Getting Started with SharePoint Technologies

Robert Holmes
May 15, 2007

This is the first in an eight part, monthly, series on SharePoint technologies. Our intent in this series is to allow people new to SharePoint, particularly developers, to gradually gain the knowledge and skills necessary to be able to manage and customize SharePoint sites, including both WSS and MOSS. the series will cover the following topics:

• Getting started with sites
• Site customization such as Content Types, and Site Definitions
• Development topics such as:
  • Coding Events
  • Web Parts
  • Workflows

The title of the series 'SharePoint Tamed' reflects the goal of making sense of this highly complex technology platform and making it usable with some real value add with minimal time and effort. Since many of us do not have the time to go through a lot of books or read many magazine articles there is a real need for a forum to spread the knowledge in as efficient, and practical, way possible.

We will skip the installation and initial configuration of your version of SharePoint, and assume that you, or your administrator, have done so and created at least one top level site. If you need help with this step, there are numerous blogs with step by step instructions and the process will vary depending on whether you are installing WSS or MOSS, your precise topology, and other factors. See useful links below.

We hope that you find this material useful in your work!

Getting Started with SharePoint - Some Preliminary Considerations

You're anxious to get started with SharePoint. Your administrator has installed and configured SharePoint Services on your network; now what do you do? Before getting started with the actual work it behooves us to clarify some terminology and concepts. The first point to make clear is the difference between Windows SharePoint Services(WSS) and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server(MOSS).

WSS is the free download that is in fact considered a part of Windows 2003. Although it is now a separate download, the R2 version of Windows 2003 includes version 2 of the product on the CD as a Windows component, and I expect that future releases of Windows Server products to do the same with version 3, the current version. MOSS is the technology formerly known as SharePoint Portal Server with some significant additions, particularly in the way of enterprise content management(ECM), business intelligence(BI), and Workflows(WF). MOSS is built on top of WSS, then greatly expands upon it. These terms may be used interchangeable, and often are, leading to considerable confusion when first approaching these products. For purposes of this article I will be referencing a WSS site since that is the lowest common denominator, but the ideas are equally valid in MOSS installations.

Another sticking point for a lot of people first working with this technology is the idea of site collections. The best way to think of a site collection is as a trust boundary. Each site is not truly a web site per se, but really a repository of information, functionality, etc for one functional area, or piece of one, of a larger organization. One example of how this might look is this:

Click image for larger view.

As this diagram shows, you can make the collections as simple or as complicated as you wish. At any level one section may be broken out further, while another is not, even within the same functional unit, such as sales in the example. For the purposes of this article, I will assume that the administrator has created a top level site using the Team Site template, most likely the most commonly used template for top level WSS sites. The other two that will be used commonly are the Collaboration Portal template for intranets, and Publishing Portal template for outward facing sites, such as internet and extranets.

To clarify the above point about sites, remember that a 'site', is really a collection of lists, including document libraries, which are merely a specialized type of list. This includes task lists, calendars, discussions, and any custom lists that you may create If having a collection of lists may not seem like such a big deal, remember that, in one sense, a database is also merely a collection of lists. Once you work with WSS sites, including MOSS, and get a feel for all the things that you can do with lists, you will begin to appreciate their true value. Just remember that it is absolutely key to plan out your site structure to the degree possible before building it. While getting it right most likely will be an iterative process, every bit of thought going into each iteration, will be repaid many times in the end product.

Another thing to keep in mind is that certain content is shared within a site collection, but not across collections. Examples of this include such things as Site Columns, Content Types, the Web Part Gallery. We will get into these topics in future articles in the series.

The final point is that although the users and groups structure in SharePoint may resemble the ones found in AD, in fact the concepts are the same, and the ones in SharePoint may mirror the ones in AD, they are managed separately and there is no overlap, other than authentication. The default authentication scheme in SharePoint is to use the Windows logon, although alternates are available, however there the connection ends. Users are from the AD used, but the permissions they enjoy, and the groups they may belong to, exist solely in the SharePoint configuration.

Groups and Users

Getting started with SharePoint requires that you establish access and permissions. Similar to Windows itself, access and permissions to SharePoint sites are managed by the use of Users and Groups. Assuming the default of NTLM authentication was chosen during installation, Windows provides the authentication, but the connection stops there. In this sense it is more or less the same as with Sql Server.

When you create a site from the Team Site template, there will already be three groups created for you, with the naming based on the name you, or your administrator, gave to the site. So, for example, when I created a site named SetFocus, I got the groups SetFocus Owners, SetFocus Members, and SetFocus Visitors, which are given the permission levels of Full Control, Contribute, and Read respectively, and one user, the one indicated as the Primary Site Collection Administrator, assigned to the Owners group.

The other permission level of interest is Design, which differs from Full Control primarily in that Design cannot perform security related functions, or create subsites. The Contribute permission level can add new items to existing lists, modify or delete existing items, but cannot create new lists or modify the structure of existing ones, as Design and Full control can. The permission levels are collections of individual permissions that can be granted directly to a group or user. You can create your own, or modify existing ones by going to Site Actions --> Site Settings --> Advanced permissions.

At this point you can plan out, and implement, the groups and permission levels that you want. For example each subsite may have its own set of groups and permissions, or you may choose, when creating the site to inherit form the parent site. In the current version of WSS, you can be as granular as you may want to be in setting permissions, even going down to the view and item level, but the details of all that will be left as an exercise to the reader.

Site Structure

Having used the Team Site template your site will look like the following:

Click image for larger view.

The Quick Launch is this area: and this section is known as the Top Link Bar: . By default if you create subsites they will appear in the Top Link Bar, but you may choose not to put them there, and may also add links to other locations. One thing to be aware of is that not everyone will see the same all the same elements due to  the Security Trim feature in WSS v3. What this refers to is that if the currently logged on person does not have access to a particular list, option, etc., he or she will not see that. This prevents users from trying to access functionality that they do not have access to, then getting refused, resulting in a poor user experience.

If you click on 'View All Site Content', you will see a page listing all the lists currently in your site. The four showing on the Quick Launch, plus two that are on the main page, Announcements and Links, but not the Quick Launch. Either from here, or back on the main page you can click the link on the name of the list to get to the main view of the page. Each list is customizable in a number of ways. to illustrate let's look at the simplest of them, Links. Since the idea of SharePoint is to share information, we may decide that the meta-data, the SharePoint name for columns in a list, is not adequate to the task, that we also want to know for each link, how we got it, what was its source.

Go to the List Settings page by clicking Settings --> List Settings from the menu thusly:

Here you will see a number of settings, so it will be well worth your time to go back and explore. For now we will go to the option midway down the page that says 'Create column'.

From that page you can enter a column name. let's say Source, and the default type is Single line of text, which is fine for our purposes. Below the Name and Type section is one named Additional Column Settings, where you can set a default, require that the column be filled out, and some other options that you can explore later. For now we click OK, and come back to the settings page.

From here we can click the breadcrumbs link: .

Note: You can always use the breadcrumbs from the Title section, or the upper left of the browser window, to navigate around the site. Now when you want to add a new link to the list you will see this input form:

Note: There is another way to add columns to lists called 'Site Columns'. This concept will be covered in upcoming installments in this series.

While most of the column types are fairly easy to figure out, any introduction to SharePoint would be remiss if it did not explain a few more types that are useful. Let's look at the announcements list and say you want to indicate a category. If you go to the settings page for the list, then go to Create column you will be at the same page as when you added a column to the Links list. However this time let's name the new column Category, and the type as Choice. When you make that selection the page refreshes, and under Additional Column Settings there is now a multi line input box that allows you to enter the choices available. Let's enter some choices so that it looks like this:

You will also notice that upon leaving this box the default choice becomes the first on the list but you can change this. The only other choice worth discussing at this point is the one labeled 'Display choices using'. On this option choosing Checkboxes here would allow you to assign multiple categories, or whatever the choice is, to each item.

Another type of column you may want to create is a lookup from another list in your site. First let's create a new list on our site. From the main page you can Select 'Site Actions', then 'Create', or from All Site Content, you can click the Create link just below the list title. Either approach will bring you to the same Create page. Under 'Custom Lists' choose 'Custom List'. You will then go to a page that allows you to give your new list a name, description, and to indicate if it should be on the Quick View. Whether you want it on the Quick View or not depends on if you want your users to go to it regularly, or it may be more or less static and only used to populate other lists, in which case you may not want your users to access it so readily. This choice can be modified at any time from the list's settings page under 'Title, description and navigation'.

In our case we choose Departments as the name and leave off the Quick View. Clicking the Create button brings us to the list's main page. Going to Site Settings we can go to the Columns section and add new columns, as well as modify or delete existing ones. The exception to this is that the default first column, 'Title', cannot be deleted, and you cannot modify the type, only the name. Let's add a column and name it Manager. If we change the type to Person or Group the page again refreshes. We have some options that are fairly self-explanatory. The point here is that the list has meta-data that refers to people listed on the site. You can filter the selection to some degree depending on the choices you make in the second section when creating the list, but will only get people and groups that you have added to the site.

Having added the new list populate it with some values. Now click 'Shared Documents' from the Quick Launch, and go to the settings for the list. Click Create a column, then name it Department, select Lookup as the type, and after the page refreshes in the second section, there is a drop down named 'Get information from:'. The drop down has the lists that the current site has access to. Choose Departments, then Title in the next dropdown. For now leave the other options as they are, and click OK. Now when you add a document to the document library, you can indicate what department it pertains to.

One last point regarding lists that one should be aware of when getting started with SharePoint is versioning. It is beyond the scope of this article, but once your sites are getting used, and become increasingly critical to your business processes, you should get fully up to speed on the concept, when to use on lists, particularly document libraries, how to use and best practices.

Views

Getting started with SharePoint also requires some awareness of views and how they can be used. A view is exactly what one would expect from the name. It is a way to layout and filter the list. Each list has a default view that is shown when a default link to the list is clicked. In the settings page for a list, there is a section for views. Here you can modify existing view or create new ones. There is also a column for default view. Each list will have at least one view, and exactly one view with a checkmark in the 'Default View' column. You can modify any view by clicking its link from the list's settings page. Here you will notice a checkbox in the 'Name' section to make this view the default for the list. In the columns section you can indicate what columns to show in the view, and their order. The other sections of the 'Edit View' page are left as an exercise to the reader.

Summary

At this point you should have enough information to get started with SharePoint. Once your admin has installed the software and given you a top level site to work with you should be well on your way. Again I cannot emphasize enough how important planning is. The best guarantee for a failed SharePoint deployment is lack of planning. While getting to optimal structure will most likely require some iterations, simply adding lists, hooking them together, adding subsites, allon the fly, will assure that it is much less than it can be.

Good luck with it and please come back for future installments.

Appendix

Useful Links

• An A-Z setup for a development environment
• Install on a stand alone server
• Simple server farm
• Full server farm deployment
• Create databases separate from the install process
• Administrative and service accounts (create these prior to installation)

About the author:

Robert Holmes is a software developer from the Boston area working almost exclusively with Microsoft products for over ten years. Over that time he have worked extensively with Visual Basic, MS Access, and Office product development as an independent consultant for a variety of organizations of all sizes, in both the public and private sectors.

Over the last 4 years Robert has been heavily invlolved with .NET technologies as a developer, user group leader and presenter, the last two using SharePoint heavily as a collaboration, and application platform. Robert has been involved with the current version of SharePoint technology since the beta 1 days in February of 2006, and is currently involved in the deployment of MOSS at two medium sized companies. Robert is available for development work as well as mentoring and guidance.

Contact Robert:

• www.sharepointguy.com/public
• Email Robert!

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