Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By : Adrian Colquhoun
Book Image

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook

By: Adrian Colquhoun

Overview of this book

The power of Microsoft SharePoint as the Enterprise collaboration platform is ever-growing; due to the wide range of capabilities it offers, SharePoint 2010 can help transform your business so you can quickly respond to the changes and challenges that you face. For End Users, SharePoint helps you and your team work "better, faster, and smarter". This book will take your SharePoint knowledge further, showing you how to use your skills to solve real business problems. While many other titles might be characterized as "SharePoint Explained", this cookbook contains advanced content that goes beyond that found in other SharePoint End User offerings: it is "SharePoint Applied". It provides recipes walking Power Users through a range of collaboration, data integration, business intelligence, electronic form, and workflow scenarios, as well as offering three invaluable business scenarios for building composite applications. The cookbook begins by providing a comprehensive treatment of SharePoint essentials, while quickly moving forward to topics like Data Integration, Business Intelligence, and automating business processes. At the end of the book, the information presented in the earlier recipes is combined to create three example SharePoint 2010 "composite applications" for Human Resources (HR), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Project Management. Composite applications are the "unique selling point" of SharePoint 2010 and understanding how to create them is the key to unlocking the business value of the product.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating an external list


SharePoint can expose data from a database, web service, or custom line-of-business system in the same way as a regular SharePoint list. What's more, users can update that data in SharePoint and their changes can be written back to the source data without requiring a custom user interface or code.

Getting ready

This recipe works for:

  • SharePoint 2010 Foundation

  • SharePoint 2010 Standard Edition

  • SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition

  • Office 365 (SharePoint Online)

You will need the Full Contro l permission level to run this recipe.

You will need an External Content Type to create your external list from. This recipe uses the Contacts external content type from the previous recipe for illustration.

You will need a SharePoint site where you want to create your external list.

How to do it...

  1. Open your site in SharePoint Designer.

  2. Select External Content Types in the Site Objects pane.

  3. Highlight the Contacts external content type.

  4. Select Edit External Content Type from the External Content...