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Although this book is packed full of solution examples and plenty of code, I’ve always thought it is important to frame the context of these solutions inside of the business environment they target. A successful SharePoint solution must take into account the overall direction Microsoft is going, the vertical marketplace in which your organization operates, and the willingness of end users to adopt new technologies. Therefore, I’ll indulge in a little digression from my charter in this chapter. If you’re just dying for some code, flip to the middle of the book and breathe deeply. Then come back and take a few minutes to read this chapter and think about the environment in which you are deploying SharePoint.

Before planning a SharePoint installation, you should have a strong understanding of the intended purpose. You should identify whether the installation will serve sites on the intranet, extranet, or Internet. You should also determine how many users and documents the system must support. Finally, you need to decide if the system is mission-critical or if downtime can be tolerated. In this chapter, I walk you through the major components of SharePoint and help you plan your installation. At the end of the chapter is a complete installation procedure you can use to create a development environment for use with this book.

SharePoint 2007 is a significant product with many functional areas to master. Installing the software and creating a web application are only the beginning of the administrative and programming tasks you must perform to develop a professional site. These tasks include managing users, configuring authentications, and deploying functionality to the site. In this chapter, I cover the fundamental configurations, features, and functions that are required to get a site up and running.

While a SharePoint farm gives you the ability to create many separate web applications, there are several services that you will not necessarily want to recreate for each new web application. The most obvious example of such a service is the Search Service. In many scenarios, it makes sense to set up the Search Service one time and then share it across several web applications. This is the concept behind the Shared Services Provider (SSP) in SharePoint.

Although the default installation of WSS and MOSS are acceptable for general-purpose usage, you will undoubtedly want to customize the appearance and behavior of sites to match your organization’s branding and expectations. SharePoint supports customizing sites in several different ways. You can make many changes to the look and feel of a site directly through the site administration pages, or using the SharePoint Designer for more extensive control. Additionally, MOSS supports a publishing feature that enables professional content management capabilities for managing page creation, approval, and deployment. In this chapter, I cover all of the various ways to change the appearance, behavior, and content of sites.

Throughout the book, I have used document libraries in various examples and worked with some of the functionality. However, we have not yet investigated documents, forms, records, and libraries in detail. In this chapter, we will take a detailed look at the functionality in SharePoint for managing documents, forms, and records. After reading this chapter, you should have a strong understanding of the complete document life cycle from creation through archival and some good ideas for customizing the capabilities to meet your own needs.

F are the backbone of SharePoint development because every custom development project can—and really should—be deployed as a feature. Features give tremendous control over SharePoint configurations and capabilities at the administrator level. This means that developers can create features and then turn them over to SharePoint administrators without having to get involved repeatedly in small configuration changes.

Microsoft’s business intelligence (BI) offering has been evolving over the past few years with several products playing a role. SQL Server 2005 contains a database engine, an analysis services engine, and a report services engine, while Excel 2007 has been enhanced to support up to 2 million rows of data. Other products such as PerformancePoint Server 2007 and recently acquired ProClarity offer scorecarding and analytics. All in all, it is an offering that often feels cobbled together out of available pieces. Worst of all, there has never been a single centralized view of BI data in the Microsoft world. Excel spreadsheets might be e-mailed to users while reports are viewed through a web site and data is accessed through custom applications.

Throughout this book, I have shown you the integration points between SharePoint and various Microsoft Office products. Generally, I have demonstrated integration points in context when those capabilities were related to the topic at hand. In this chapter, I will cover any additional integration points that have not been presented previously. I will also cover several aspects of custom development with Microsoft Office 2007 including the new open file formats and Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). At the end of this chapter, you should have a strong understanding of all the techniques you can use to leverage Office in your SharePoint solutions.

The power of SharePoint as a solution platform comes in no small measure from its support for web parts. The web parts framework built into Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provides a consistent environment for both developer and user. Standard interfaces, attributes, and deployment models make web part construction straightforward, while standard interface elements to add, remove, and modify web parts make them easy to customize. Throughout our investigation of SharePoint, we have used web parts to integrate systems, customize functionality, and display information. Although WSS and MOSS ship with a number of useful web parts, you will inevitably want to create your own. In this chapter, I will examine the fundamental construction and deployment of web parts.