Intermediate

SPSI2101

SPSI2102

SPSI2103

SPSI5101

Advanced

SPSA4101

SPSA4102

SPSA4103

SPSA4702

SPSA4703

SPSA5102

SPSA5103

SPSA5104

SPSA5702

SPSA5703

Introduction

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) offers unprecedented content management, form serving across the office suite and document sharing for enterprise class functionality.

Description

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) has full web content management features built directly into the product. Microsoft have taken their Content Management Server 2002 product and created the next version of it as a part of MOSS 2007. This means you now get Enterprise Content Management functionality not just for your documents but also your web content.

InfoPath is to forms, what Outlook is to email. However InfoPath 2003 could not render designed forms in the browser and required InfoPath 2003 to be installed locally. With InfoPath 2007 and Forms Server, Microsoft has delivered a forms solution that not only renders in browsers and InfoPath, but also in applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The main aim of an organisation deploying a collaboration platform is to improve employee's efficiency by making it easy to locate information and relevant people. My Site was available to every SharePoint Portal 2003 user and was used as a place for users to save and share their documents with others. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) offers a much improved version of My Site which as well as providing file sharing capabilities also includes social networking functionality to locate the people in your organisation who can help you.

Outline

Masterpages, Content Types and Page Layouts

With SharePoint 2007 being built on top of ASP.NET 2.0 developers now are able to easily edit and brand MOSS 2007 sites with SharePoint designer. Content Types are also a new feature of MOSS 2007. These define the structure of items in SharePoint such as the fields that make up a task item, a document, and a web content page. For example you might want to create a content type that is made up of a title field, a description, the actual content field, and an image field. How these fields are then displayed once a new page is created is down to Page Layouts.

Page Layouts define how a Content Type will be displayed with the use of field controls. They also reference a master page which will define the chrome around the site such as a header, footer and sidebar menus. So for our example above a Page Layout could define that the title goes at the top, with the description below. The image will be aligned right, with the main text besides it. You can create many Page Layouts for each Content Type. When you create a new page you decide which Page Layout to base the page on. If you make a change to an existing Page Layout, for example aligning an image to the left instead of the right, all of the web pages that have been based on the Page Layout will immediately reflect the change.

Authoring Functionality

SharePoint 2007 offers a very rich editing experience for creating and authoring your pages. Microsoft has vastly improved the rich content editor to include tools such as spell checking, rich html table creation, and style selectors that can be locked down so all content is produced in your corporate look and feel.

Reusable content can also be created to be re-used in many places in your site. If a change it made to the reusable content, this change will be reflected wherever the reusable content has been placed.

Once a page has been created or edited MOSS 2007 makes use of workflow to provide an authoring, approval, publishing scenario. Content creators will create pages and submit them for approval. Users who are members of the Approval group with get emails alerting them to the fact that content is waiting to published to the website. They can go and view the page as it would appear on the site and either request changes, or approve it so that it appears live on the site.

As well as an approval process as the websites are MOSS 2007 sites pages have full versioning ability and the recycle bin is there for content that is accidentally deleted. Search is also provided out of the box.

Multilingual Sites

While creating multilingual versions of sites was possible for SharePoint 2003 and MCMS 2002, it has become a lot easier in MOSS 2007 with page variations.

Authentication

With MOSS 2007 it's now very easy to allow anonymous access to your SharePoint site if you are running a public facing website. As well as being able to create an anonymous site, it is also possible to configure and deploy a site that uses forms authentication. This allows you to run a site allowing your visitors to register to gain access to restricted content. Forms authentication is available for you to deploy out of the box, but MOSS 2007 also provides you with the ability to develop your own pluggable authentication modules.

Caching

To enable you to host a scalable high performance MOSS 2007 based website, SharePoint 2007 makes great use of caching and in particular a new idea of Cache Profiles. This means that pages are cached so that each type of user has its own cached page.

Smart Client Authoring

Web pages can now be authored in Microsoft Word, saved into a SharePoint document library, and then with content converters, convert the document content to fit in with the web page Content Type and Page Layout. MOSS 2007 comes with some default converters for Word, XML and InfoPath 2007 forms, but the conversion process is completely extensible by implementing your own conversion code and routines.

InfoPath 2007

InfoPath 2007 has built on the success of InfoPath 2003 to produce a rich design environment for teams to produce forms to gather, share and re-use information. With a great importing feature it is possible to import your Microsoft Word and Excel paper based forms so that InfoPath 2007 will create textboxes, checkboxes and repeating data sections for you. This enables you to quickly move from a paper-based data capture method to electronic forms.

Once created, InfoPath forms can be deployed in a number of ways. Two of the most compelling are sending them out to your employees directly as emails, or publishing them to a SharePoint 2007 forms library. Emailing forms directly to people is the quick way to get electronic information being captured, however publishing to a MOSS 2007 forms library enables browser and mobile rendering, version control and workflow usage around your forms. Read more below

Forms Server

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 contains a new component called Forms Services. Upon publishing your InfoPath 2007 form to a MOSS 2007 library, users will now be able to open forms in their browser meaning they won't have to have InfoPath 2007 installed on their machine. Forms can render and be used correctly in box Internet Explorer and Firefox. As well be being possible to use these published forms via a browser, they also get correctly rendered for Mobile devices such as Microsoft Pockets PC's or Smartphones.

Document Information Panels

A document information panel is a form that is displayed within a client application such as Word or Excel, and contains fields for the document metadata which shows the information panel below the new Office ribbon collecting document metadata such as Budget, Company and Project Name. These document information panels are themselves InfoPath forms and so can be designed and styled to collect the metadata information you require.

Workflow and Workflow Forms

One of the main benefits of deploying your InfoPath Forms to a SharePoint forms library is the ability to run workflows based around the information collected in the form. For example this could be one of the out of the box approval workflows that are packaged with MOSS 2007 to enable Directors to approve an expenses form that has been completed by an employee, or you could create your own custom workflow with SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio 2005. This custom workflow could make more use of the data captured by our form so that if the expenses are less the 100 they are approved by DirectorA, but if they are over 100 they must be checked by DirectorB

As well as starting workflows from completed InfoPath forms, InfoPath forms can be (and most probably will be) used as part of a custom workflow for data capture and data processing as part of the actual workflow itself to either complete it, or process it on to the next stage. ASP.NET 2.0 webforms can be used for this but the rich authoring and publishing model of InfoPath 2007 makes it the tool of choice for workflow form development.

My Information

For people to be able to find you, you need to fill in information about yourself. This includes some text about you, a picture, skills, past projects and contact details. You can decide who this information is visible to, for example you may want to only make your mobile phone number available to your manager.

My Colleagues

A new part for the MOSS 2007 website is the Colleague Tracker. This web part show's you a list of your colleagues in an organisational tree structure, enabling online presence information and links to their 'My Site'. There are two methods to get colleagues into your colleague tracker. The first one is to manually search your user profile store and select and add them. The second way is for MOSS 2007 to suggest colleagues that it feels should be part of your colleague tracker. It accomplishes this by analyzing who is a member of the same sites and workspaces as you, who has worked on the same documents, who has emailed and instant messaged you, and by examining your user profile store itself.

Documents

As well as documents that you decide to save directly to your My Site, MOSS 2007 will also trawl others SharePoint sites and collect links to all the other documents you have worked on. This gives you a central place to keep track of files that are of importance to you.

My Profile

The My Profile page is the view that other people get when visiting your site. As described in 'Your Information' section, what role this person has may affect how much detail they see. You chose how much to tell them about you, and what documents and files to display that you are working on. A very nice feature is that the page will show the colleagues that you and the users page you are looking at share. You can also see other areas you have in common, such as site memberships, and managers.

Knowledge Network

Knowledge Network is an addin for MOSS 2007 which will help your users make decisions with information, knowledge and relationships that is usually undocumented.

Knowledge Network analyses users inbox to see who the user has discussed certain topics and issues with, and calculate what each user is an expert in. As with My Sites, users can select who can see what information about them as well as being able to decide exactly what gets analyzed.

Once all the information has been analyzed it is then possible to search for people within your organization who are able to help on certain topics. The nicest feature of this is that if you have chosen only to make your knowledge available to your manager, you can still show as an anonymous helper to other members of your company. They can then send you an email requesting your help on the subject. Only when you agree to help them after receiving the email do they become aware of who you are. It is of course possible to choose not to help this person if you are busy. In this scenario the requesting user will not find out who you are.