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

Introduction


Before we start, it is important to understand what is and isn't a composite application. The first few sections in this chapter introduce you to composite applications, explaining their background and the key underlying concepts. Studying these sections will allow you to determine if your particular problem should be solved by creating a composite application, or if another approach would be more appropriate.

Assuming that a composite application fits your needs, we then explore the approach you should apply to build one. There are some best practices that you should apply, and pitfalls that you will want to avoid. I have created a checklist of questions to ask to make this easier.

The second half of this chapter presents three simple composite applications covering:

  • Project Management

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

  • Human Resources (HR)

Each application is designed to illustrate a few key concepts that you should consider applying when building your own applications. For each application, I first outline the business problem to be solved, describe the composite application solution, provide some high-level instructions on how to build it, discuss how it works, and highlight the key learning points. These applications aren't intended to be comprehensive solutions. There isn't enough space to detail step-by-step how to build each application (that would require another book in itself). Think of each application as a starting point that you may extend to solve your own particular business problem. However, the information that you need has already been covered in the recipes previously presented in the book. Each composite application contains a list of the recipes that you should reference to help you.

At the end of the chapter you will find my closing thoughts, summarizing what we have learnt so far, along with some advice on how to continue your SharePoint Power User journey.