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.

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Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Adrian Colquhoun
Oct, 2011 | 344 pages
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Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Power User Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started—SharePoint Essentials
Getting Started—SharePoint Essentials
Introduction
Creating a SharePoint list
Creating a site column
Creating a content type
Creating and accessing my My Site
Updating my user profile
Tracking colleagues using my My Site
Viewing the SharePoint sites I am a member of
Tagging a SharePoint page so I can find it again later
Reviewing the tags and notes other users have posted on a SharePoint page
Adding an alert to a SharePoint page
Managing my alerts in SharePoint
Determining my permissions in a SharePoint site
Checking another user's permissions in a SharePoint site
Applying unique permissions to a SharePoint list
2
Working Together—Using SharePoint to Collaborate
Working Together—Using SharePoint to Collaborate
Introduction
Creating a Team Site
Adding users to a Team Site
Adding a new page to a Team Site
Adding a link to the Top link bar of a Team Site
Adding a slide library to share PowerPoint slides
Adding a slide to a presentation from a SharePoint slide library
Creating and tracking a discussion item
Managing a Team Site Calendar with Outlook 2010
Creating a task and assigning it to another user
Using the datasheet to bulk-edit tasks in a task list
Managing a SharePoint task list in Outlook 2010
Creating a SharePoint contact list and connecting it to Outlook 2010
3
SharePoint as the Data Hub—Storing and Integrating Data
SharePoint as the Data Hub—Storing and Integrating Data
Introduction
Creating a custom list
Creating a custom list view
Creating a term set using the managed metadata service
Creating a list column based on a term set
Creating an external content type
Creating an external list
4
SharePoint Document Management Deep Dive
SharePoint Document Management Deep Dive
Introduction
Uploading an existing document to a document library
Uploading multiple documents to a document library
Creating a new document in your My Site
E-mailing a link to a document in SharePoint
Downloading a copy of a document
Creating an alert on a document to be notified when it is updated
Requiring users to check out a document before they can edit it
Enabling versioning on a document library
Publishing a major version of a document
Restoring a previous version of a document
Enabling content approval on a document library
Take SharePoint documents offline using Outlook 2010
Co-authoring an important document
Use content types to store different types of document in the same document library
5
Getting the Message Out—Using SharePoint to Communicate
Getting the Message Out—Using SharePoint to Communicate
Introduction
Adding an announcement to a Team Site
Creating a blog in my My Site
Posting to my blog from Microsoft Word 2010
Creating a new page on a publishing site
Changing the page layout of a publishing site page
Publishing a publishing site page
Using web analytics to see which are the most popular pages on your site
6
Where's My Stuff?—Finding Things with SharePoint
Where's My Stuff?—Finding Things with SharePoint
Introduction
Performing a basic search
Performing an advanced search
Finding experts using a people search
Saving a search as an alert and being notified when the results change
Using search analytics to see what people are searching for
7
Gaining Insights— Using SharePoint for Business Intelligence
Gaining Insights— Using SharePoint for Business Intelligence
Introduction
Creating a chart using the Chart Web Part
Creating a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
Creating an Excel spreadsheet to run on the server
Creating a report using Report Builder
Creating a chart using the PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer
Building a PerformancePoint business intelligence dashboard
8
Automating Business Processes—Recipes for Electronic Forms and Workflows
Automating Business Processes—Recipes for Electronic Forms and Workflows
Introduction
Creating an InfoPath Form for a SharePoint List
Creating a holiday request InfoPath form and publishing it to a form library
Using the Collect Feedback workflow toreceive feedback on a Microsoft Word 2010 document
Creating a list workflow using SharePoint Designer 2010
Using Microsoft Visio 2010 to model a SharePoint workflow
Joining the Dots—Creating Composite Applications
Joining the Dots—Creating Composite Applications
Introduction
Understanding composite applications
How to design and build composite applications
Project Management composite application
CRM composite application
Human Resources composite application
Closing thoughts
Index
Index

Understanding composite applications

A composite application is a quick, simple, "no code" SharePoint application intended to provide a solution to a particular business problem. It is constructed by a SharePoint Power User possessing an intimate knowledge of the problem to be solved. A composite application draws upon any or all of the SharePoint features explored in this book, melding them together until a satisfactory solution is produced. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Composite applications are normally developed through "trial and error"—prototyping and evaluating the application until something useful is produced.

The best types of composite applications to create on SharePoint are those which require collaboration, the sharing of documents, tasks, electronic forms, and simple workflows. SharePoint provides extensive out of the box tools and functionality to do this.

Powerful as composite applications are, it is also important to appreciate what they are not and to know where to draw the line between an informal Power User development and a formal software engineering project, with all the project management, governance, rigorous process, costs, and resource, which that entails.

Please don't read this chapter thinking that you can construct a new banking system, sophisticated payroll, or accounting solution as a composite application. You can't. You may be able to build solutions to those problems on SharePoint, but you will need a formal project, team-based development, designs, test plans, and lots of resources to be successful. You will definitely need to write code and will more than likely need to involve a whole range of other technologies as well. SharePoint may well make building those applications easier too, but that is not what this book is about.

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