SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

** UPDATE ** Thank you for the overwhelming feedback, A Kindle version of the book is in the works and we will keep you posted.

Back in June 2011 Paul Beck asked the community for authors to contribute to a community book on SharePoint 2010 (original post).  Various authors have stepped up to the plate and the book has now been released.  So without further ado…

The SharePoint 2010 Handbook

A Collection of Short Chapters for Delivering Successful SharePoint Projects

The SharePoint 2010 Handbook aims to explain some of the key topics of SharePoint 2010 as well as to broaden the understanding of SharePoint so that its full business effectiveness might be better exploited. Each topic has been written as a separate chapter by different authors, each drawing on their own real world experience.

Publication Date: 7th November 2011
ISBN/EAN13: 1466486740 / 9781466486744
Page Count: 448
Binding Type: US Trade Paper
Trim Size: 5″ x 8″
Language: English
Colour: Black and White
Related Categories: Computers / Documentation & Technical Writing

 

 

Authors & Chapter Titles:

• 01. Structuring a SharePoint 2010 Practice (John Timney)
• 02. SharePoint Test Environments (Justin Meadows)
• 03. SharePoint Adoption (Veronique Palmer)
• 04. Social SharePoint (Jasper Oosterveld)
• 05. The Art of SharePoint Success (Symon Garfield)
• 06. Exploring Different Options for Implementing SharePoint Solutions (Rene Modery)
• 07. SharePoint Server-based Data Storage and Data Access (Paul Beck)
• 08. SharePoint 2010 Automated Code Deployment (Suzanne George)
• 09. SharePoint Security and Authentication Notes (Conrad Grobler)
• 10. InfoPath 2010 – What is new? (Ashraf Islam)
• 11. Governance in SharePoint (John Stover)
• 12. Creating Dashboards using Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Designer and other related technologies (Giles Hamson)
• 13. Building Business Intelligence Solutions with SharePoint 2010 (Mark Macrae)

 

Chapter Descriptions:

01. Structuring a SharePoint 2010 Practice (John Timney)

SharePoint 2010 is simply put, nothing like SharePoint 2007! It is vastly more scalable, significantly more complex, and hugely appealing as an information management hub. A consequence of the successful re-architecture of the product to such a strategic hub product and the core of the Microsoft tools strategy is that programmes and projects, and consequently employers and recruiters need to think carefully about the new range of planning roles and skill sets required to satisfy a successful end to end delivery of SharePoint 2010. This chapter will show the reader how (and equally as important why) to correctly structure a SharePoint Practice or programme of delivery to plan for internal career progression and assist with staff retention and to identify and exploit the correct roles to staff modern demanding SharePoint 2010 delivery programmes.

 

02. SharePoint Test Environments (Justin Meadows)

Test environments for most IT professionals are a no-brainer — major system changes should be tested once, twice, even three times to provide the best possible experience to end users with little to no interruption in service. Recent virtualization technologies have made this easier than ever; one only needs to spin-up a new instance of a virtual machine and off they go with an entire SharePoint environment at their disposal.

SharePoint administrators will painfully learn, however, that this testing model doesn’t adapt well to the componentized structure underlying a well-built SharePoint system. This chapter will make the case for building and maintaining a fully-scaled test environment that is architecturally similar to an organization’s production environment.

It will support this recommendation with lessons learned from the authors personal experience administering a small SharePoint farm. This case can be argued further to include more than one test environment. If an organization chooses to develop solutions for SharePoint they should consider building in one environment, certifying the build in another test environment, and then implementing the solution in the production environment.

Using one or more fully-scaled test environments is the only way to understand the implications of a major system change. They also provide a mechanism for rehearsing these system changes. With such a tool at their disposal, SharePoint administrators can maintain and administer their systems with confidence.

 

03. SharePoint Adoption (Veronique Palmer)

There is a common misconception that merely installing SharePoint makes for a successful implementation. It is how the people in the company effectively adopt the solution that is the true measure of success. Have you asked yourself how you will get people to use the solution?

Anyone can cope when there is only one table booked in a restaurant; but what happens when you are booked to capacity with a waiting list – are you geared to cope with that demand? What if you get no bookings at all? Could you explain to your investors why no-one is visiting?

SharePoint user adoption is about how to get to a full house, how to be prepared for the rush, and how to manage it once it happens. People will not magically adopt SharePoint, there are measures you need to put into place to ensure that happens. If this is done correctly, you will have a very high adoption rate and consequently good return on investment for the capital outlay of the infrastructure.

This chapter will cover what you need to do in order to achieve that.

 

04. Social SharePoint (Jasper Oosterveld)

The word ‘Social’ has become a very popular term over the last couple of years. Everyone is familiar with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These so-called Social sites attract (hundreds) millions of visitors per day! So how does this translate to SharePoint 2010? What Social features are available? Social features were also available (albeit limitedly) in the previous version Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007).

The main feature was the My Site. This site is a personal page for every user within a SharePoint Intranet portal. The user was able to provide valuable information for colleagues, such as a mobile number, e-mail address, manager or skills. Other users were able to use the MOSS 2007 search engine to find a colleague with the skill ‘Writing marketing material’, for example. By using these features, users were able to connect and share information with each other.

This has been improved in SharePoint 2010 and loads of new features are now available. This chapter describes these features, and how they can improve the collaboration within your organisation. Talking points covered include My Sites, Tags and Notes, Ratings and Social Search. Most importantly, the author addresses how they are all connected and what advantages they provide for companies.

 

05. The Art of SharePoint Success (Symon Garfield)

Microsoft SharePoint products and technologies have been in the market for ten years the fourth version, SharePoint 2010, was released in November 2009. There is no doubt that SharePoint is a phenomenal success: It is Microsoft’s fastest selling server based product ever and has generated approaching two billion dollars in sales revenue for Microsoft. The only other Microsoft Server products to generate this level of revenue are SQL Server and Exchange Server, and SharePoint has reached this milestone more quickly than the others.

There have been over one hundred million SharePoint licenses have been sold worldwide and I.T. industry analysts such as Forrester Research and Gartner rank SharePoint as a leader in a number of different technology markets including Search, Enterprise Content Management, Social Computing, Collaboration, Information Access and Horizontal Portals.

SharePoint will be at the heart of Microsoft’s information worker strategy for many years to come. Yet despite its market success many organisations seem to struggle to realise the full value from investments in SharePoint products and technologies. In 2010 AIIM survey found that forty seven percent of organisations that have deployed SharePoint use it primarily as a file share. In May 2011 research commissioned by Fujitsu shows that SharePoint is the most common collaboration tool used by UK businesses, Ninety two percent of Enterprise organisations using collaboration technology use SharePoint. But the research also shows that on average only sixty percent of SharePoint sites are considered active, and forty percent of IT managers don’t believe that the collaboration platform is driving cost savings.

This chapter first explores the challenges facing organisations investing in SharePoint based initiatives, and then presents a framework for success consisting of four elements; Governance, Strategy, Transition, and Architecture. Governance relates to defining the accountability for the ensuring a return on the investment in SharePoint. Strategy discusses how SharePoint relates to organisational objectives. Transition considers the challenges of organisational change and user adoption and Architecture relates to the way that SharePoint is deployed to the business as a set of distinct but inter-related services.

 

06. Exploring Different Options for Implementing SharePoint Solutions (Rene Modery)

An important decision to make while planning the implementation of any SharePoint solution is how exactly it should be created. Two commonly used options are leveraging the out of the box available functionality through customization in the browser and development of solutions using custom code.

SharePoint’s out of the box functionality empowers end users to create simple solutions with little effort and in a short time frame, however with a limited customization scope. Development of custom code solutions provides the most flexibility, however at a higher cost in terms of complexity and resource requirements. Another option is to extend the standard SharePoint functionality with customizations that make use of JavaScript and the Data View Web Part.

Using JavaScript has become a very popular way of extending SharePoint without having to rely on custom code. It allows users with some basic development knowledge to create their own more advanced solutions easily.

Considering all these possibilities, when evaluating the correct course to take for a solution implementation, organizations need to take into account the pros and cons of the different approaches, and weigh them against each other.

This chapter will compare these approaches with each other and describe the capabilities, as well as the benefits and the drawbacks of each approach, allowing a decision maker to better understand which method is useful in which situation and choose the best option.

 

07. SharePoint Server-based Data Storage and Data Access (Paul Beck)

This chapter guides readers through the basic storage and data access options available in SharePoint 2010 application development projects. The matching of application business requirements with the appropriate storage and data access technique is vital for achieving a successful project.

 

08. SharePoint 2010 Automated Code Deployment (Suzanne George)

During the past several years SharePoint has quickly become one of the leading collaboration technologies. Businesses today are taking the SharePoint framework from the development labs into mission critical production environments which require application high availability. This chapter will describe methods and concepts which will ensure you will be able to build and deploy custom code into Intranet and/or Internet facing production farm(s) using Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010, and SharePoint 2010. Further, a description of the concepts and tools necessary to ensure code consistency throughout the development lifecycle will be included.

SharePoint Internet facing sites often have additional requirements, network bottlenecks, and limited downtime constraints which make deploying code from the development arena through QA/staging, and finally into production SharePoint farms more restrictive. The new capabilities provided in Visual Studio 2010, Team Foundation Server 2010, and SharePoint 2010 make this process much easier than before.

This chapter will provide examples for all flavours of deployments (timer jobs, page layouts, web parts, etc.) so you don’t have to learn as you go! You’ll get an in-depth look at how these tools can help you successfully deploy code into production SharePoint 2010 farms.

 

09. SharePoint Security and Authentication Notes (Conrad Grobler)

SharePoint 2010 provides different options for authentication of users as well as authentication to external line-of-business systems. During the design and implementation of a SharePoint 2010 solution, the chosen authentication method could impact or restrict the availability of some SharePoint functionality and the options for interacting with external systems.

This chapter will discuss the different options and architectural considerations for user authentication and for authenticating to external systems. It will cover classic mode authentication and claims based authentication. It will cover NTLM, Kerberos, Clear Text Authentication, Forms Based Authentication and Trusted Claims Providers, the Claims to Windows Token Service and the Secure Store Service Application. It will also give a brief overview of options for exposing

SharePoint 2010 sites securely across the Internet, such as using Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway, and the implications of doing this and how to ensure the security of business data exposed using SharePoint.

The chapter will provide information on configuring and troubleshooting the authentication options such as Kerberos, Clear Text and Forms Based Authentication, the differences between the SharePoint 2010 FBA implementation and ASP.Net forms authentication and the implications for interoperability between SharePoint and ASP.net applications. It will also provide information on the limitations of certain functionality (such as search based alerts and the people picker) for Forms Based Authentication and Trusted Claims providers.

 

10. InfoPath 2010 – What is new? (Ashraf Islam)

This chapter is dedicated to exploring the capabilities of InfoPath 2010. What can InfoPath can do for you? What are the key improvements to InfoPath 2010 and the impact on form design and development.

InfoPath 2010 has interesting license implications and this deserves some attention. The chapter also discusses key concept and building blocks of InfoPath Forms (such as rules, data connection, design template and data validation) using scenario based solution. The chapter also demonstrates how to write c# code for control and form events.

InfoPath is an agile/rapid design tool for creating forms. InfoPath is intricately linked with SharePoint so it would be ideal if you know the basics of SharePoint 2010. This chapter will give you a solid foundation for people new to SharePoint and will allow more advanced users to see what is new in InfoPath 2010.

The chapter ends by discussing potential issues and what users might be expecting from Microsoft for the next release.

 

11. Governance in SharePoint (John Stover)

Governance relates to the process and plans used to define expectations, grant power, and verify performance. SharePoint Governance describes the specific plans and procedures for managing your SharePoint environment.

SharePoint’s widespread adoption, broad capabilities, ease of use, and multiple deployment and hosting options have made it easy for anyone to get started using SharePoint. It’s this same flexibility that can also make SharePoint difficult to effectively manage. In order to optimize the use and growth of SharePoint, your SharePoint Governance Plan should be used to define expectations, grant and restrict rights, as well as maintain and verify usage and performance.

Due to vast differences in SharePoint environments, a SharePoint Governance Plan should be adapted to your specific environment, regardless of how simple or complex your environment is. This chapter will serve as a guidebook outlining processes for the administration, maintenance, and support of your SharePoint solution.

There are three primary goals of this chapter: To provide a recommended structure for a SharePoint Governing Board responsible for governing and supporting the SharePoint solution. To provide recommended governing policies and procedures of the SharePoint environment within three distinct areas (IT Governance, Application Governance, and Information Governance) and to provide a recommended user adoption and training strategy for the people using and maintaining SharePoint.

 

12. Creating Dashboards using Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Designer and other related technologies (Giles Hamson)

When I look back at my days of learning SharePoint and dashboards etc. in SPS 2003 & MOSS 2007, I had to learn from various articles on the internet about each specific component and then bring them together myself so that I could provide a cohesive end to end solution for my clients.

If I knew then what I know now, projects could have gone a lot smoother.

This chapter covers the end to end cycle of linking to 3rd party Line Of Business (LOB) applications, authentication and creating reports explaining the concepts along the way.

By completing this module the reader will have gone from end to end understanding the following subjects:

• Secure Store Service (previously Single Sign On service – MOSS 2007)
• Business Connectivity Services (previously Business Data Catalog (BDC) – MOSS 2007) connecting to SQL Server views via SharePoint Designer 2010
• Dashboard pages with drill downs using the BDC Web Parts
• Excel Services directly connected to the SQL and refreshable.

This chapter compliments chapter 13 (Building Business Solutions) by providing step by step instructions to achieve your solutions using key Enterprise features.

 

13. Building Business Intelligence Solutions with SharePoint 2010 (Mark Macrae)

In this chapter we will explore the variety of tools available in SharePoint 2010 to provide business intelligence to your business users. We will examine the pros and cons of each tool along the way, and look at a couple of methods of building a powerful dashboard from the items we construct.

Creating dashboards and drill downs using Business Connectivity Services, SharePoint Designer, Filter Web Parts and Reporting Technologies.

This chapter covers the creation of dashboards and drill downs utilising SharePoint Designer 2010, Business Connectivity Services, Secure Store Service, Business Data Catalog Permissions & Actions. It demonstrates Filtering Web Parts & Connections to List Web Parts and explores Excel Services.

The chapter will be a guide to using SharePoint Designer 2010 to connect to SQL Server data sources with External Content Types. It will discuss the rationale for using the Secure Store Service and the Business Data Catalog.

It does this by utilising a real world Customer Information Portal scenario for a Products & Service Company. The company has a requirement to bring together information from various disparate systems within the network to aid a number of departments.