Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Cookbook

By : Peter Serzo
Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Cookbook

By: Peter Serzo

Overview of this book

Collaboration and content management are the major business needs of every organization in this increasingly global and connected environment. Microsoft SharePoint is a solution to these needs that offers a software platform that facilitates collaboration and provides content management features for the effective implementation of business processes. With a vast amount of functionality available with SharePoint, it is easy to get confused in carrying out administrative tasks. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Cookbook starts off by demonstrating the various upgrading and post-upgrading tasks to be performed in SharePoint 2010. Next come recipes for managing SharePoint service-level applications and for monitoring the SharePoint environment. The book introduces one of the best new tools that should be in your arsenal, PowerShell, and the commands you will need to script your tasks with Powershell. Collaboration and content management are the most important features of SharePoint and this book contains many recipes that focus on improving them. Enterprise monitoring and reporting are also covered in detail so that you can ensure that your SharePoint implementation is up and running all the time. You will find recipes to manage and customize SharePoint Search. When you are half way through the book, you will explore more advanced and interesting topics such as customizing and securing the SharePoint environment. You will learn to extend SharePoint to include features similar to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Lastly, the book covers backup and recovery solutions for SharePoint so that you can ensure that your system is protected from data loss and virus attacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Managing External Content Types


An External Content Type is SharePoint's way to access the back end data in another data source. This could be the ERP, CRM, or custom manufacturing system. The data is defined in a database and now the organization wants to consume that data through SharePoint.

In order to consume the data, we need to define the properties of that data to SharePoint. This is done by creating an External Content Type (ECT). This is an XML file that defines and identifies the object.

Typically, an administrator does not create the External Content Types. Creation is done by power users or developers through SharePoint Designer and Business Connectivity Services. However, it is important to be able to manage these entities as an administrator.

This recipe will show how to identify the External Content Types on the farm and how to set permissions.

Getting ready

You must have farm-level administrative permissions to the Central Administration site. You should also have an external...