SharePoint is a web-based collaboration and document management platform from Microsoft. Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer (SPD) is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and web design program, which has replaced FrontPage, and is the ideal environment for working with pages on a SharePoint site.
This book is ideal for people new to SharePoint Designer who need to put together a working SharePoint site as quickly as possible. If you want to get started, and finished, as quickly as possible, this book is for you. You won't just learn how to use SharePoint Designer; you'll see how to use it to put together a SharePoint site.
This book will introduce you to the SharePoint Designer environment, and lead you through the key features as you complete important SharePoint customization activities. Throughout the book, you will be developing an example site for a wine business, and you will see what help SharePoint Designer offers, and step through clear instructions to get things done.
The book begins by familiarizing you with the Designer environment and helping you to connect to your SharePoint site. You will then learn how to add and format content, and use SharePoint's workflow tools to collaborate with other content creators before learning how to connect to different SharePoint data sources. You will also learn to use ASP.NET Web Parts in your SharePoint site to create calendars, graphs, integrate with Exchange Server, and add powerful search tools to your site.
In Chapter 1, we will learn what SharePoint is and why we should choose SharePoint Designer for developing SharePoint sites. Then, we will learn how to install SharePoint Designer and connect to an existing SharePoint site.
In Chapter 2, we will learn what SharePoint Designer does and how to get the most out of the interface. We will learn how to arrange the IDE's task panes , and about the benefits of switching between Design view and Code view. We will also get familiar with the features discretely tucked away on the Status bar to ensure that our pages conform to agreed standards and will render correctly in the browsers visitors use.
In Chapter 3, we will learn how to create a new site, add pages to that site, add text and graphics to our page, and preview the site in our web browser. We will also learn how to create tables and will learn about the benefits of layout tables. We will learn to organize our files and publish our site. We will also learn about the methods we can use to create a consistent style for our site.
In Chapter 4, we will learn to create new pages that follow a consistent theme and allow other users to contribute towards our site while still keeping our styles protected.
In Chapter 5, we will see that SharePoint Designer is more than just a tool to allow us to design pretty pages. When used properly, it becomes an integral part of a company's business processes.
In Chapter 6, we will collect data in our SharePoint site and examine the many methods that SharePoint has for allowing us to display that data.
In Chapter 7, we will discover how easy it is to interrogate a whole range of data sources and display information from them in our SharePoint site in an attractive and useful manner.
In Chapter 8, we will learn what Web Parts are and how they can be added to our site. We will also learn about the benefits of grouping our Web Parts within Web Part Zones.
In Chapter 9, we will learn about what ASP.NET controls are and which ones are available to us. We will also see how to implement simple controls, menu controls, calendar controls, validation controls, and login controls into our pages.
In Chapter 10, we will witness the power of the ready-made tools that SharePoint makes available to us. We will learn how to use OWA Web Parts to display our Exchange information in our SharePoint site and will learn about the configuration changes that are required to do so successfully and how to troubleshoot any error messages that we may come across.
In Chapter 11, we will learn to use the search capabilities that SharePoint provides for us. We will also see how to add search forms and results lists to our pages.
In order to work through the examples in this book you will need to have Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 installed on your computer (no surprise there!). You should also ensure that you have access to a SharePoint site, either on your local network or across the Internet.
It would also be beneficial to have administrative access to Windows Server 2003 or 2008, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for several of the more advanced examples.
This book is ideal for people new to SharePoint Designer who need to put together a working SharePoint site as quickly as possible.
No experience of SharePoint Designer is expected, and no skill with creating SharePoint sites is assumed.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We could have left the VirtualPath blank so that server-side scripts are allowed in all SharePoint sites, but limiting it in this way ensures that only our birthday page has script access."
A block of code will be set as follows:
a:link, a:visited, a:active {
color:#903;
padding-top:1px;
padding-bottom:1px;
border-color:#903;
border-width:1px;
border-style:solid;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:hover {
background-color:#EEE;
}New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "We then click the Create button in our Conditional Formatting task pane and select Apply Formatting".
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