePoint Designer. Now, I can cover only so much in the space allotted, so don’t be upset if your favorite feature doesn’t get covered. I tend to be a very visual person, so you’ll see screenshots of the important things along the way. I hope, above all, that this chapter inspires you to experiment and explore SPD, and try to create new and unique solutions based on that product we all know and love: Windows SharePoint Services!

What’s in a Name?

I use the word “SharePoint” in my writing, rather than the full platform title “Windows SharePoint Services.” So, whenever I mention a “SharePoint site,” I’m actually referring to a site using the “Team Site” site definition on a server running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS v3.0).

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by Shane Perran and Heather Solomon

The benefits of customizing a user interface run deep, with many layers,... more

by Shane Perran and Heather Solomon

The benefits of customizing a user interface run deep, with many layers, each as unique as they are important. From standard brand recognition, to ensuring a user experience that will promote healthy adoption, there is much more to customization than meets the eye.

The 1990s failed to deliver a long-promised usable Web experience, leaving the world weary of doing business online. The expectations in the new world of work have increased significantly.

A seamless and connected experience across applications in which technology is borderline transparent (a term dubbed “Web 2.0” by the global marketing machine) is not only expected, it’s demanded.

SharePoint is certainly no exception to this rule. Being a Web-based platform, the expectations are high, and the need to deliver has never been stronger.

In this chapter, SharePoint MVPs and customization experts Shane Perran (www.graphicalwonder.com) and Heather Solomon (www.heathersolomon.com) have teamed up for the first time to share real-world field experience and guide you through some of the least-documented and understood aspects of SharePoint, user interface customization.

To begin, Shane Perran guides you through a basic overview of each customization option at a high level before moving on and sketching out several realistic business scenarios based on real-life experience in the field, helping you to logically match customization options with business problems. Next, the discussion takes a deep dive into the mechanics of each option as they apply directly to the solutions, giving you step-by-step instructions, trips, tricks, and best practices sure to make your next customization project a success.

In the latter half of the chapter, Heather Solomon focuses solely on a major component of any SharePoint customization, cascading style sheets (CSS). By the end of this part of the chapter, you will be able to identify, edit, and create your own styles, and fully customize SharePoint for your unique branding.

Have you been fretting the interface customization of SharePoint? This chapter will give you a clear view of what to do, how to do it, and how to be successful at it.

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by Jan Tielens

Web Parts are the building blocks of pages in SharePoint sites. Users of SharePoint sites can make... more

by Jan Tielens

Web Parts are the building blocks of pages in SharePoint sites. Users of SharePoint sites can make use of those building blocks to determine what should be displayed on a specific page in a particular SharePoint site.

When you install SharePoint, you can make use of some out-of-the-box Web Parts straight away. Depending on whether you have Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as your SharePoint installation, you’ll have more or less. Additionally, every SharePoint list and document library will have a Web Part counterpart that can display the contents of the corresponding list or document library.

Of course, the out-of-the-box Web Parts are not the only ones that you can use! Developers can build their own Web Parts as well and deploy them to the SharePoint server. End users won’t notice the difference between the custom Web Parts and the out-of-the-box Web Parts, so Web Parts are a great way to extend SharePoint.

This chapter takes you through the basic steps to create your own Web Parts in various ways, and discusses some more advanced Web Part topics as well.

Tip

The techniques and technologies described in this chapter are applicable both to Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), unless mentioned otherwise. So, in this chapter, when SharePoint is mentioned, it should be interpreted as Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

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by Robert Bogue

Wow! That’s all you can say when you look at the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services... more

by Robert Bogue

Wow! That’s all you can say when you look at the capabilities of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007)—particularly when you evaluate the product’s capability to facilitate, coordinate, and track business processes in your enterprise. Although the “SharePoint Vision” has always been about providing more connectivity with Office documents between people, between steps, and between systems, SharePoint has made significant progress in this regard with the latest release compared to previous releases, and when compared to competitive products.

This chapter covers a lot of ground as I help you to understand the options for creating workflows, the fundamentals of workflow, the limitations of workflow, and some ways to make workflow work for your organization.

Largely, this chapter won’t be covering how to use Microsoft’s Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), upon which SharePoint’s workflow functionality is based. Some essential topics are covered only enough to place the SharePoint implementation of WF into perspective. If you need a comprehensive reference to WF, you’ll want to pick up another book on workflow, such as Professional Windows Workflow Foundation by Todd Kitta (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2007).

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by Joris Poelmans

In the mid 1990s, the Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) published its first definition of workflow:... more

by Joris Poelmans

In the mid 1990s, the Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) published its first definition of workflow:

“The automation of a business process, in whole or part, during which documents, information, or tasks are passed from one participant to another for action (activities), according to a set of procedural rules. A participant can be a person or a system, local or in a remote organization.”

This focus on business processes explains why workflow is so important. Well laid-out and efficient business processes differentiate companies from one another. This is why you have probably heard about such methodologies as Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR). Both BPR and CPI are process-centric methodologies that can be supported by a workflow management system.

Note

CPI is part of the Total Quality Management (TQM) approach and focuses on optimizing processes by continuous, incremental improvements, instead of seeking a radical breakthrough. For more information on BPR, see the book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution by Michael Hammer and James Champy (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

Workflow in SharePoint Server 2007 is built on top of the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) framework, which is part of .NET 3.0. WF was introduced because Microsoft noticed that many people were all re-inventing the wheel when trying to implement workflow. Even its own products such as Microsoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Exchange Server, and Microsoft Content Management Server (CMS) each used a different workflow framework. There was no real platform on which to build workflow applications.

On the other hand, Biztalk Server had been around for quite a while and provided a solid foundation for building system-to-system workflow. Unfortunately, Biztalk is not a very good platform for building systems that are human-oriented, especially with regard to the unpredictability of this behavior. However, you will notice some similarities between Biztalk and WF.

Basically, WF consists of a number of assemblies (which use the System.Workflow namespace) and a Workflow Runtime (which is the execution environment for your workflow programs). The WF Runtime should, however, be instantiated by a host application that can be any .NET program. The core WF Runtime uses a number of services that are referred to as WF Runtime Services defined in the System.Workflow.Runtime.Hosting namespace.

The timing for the development of WF was just right to implement it straight away in the 2007 Office System. As a matter of fact, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 acts as such a host application for WF and provides the core platform on top of which Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) adds some specific workflow templates for enterprise content management scenarios.

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by Nick Swan

I was initially drawn to SharePoint 2003 because of the promise it offered people in terms of productivity... more

by Nick Swan

I was initially drawn to SharePoint 2003 because of the promise it offered people in terms of productivity gains through working in a collaborative way. This not only would make their jobs easier, but also would allow them to do more each and every day.

I was first drawn to the Business Data Catalog (BDC) for the same reason. SharePoint 2003 allowed a portal so that your staff could see information from many different systems in your business, whether from an Oracle, SAP, or Siebel system. The problem was that custom Web Parts had to be written to pull this data back from the database and display it on a page. Also, each data source required its own API for developers to learn. SharePoint developers had to spend many hours developing, debugging, and administrating these very similar Web Parts that, for the most part, were simply selecting data from a data source. Although these Web Parts took up a significant portion of a SharePoint developer’s life, displaying the data in the Web Part was all that could be done with it. The data was not searchable, and if you wanted to use this data in another custom SharePoint solution, you had to manually create data access code to read from the data source again.

The BDC, which is a part of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) Enterprise Edition, offers a new way of being able to display your data within your SharePoint environment—without your developers having to write a single line of code. By creating XML application definition files that describe your data source, you can import these into the BDC, which opens up a wealth of opportunities for your organization to use business data within MOSS 2007. BDC supports simple access to any ADO.NET data source (such as SQL Server and Oracle). Even if your legacy data store is not supported by BDC out-of-the-box, you can still allow the BDC to access your data via Web services.

Creating application definition files is an important (and time-consuming) part of making use of the BDC. However, a great deal of information is available on the Web and in books that teach you how to create these files to describe your business data stores. The best place to start is the MOSS 2007 SDK BDC section, which you can find here:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms544518.aspx

The SDK does a great job of explaining how to create application definition files, so I’m not going to cover the same ground in this chapter. I will, however, explain key parts of the files, and things to consider when you are creating them.

The examples provided in this chapter are mainly based off the AdventureWorks 2000 database that is commonly used by Microsoft examples. You can download the sample database from the Wrox Web site (www.wrox.com).

An application definition file is required to be imported to your Shared Service Provider (SSP) so that you can use the AdventureWorks 2000 database via BDC. This application definition file is available on the Wrox Web site (www.wrox.com).

This chapter begins with an examination of entities and how they relate to your application definition files. Once you have a grasp of what entities are, crafting application definition files is easy. The chapter then looks at how I have been using such BDC out-of-the-box features as Web Parts, search, and business data in lists and libraries. The later discussions in the chapter are dedicated to more advanced topics, such as creating Web services to supply your back-end data to the BDC, and the options available to you to complete the data cycle, or reading, displaying, and writing to your back-end store.

At the end of the chapter, I introduce an application that is available called BDC Meta Man. The aim of this software is to allow you to create application definition files in a visual way (such as dragging and dropping tables from SQL Server onto a design surface).

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by Luis Du Solier Grinda

Since SharePoint 2003, significant enhancements have been made related to the interaction... more

by Luis Du Solier Grinda

Since SharePoint 2003, significant enhancements have been made related to the interaction with Microsoft Office Suite applications. You can now better share information generated with Office applications using a SharePoint collaboration Web site. The files stored in a SharePoint document library can be edited and shared with the rest of your coworkers using the Office family (for example, a Word client). This not only allows you to work with documents, but also to use your SharePoint team Web sites for sharing team calendars, creating and assigning tasks to other team workers, chatting with team workers, creating surveys, creating discussion forums, and keeping your team informed about any important activities.

These capabilities provide you with great functionality and interaction when using Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Access. And, of course, when using a browser, team members can interact with their information and collaborate with other people on the same (or other) projects. The idea is to do more (or even have the capability to do much more) with the same applications and knowledge you and your people already have, with the purpose of being more productive.

Microsoft has introduced significant enhancements with Office 2007 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007). This chapter focuses on Excel Services, which is included with MOSS 2007 as the server-side component of the client-server relationship. With Excel Services, you can now share your workbooks, and let your team interact online with the data worksheets using a Web browser and Excel Services.

Let’s begin this chapter by taking a look at some great enhancements Microsoft has made with Office Excel 2007, which represents the client-side component of Microsoft Office.

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by Adam Buenz

Just as with all other Web-based applications, SharePoint is subject to electronic malicious actions... more

by Adam Buenz

Just as with all other Web-based applications, SharePoint is subject to electronic malicious actions of assorted types. Securing SharePoint is arguably one of the most unique and significant tasks that you will undertake when rolling out an initial SharePoint deployment, or securing a previously deployed SharePoint instance. The scope of securing SharePoint for your organization is considerable, from implementing transport layer security on the pipe to practicing appropriate Business Continuity Planning (BCP) strategies. By ensuring that all layers of security for SharePoint are accounted and planned for, you can mitigate numerous risks that would otherwise prove disastrous for your SharePoint infrastructure.

Fortunately, there are various avenues that you can exploit to procure effective SharePoint hardening mechanisms and security practices. Beyond the beneficial position that implementing appropriate SharePoint security practices will provide you and your organization, industries are subject to various business and governmental legal regulations that are generally federally mandated, therefore making securing SharePoint not an elective task.

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by Jason Medero

Information Rights Management (IRM) is quickly becoming a must-have for any organization looking... more

by Jason Medero

Information Rights Management (IRM) is quickly becoming a must-have for any organization looking to protect its intellectual property to ensure that sensitive data is not accessible by unauthorized individuals. Windows Rights Management Services (RMS) is a Windows Server 2003 technology that works with applications to secure digital content. With the introduction of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007), these two technologies now work together so that information workers can collaborate on documents and still be confident that, when they take these documents offline, the documents are still secure.

In the first part of this chapter, I introduce you to Windows RMS—more specifically, how to go about planning, designing, and implementing RMS and MOSS by utilizing best practices that I recommend and have used in real business scenarios. I go into some of the functional architecture of RMS and how it integrates with MOSS 2007, explaining some of the key components that make up the RMS infrastructure. Throughout this chapter you will gain an in-depth understanding of how RMS and MOSS 2007 can be integrated together and used in your own organization.

IRM can be activated within document libraries and also for list attachment files. This feature can be controlled on a per-document library/list level. When IRM is configured, RMS-enabled files stored within that document library are encrypted and permissions to these files vary. The permissions within SharePoint document libraries and lists can become very granular, all the way down to the item level. In this case, certain users may have elevated rights to certain specific files.

Note

This chapter is not a complete step-by-step guide on how to implement RMS and MOSS. Rather, this chapter looks into how these two technologies can work together to secure digital information within your organization.

If you would like to find some more documentation on IRM integration with MOSS 2007, the following links will provide you with a good starting point for collecting information about IRM. Also included in the list is a white paper that will guide you step-by-step through setting up your RMS environment.

• http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluation/overview/technologies/rmenterprise.mspx

• http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms458245.aspx

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by Shane Young

It was a dark and stormy night. I had just talked myself into sitting down long enough to take screenshots... more

by Shane Young

It was a dark and stormy night. I had just talked myself into sitting down long enough to take screenshots for my next blog posting when my phone rang. The call was from Big Ideas!—you may have heard of them, but probably not. Their ideas are Big, but their products haven’t caught up yet.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 (MOSS 2007) had just hit the streets and Big Ideas! had heard enough about the new features to make them believe it was a must-have upgrade. The ability to enforce checkouts, workflow, more powerful search, item-level security, security-trimmed user interface, a built-in recycle bin, the business data catalog—these were big items that Big Ideas! had to have in their organization as soon as possible, and they wanted me to make it happen.

Step back for a minute to understand why Big Ideas! wanted someone to review their upgrade plans. Upgrading a major enterprise platform such as SharePoint isn’t like upgrading a favorite screensaver. Microsoft has spent a lot of time and money to make sure the upgrade process scales through the whole range of SharePoint users. Small organizations that only use a single server install must have a way to move their megabytes of data to a new system, and Microsoft itself needs a path to upgrade its terabytes.

Three different plans for upgrading were built into the MOSS 2007 installation, and each one is right for certain situations:

• In-place upgrade

• Gradual upgrade

• Database migration

The next few sections discuss each upgrade option in a little more detail, giving both the pros and cons of each approach. Keep your environment in mind as you read, and imagine how you would apply each procedure in your situation.

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