Essential SharePoint 2013: Practical Guidance for Meaningful Business Results (2014)
Part I. Planning
Chapter 3. Introducing the SharePoint 2013 Platform
In Chapter 2, “Planning Your Solution Strategy,” we looked at essential factors in planning your overall enterprise portal, collaboration, and social strategy. An application, platform, and/or framework that supports this strategy will need to enable the tasks that users will do. This includes managing documents, sharing information, organizing content, communicating with others both synchronously and asynchronously, and using data to make business decisions. On top of this, the platform should also accommodate customizations that enable organizations to develop solutions that exactly meet the needs of their business.
All of these requirements are supported by Microsoft’s collection of client and server products known as Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013, respectively. Together, SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 form a comprehensive collaboration and knowledge management platform. Add in Exchange 2013 for e-mail and Lync 2013 for synchronous communication, and you’ve got a comprehensive collaboration and communication platform. Microsoft also provides this platform offering in the cloud in several flavors as a service called Office 365. This chapter provides an overview of this collection of technologies, a corresponding historical perspective, and what is new about SharePoint 2013. We’ll also provide a walkthrough of how to build a simple but powerful solution by using SharePoint Online as a platform. Figures 3-1 and 3-2 highlight the core products and technologies in the overall Microsoft communications and collaboration platform. Note that SharePoint Workspace, a client application that provided offline access to content in the SharePoint 2010 time frame, has evolved into SkyDrive Pro, which focuses on synchronizing documents offline.
Figure 3-1 The server products that make up Microsoft’s Information Worker platform include capabilities to enable portals, collaboration, social computing, enterprise content management, e-mail, real-time communication, and other key features—deployed either on-premises or via the cloud
Figure 3-2 The Microsoft client-side Information Worker components can be purchased separately (for example, Word, Excel), as an Office 2013 suite (Office Standard, Office Pro), or as a cloud-based service (Office 365)
SharePoint Foundation 2013 is actually the fifth generation of Microsoft’s foundation for the overall collaboration platform. SharePoint Foundation provides the core engine, toolset, and runtime that enable both users and IT professionals to create collaborative sites. Microsoft SharePointServer 2013 is built on top of SharePoint Foundation and provides a large number of additional features, including aggregation, targeting, search, social computing, and content management functionality along with business intelligence and line-of-business (LOB) data integration. The next section describes how all of the pieces (including client tools like SkyDrive Pro and Lync, as well as related server-side products like Exchange) fit together in a typical environment. It also provides a little of the history behind the evolution of SharePoint products.
Microsoft’s Collaboration Evolution
The world of Microsoft collaboration really started with Outlook 97 and Exchange 5.5 back in 1996, when public folders represented the extent of collaboration technology at Microsoft. At that time, Lotus Notes was the de facto enterprise collaboration product.
Exchange as a Collaboration Platform
When Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server was released, Microsoft positioned Exchange and its Web Store (the Exchange database plus some schema and Web-enablement features) as a collaboration server that would compete with, among other products, Lotus Notes. Exchange 2000 also provided a real-time communication piece that could provide instant messaging within an organization. The strategy seemed to make sense—use Exchange as the core asynchronous messaging, synchronous messaging, and collaboration platform. Build it and they will come.
Unfortunately, they never came. Using Exchange as the core collaboration platform never took off (mainly because applications had to be run directly on the server, a situation that didn’t sit well with Exchange administrators). It became clear to Microsoft that messaging was a mission-critical application, and letting application developers build on top of Exchange was not going to be a popular option among Exchange administrators. (This is also now a trend in the SharePoint world since many SharePoint servers are now in the cloud and beyond the reach of administrators.) Microsoft repositioned Exchange as a pure messaging server. Microsoft also carved the real-time communication option out of Exchange 2000 and created a new product, called Live Communications Server (LCS) at the time and now called Lync, keeping Exchange firmly planted in the e-mail and personal information management (PIM) camp.
Office Server Extensions and SharePoint Team Services
Microsoft was addressing real-time collaboration with this new product LCS, but they still had a gap when it came to supporting groups that wanted to collaborate in a team environment. To meet this need, Microsoft leveraged existing technology originating with the FrontPage group and evolved it into SharePoint Team Services. On a technology basis, SharePoint has its roots in FrontPage Server Extensions, which became Office Server Extensions, then SharePoint Team Services, Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), and finally SharePoint Foundation. Based on FrontPage Server Extensions (a technology that enabled Web developers to save Web pages directly to the server over HTTP), Office 2000 included a server-side feature that provided list functionality called Office Server Extensions. This led to the next revision of the Web-based team collaboration concept in 2001—SharePoint Team Services (STS). STS was included with FrontPage 2002 and Office XP Developer.
Note
You may notice that certain file names in the SharePoint installation folders contain OWS or STS in them. These artifacts from previous versions of SharePoint stand for “Office Web Server” and “SharePoint Team Services,” respectively. You may also wonder what VTI stands for (as in VTI_BIN) . . . it’s “Vermeer Technologies, Inc.,” which was acquired by Microsoft. Vermeer Technologies was the original developer of FrontPage.
SharePoint Portal Server 2001
The collaboration platform was moved out of Exchange 2000, but Microsoft was determined to use the Web Store database technology. At this point, Microsoft realized that there were three key collaboration/portal needs: real-time collaboration, ad hoc team collaboration, and an enterprise portal framework. SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) 2001 integrated a number of existing concepts into one product: search (which came from Index Server), workflow (which evolved from Exchange 5.5 workflow concepts), document management (which was based on the Web Store), and a customizable Web portal (which evolved from Digital Dashboard 3.0). The idea of a combined set of portal technologies was good; the implementation was, in hindsight, bad. SPS 2001 (code-named “Tahoe”) wasn’t based on the same technology as SharePoint Team Services (which provided the team collaboration solution). Worse yet, you couldn’t even install them on the same machine. SPS 2003, mentioned next, fixed this, using a better architecture (mostly based on WSS 2.0) and better integration.
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
The next revision of the Web-based team collaboration concept emerged as Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. Microsoft decided to include the platform with Windows Server 2003, rather than Office 2003. However, Office and WSS provided key integration points, which made each of them better when used with the other. The concepts from SharePoint Team Services were brought forward, with an emphasis on a scalable and consistent architecture.
SharePoint Portal Server 2003
SPS 2003 was based on WSS 2.0 and provided search, portal, and aggregation features. Microsoft took a big leap forward, basing SPS on WSS (instead of being a completely separate product). However, in the end it was still two teams, two architectures, and two different user experiences. Microsoft also realized that WSS belonged as a core part of the operating system—which had a huge impact in terms of development focus and installed base. Most customers bought SPS 2003 to implement a simple intranet and to search across WSS 2.0 team sites.
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
Microsoft took key feedback from customers, which included the following core mandates:
Do continue to provide core Web, management, and collaboration features in the WSS platform.
Do add incremental improvements (like a recycle bin and workflow) that will enhance the experience and usability of the product.
Don’t change the core architecture to the point where migration will be next to impossible.
Microsoft has done an impressive job evolving the SharePoint platform in a way that accomplishes those objectives.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 was a true superset of WSS 3.0 and provided search, portal, and aggregation features, along with business data, Excel Services, and Web-based forms. And, in this release, the WSS and MOSS technologies were completely integrated, from the management to the UI to the user features to the programming APIs. In addition, MOSS 2007 represented the first integration of Web content management technology from another Microsoft product—Content Management Server—which enabled customers to use SharePoint as a true intranet/Internet site tool.
SharePoint Foundation 2010
With the 2010 release of SharePoint technologies, Microsoft evolved both the core platform as well as the development story through products like SharePoint Designer 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. SharePoint Foundation 2010 (4.0) proved to be the cleanest yet in terms of architecture and feature set.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010
Like MOSS 2007, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 was a superset of SharePoint Foundation and provided additional application features on top of the core SharePoint platform. In addition, Microsoft acquired the FAST search engine, which bolstered SharePoint’s indexing and searching capabilities.
Current Versions of SharePoint Products and Technologies
The current-day world of Microsoft collaboration has made SharePoint the predominant content management product in the industry. SharePoint 2013 Foundation and Server not only provide comprehensive platform capabilities but also power the “Sites” capability of Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 service.
SharePoint Foundation 2013
With the 2013 release of SharePoint, Microsoft has evolved both the core platform as well as the development story, mainly to accommodate Microsoft’s own move into hosting SharePoint as a service in the cloud, rather than selling it as traditional software.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013
Like SharePoint 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 is a superset of the corresponding SharePoint Foundation (2013) and provides additional application features on top of the core SharePoint platform. The next section describes the changes to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.
SharePoint Server 2013: The Details
There are three versions of SharePoint 2013 that can be deployed on-premises: SharePoint Foundation 2013, SharePoint Server 2013 with Standard CAL, and SharePoint Server 2013 with Enterprise CAL. Each version is a complete superset of the one it builds upon. In addition, there are many flavors of SharePoint Online—which is Microsoft’s service that provides SharePoint via the cloud. We outline the differences in Table 3-3.
SharePoint Foundation 2013 is freely available as a downloadable component and can be installed on either Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2012. It provides core collaboration services with templates for team sites; it is based on ASP.NET and requires .NET Framework 4.5.
SharePoint Server 2013 comes in two distinct licensed versions from a CAL perspective: Standard and Enterprise. SharePoint Server 2013 Standard builds on SharePoint Foundation to provide portal, search, social computing, and enterprise content management (ECM) features.SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise builds on SharePoint Server 2013 Standard to include services such as InfoPath Forms Services, Excel Services, and the Business Data Catalog.
Note
Microsoft has eliminated the SharePoint FIS license, which stood for “For Internet Sites.” This means that organizations that deploy SharePoint on-premises can simply purchase a regular SharePoint server license and do not need an additional license for external users who are not employees or contractors of the organization. This could save you significant licensing costs.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 2013
Microsoft’s goal is to provide consistent collaboration functionality in an architecturally sound manner. One of the core approaches to meeting this goal is the reuse of common services. The Windows operating system provides core Web server and workflow services (via .NET 4.5). The .NET Framework provides the Web Part Framework and Web concepts such as master pages. SQL Server provides database services. SharePoint Foundation provides core information services such as security, management, and a site provisioning engine. The rest of the SharePoint 2013 server components build on the core SharePoint Foundation platform to provide additional features. Figure 3-3 shows the component relationships that constitute the overall architecture. In the rest of this section, we will explore each component in more detail.
Figure 3-3 The SharePoint 2013 technologies provide a wide array of capabilities, built upon Windows Server and .NET and delivered in three tiers: SharePoint Foundation 2013, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Standard CAL features, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise CAL features
Operating System Services: Windows Server
Windows Server provides base operating system services, such as the NTFS file system, the Internet Information Server (IIS) Web services, and application server features such as message queuing and component management services.
Note
The collaboration platform technologies discussed in this book run only on Windows Server 2008/2012 (64-bit) and are not supported on other operating systems such as Linux or Solaris. They are, however, accessible via a Web browser from clients on these systems.
Database Services: Microsoft SQL Server
Both SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 require a database server to store configuration information, metadata, and files. SharePoint 2013 requires either Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 (64-bit edition) or SQL Server 2012 (64-bit edition). For very small workgroup deployments, SharePoint will run using the SQL Server Express database included with SharePoint Foundation.
Note
SharePoint 2013 is not supported on non-Microsoft databases such as MySQL or Oracle.
Workflow Services: Windows Workflow Foundation
SharePoint 2013 supports workflow by building on the Windows Workflow Foundation 4 (part of Azure Workflow and .NET 4.5). There are essentially four ways to create workflows: use the out-of-the-box workflows (which ship via templates in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013), create a workflow using SharePoint Designer 2013, use Visio 2013, or create a workflow in Visual Studio 2012 (for more complex workflows). SharePoint 2013 introduces a new Workflow Manager server role that is described further in Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions.”
Web Page Services: ASP.NET
Core Web functionality in SharePoint 2013 is provided by the .NET Framework, specifically in the ASP.NET toolset. The Web Part Framework, included in ASP.NET, enables developers to create Web Parts that work in ASP.NET Web sites, SharePoint Foundation sites, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 sites. (It is important to note, however, that ASP.NET Web Parts are not exactly the same as SharePoint 2013 Web Parts.) In addition, ASP.NET and SharePoint 2013 share some key features like master pages, which makes UI customization much easier.
Collaboration Services
SharePoint Foundation provides a core set of services for developing collaborative workspaces. We will focus on SharePoint Foundation as both a platform for the other SharePoint Server 2013 features as well as a rich collaborative technology in its own right.
Portal
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides a core set of services for developing sites that enable users to view aggregated lists of content, links, and other information. With SharePoint Server 2013, organizations can manage their intranets, extranets, and Internet sites with the same platform. Features like audience targeting enable content administrators to direct Web Parts and other content at dynamic groups of users. In SharePoint 2013, aggregation can be achieved both within a site collection via the Content Query Web Part, or across site collections by using a new Web Part called the Content Search Web Part, which uses the search index to power queries.
Enterprise Content Management
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides content management features that enable organizations to develop and manage HTML-rich Web sites. SharePoint Server 2013 provides approval, policy, rights management, retention, multilingual, and Web publishing features. Content is content is content—it doesn’t matter whether you serve content up as HTML or a Word document anymore. ECM is discussed more in Chapter 13, “Managing Enterprise Content.”
Search
SharePoint 2013 provides a number of key search features, including searching against disparate content sources, people search, and business data search. The FAST search engine, which was an additional component that required separate servers in SharePoint 2010, is now integrated into the core SharePoint 2013 search engine, making deployment topologies much simpler. For more information on search, see Chapter 16, “Planning Enterprise Search.”
Social Computing (Community)
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides features that enable users to provide social feedback on content, including tagging, ratings, and comments. SharePoint Server 2013 also provides a number of people-centric features such as a profile store and My Sites. My Sites, which were introduced in SharePoint Portal Server 2003, provide sites for users to call their own. Through the social computing features in SharePoint Server 2013, businesses can create an experience akin to Facebook or LinkedIn for their users. Note that with the acquisition of Yammer, Microsoft has relegated the SharePoint 2013 social features to an inferior role. You should consider Yammer the premier social tool with respect to a SharePoint 2013 deployment. We discuss social computing in Chapter 15, “Planning for Social Computing.”
Business Intelligence
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 brings business intelligence (BI) features to the mainstream, having dramatically improved the quality and user experience of this feature set. Excel Services, PerformancePoint Services, KPIs, dashboards, Report Center, and SQL Reporting Services all provide business intelligence via the SharePoint 2013 platform. We discuss the BI features in more detail in Chapter 18, “Planning for Business Intelligence.”
Composite Applications
SharePoint sites become increasingly powerful when integrated with real business data. Being able to create rich applications quickly that combine information in SharePoint with information from other sources—such as a database, an LOB application, or the Web—is compelling. We cover how to quickly create dynamic applications (“mashups” and “composites”) in Chapter 17, “Planning Business Solutions.”
Table 3-1 shows the respective technologies that make up Microsoft’s overall Information Worker platform. We focus on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 in this book, so when we use “SharePoint 2013,” we typically mean the full server product.
Table 3-1 Microsoft’s Communication and Collaboration Product Line
What’s New in SharePoint 2013?
The prior version of SharePoint (SharePoint 2010) was a breakthrough version of Microsoft’s core collaboration platform. Microsoft’s plan for SharePoint 2013 was to build upon the far-reaching success of SharePoint 2007 and SharePoint 2010. Specifically, the architectural goals for SharePoint 2013 include
Increased scalability
Performance enhancements, including faster page load times
Easier-to-manage security
Richer social experiences
Better offline document support
Superior search capabilities
Support for a large number of deployment scenarios, including the cloud
Improved user experience for out-of-the-box features
Easier upgrade for individual site collections
Easier-to-manage solutions built for cloud-based deployment models
Once of the key objectives of the SharePoint 2013 team was to build upon the success of prior versions while preserving the items that made SharePoint 2010 a success. Thus, the SharePoint team kept the core architecture the same while adding a number of new features. Table 3-2 lists some of the new features in SharePoint 2013.
Table 3-2 SharePoint 2013: What’s New?
Comparing SharePoint Versions
SharePoint Foundation 2013 is a collection of services for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 that you can use to share information, collaborate with other users on documents, and create lists and Web Part pages. You can also use SharePoint Foundation as a development platform to create collaboration applications and information-sharing applications, as discussed in the next section.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013, a step up from SharePoint Foundation, is a scalable enterprise server that is built on SharePoint Foundation. You can use Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 to aggregate SharePoint Foundation sites, other information, and applications in your organization. Because Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 requires SharePoint Foundation, all features of SharePoint Foundation are available in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013.
In addition to the core features of SharePoint Foundation (core site-based services and collaboration site templates), Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 includes the following Standard and Enterprise features:
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Standard:
Portal: provides a way to create an intranet portal, an extranet portal, and an Internet-facing .com site on a single platform
News: provides a way to create, maintain, and publish news articles for consumption by internal and external audiences
User profiles: provides an extensible profile for each employee and the ability for users to search and find expertise within the company
Social computing: provides a way for users to socially tag, rate, and comment on content
Audiences: provides a way to target content to groups of users based on rules
Search: provides extensible search functionality across file shares, Web sites, Microsoft Exchange public folders, Lotus Notes, and Windows SharePoint Services sites (with the exception of the Content Search Web Part)
Records management: provides document auditing, expiry, and other features that enable management of company records
Web content management: provides functionality for business users to create and manage Web-based content (HTML) based on templates
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise:
PerformancePoint Services: provides business intelligence capabilities, a Report Center template and key performance indicator (KPI) lists, and Web Parts
Search: adds the Content Search Web Part for aggregating information from across site collections by enabling queries of the search index
Business Connectivity Services (BCS): provides a way to integrate line-of-business data into portal pages, team sites, document metadata, enterprise search, and employee profiles
InfoPath Forms Services: provides the ability to publish, render, and consume InfoPath 2013 forms via a Web browser
Excel Services: provides the ability to publish and render Excel 2013 workbooks on the server; enables calculations and graphics rendering via a Web interface
Access Services: provides the ability to publish and render Access 2013 databases on the server; enables the Access application to store its data within a SQL Server or Azure database and run within SharePoint via a Web interface
Word Services: provides the ability to publish and render Word 2013 documents on the server
Visio Services: provides the ability to publish and render Visio 2013 diagrams on the server
Table 3-3 describes the core SharePoint 2013 product feature sets.
Table 3-3 Comparison of SharePoint 2013 Feature Sets
Note
For a complete feature comparison, you can view the official Microsoft comparison between an on-premises installation of SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx.
So with all of these features, what does SharePoint 2013 provide from a collaboration and solutions perspective? For many companies still using file shares for document sharing and Access databases (and Excel, for that matter) for tracking applications, it provides a perfect next step. Let’s take a look at these two trends: using SharePoint as a file share replacement and as an Access database/Excel workbook replacement.
SharePoint: The File Share Killer?
SharePoint is commonly used as a file share and public folder replacement. Customers frequently ask whether SharePoint will replace file shares entirely. If you start encouraging users to put documents and other content into SharePoint, should you disconnect your file shares for good? The answer is a resounding no. File shares are not dead. But they are on life support.
SharePoint is designed for file collaboration, records management, and discovery. Windows file shares are good for file storage, housing a database, and for large amounts of read-only content. Determine if you have collaborative, findability, security, or e-discovery requirements. If so, your document storage needs are a good candidate for SharePoint. On the flip side, ask yourself whether the files in question have little collaborative value or are simply too large or costly to store in SharePoint. If either of these is true, a file share is probably a better place for those files, since the overhead of SharePoint might make it a poor choice.
In general, for business users collaborating on documents and for storing documents as records, SharePoint is probably a better fit. However, the following are many useful scenarios for file storage based on classic file shares:
Product distribution, such as Office installation packages
SMS distribution point (desktop patches and hot fixes)
Backups
Database storage, such as Access and SQL databases
Very large audio/video and streaming media (over 2GB)
Developer source control
Executables and PowerShell scripts
Archives and dumps
In short, users will need training to understand where to save their files. With most file-sharing scenarios, SharePoint libraries will be the Microsoft-recommended way of sharing files inside the corporation, and with collaborative SharePoint site extranet deployments, it’s the way to share with partners. Most nontechnical users such as HR, sales, and marketing teams can say goodbye to using file shares for file sharing. To avoid replicating the limits of shared drives (for example, poor navigation and duplicate content), users will also need training to understand the use of metadata and folders to organize their content.
As you can see, there are a number of valid reasons for having both file shares and SharePoint document libraries in your organization. In fact, you may decide to keep existing collaborative content on your file shares as a read-only archive and simply use SharePoint 2013’s search technology to enable users to search for existing documents (rather than migrating those documents to SharePoint).
So the file share question is answered . . . but what about Access databases and Excel workbooks? Are those dead?
SharePoint: The Access and Excel Killer?
Overheard at an organization near you:
Business user (to IT department): “We need an application to track donations to our upcoming fund-raising campaign.”
IT department: “What are the requirements?”
Business user: “We need to track donors, contributions, project tasks, documents, and approvals, to search on items, and to provide reports to management.”
IT department: “We can build it in four months.”
Business user: (Gasp!)
IT department: “If you can secure additional funding, we can do it in two.”
Business user: “Never mind. I’ll create an Access database and throw it on a file share.”
IT department: (Gasp!)
The problem with this fairly common scenario is that now there’s yet another database out there that’s probably not backed up properly, cannot support Web-based access, and is virtually unknown to and unsupported by IT. This is another reason why IT departments are putting SharePoint in place—to support requests by the business for collaboration and tracking applications.
Note
Q: What’s the world’s most widely used database application?
A: Microsoft Excel.
In addition to its great collaboration features, SharePoint 2013 can be very effective as a platform to create information-sharing and -tracking applications. Let’s look at an example of the business need described by the business user—one that can be addressed in a matter of minutes, without code. Previously, this type of solution would take months for a development team to build, in addition to the time—perhaps months—it might take to deploy the infrastructure itself.
Let’s say that one of the business units within your organization needs a simple way to track donations that are being solicited for a fund-raising campaign. There is a team of fund-raisers who need to track contributions, project managers who need to plan various fund-raising events, and managers who need to see the current status of the campaign’s progress. Let’s say that the team tracks donors in a spreadsheet that gets e-mailed around—a typical collaboration and tracking scenario. However, items such as actual contributions made by whom, event-planning documents, and other items are not tracked in an organized manner, since e-mail would be a difficult way to do this.
During discovery, some of the requirements that come to light are as follows:
The need to track the following entities:
Donors (contacts)
Contributions (associated with donors)
Project tasks (for planning fund-raising events)
Team announcements (with RSS feeds)
Documents (including version tracking, multi-user editing, along with community tagging, ratings, and comments)
A workflow-based approval process
Highly scalable Web-based access
Item-level security
Keyword search
Threshold reporting and visual indicators for management
While this type of application could be written as a custom Web application, it would likely take several weeks (or possibly even several months) of custom development. In addition, a Web server and database server would need to be deployed to accommodate the application. Let’s see what a no-code method of creating the solution in SharePoint 2013, running in the cloud under Office 365, would look like. It’s as simple as creating a new site, importing the existing spreadsheet, and configuring some new elements.
Walkthrough
The following steps illustrate how to build a collaborative application in SharePoint Server 2013. To get a peek at the application in its final form, check out Figure 3-10, which shows the completed collaborative application—created in less than an hour. You can follow along in your own SharePoint on-premises environment, or you can simply provision an Office 365 trial site at www.microsoft.com/office365.
Step 1: Create a new, blank site by first navigating to Sites (see Figure 3-4):
1. Click “new site.”
2. Provide a name for the site—in this case DonationTracking (see Figure 3-5).
3. Click Create.
Figure 3-4 The “Sites I’m following” page is a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that provides a list of sites that you’ve currently selected to follow. From here, you can click “new site” to create a site.
Figure 3-5 Simply provide a name for your new tracking site
The result is a ready-to-use SharePoint site (see Figure 3-6).
Figure 3-6 Once the site has been provisioned, you can add lists, Web Parts, and additional items to the site
Step 2: Create a new contacts list by adding a SharePoint 2013 app:
1. Click the gear in the upper-right corner and select “Add an app” (see Figure 3-7).
Figure 3-7 To create a new list within the SharePoint site, you now “Add an app” (which is different from prior versions of SharePoint)
2. Click the Contacts app.
3. Name the list Donors and click Create.
4. The list will be created and show up in the list of Site Contents (see Figure 3-8).
Figure 3-8 Your new list will show up under Site Contents, which displays Lists, Libraries, and other Apps
Note
If you keep getting prompted for a username and password when using your SharePoint site, or if you get an error trying to import a spreadsheet for a custom spreadsheet-based list, make sure that the site is added to your local intranet zone within your browser.
Step 3: Create a list to track donations made by donors in the contact list:
1. Click the gear in the upper-right corner and select “Add an app.”
2. Select Custom List.
3. Name it Donations and click Create.
4. Under Site Contents, click the newly created Donations list.
5. Click the List tab in the Ribbon and select List Settings.
6. Under the Columns heading, click Title, change its name to Donation (you cannot delete this Column, since it provides the link to the item), and click OK.
7. Under the Columns heading, click Create Column, and name the new Column Donation Method, making it a Choice field. Replace the default choices (Enter Choice #1, etc.) with Cash, Stock, and Clothing. Click OK.
8. Click Create Column and name the new Column Donor. This time, select the Lookup Column. Under Get Information From, select the Donors list, FullName Column. This will associate a donation with a donor. Two features in SharePoint 2013 enable you to enforce unique values and to enforce relationship-linking behavior. We’ll skip those for now. Click OK.
9. Click Create Column and name the new Column Amount, designating it as a Currency field. Click OK.
Step 4: Create a project task list:
1. Click the gear in the upper-right corner and select “Add an app.”
2. Select Tasks, which enables you to track tasks and view Gantt charts.
3. Name the list Event Planning Tasks and click Create.
Step 5: Create an announcements list:
1. Click the gear in the upper-right corner and select “Add an app.”
2. Select Announcements.
3. Name the list Announcements and click Create.
Step 6: Add the Web Parts for the lists just created to your site home page:
1. Navigate to the home page of your Donation Tracking site by clicking on the SharePoint icon in the upper-left corner of the page.
2. Click the Page tab and click Edit.
3. Next to “Getting started with your site” click Remove This to make some room for your Web Parts.
4. In the left Web Part zone, click Insert and then click App Part (see Figure 3-9).
Figure 3-9 You can add the site’s list-based Web Parts one at a time by selecting them from the site’s Web Part gallery and clicking Add. (You can no longer add many Web Parts at once.)
5. One at a time, add your newly created list-based Web Parts, which will appear on the left under Parts, to the site. There’s no need to add Documents since it’s already on the page.
6. Click Save in the ribbon UI to return to user mode.
Step 7: To complete your application, arrange your Web Parts so that the site is organized well for a quality user experience. In addition, you’ll want to add some sample data:
1. Click Edit under the Page tab in the ribbon.
2. Drag and drop your Web Parts to locations on the page that are to your liking. You will also want to create custom views and then set the Web Part to display those custom views.
3. Click Stop Editing in the ribbon UI to return to the site.
4. Start adding data to the site. See Figure 3-10 for an example of the new Donation Tracking collaborative site.
Figure 3-10 In less than an hour and with no code (and no servers if you use Office 365!), SharePoint 2013 enables a business user to create a collaborative application, complete with related custom list data, documents, search, project tasks, RSS-enabled announcements, and real-time usage reporting
Note that this solution enables the tracking of data, file storage with metadata, a secure, Web-accessible interface, and search capabilities—all in under an hour! This is the power of a collaboration platform that enables business users, not developers, to create solutions based on a set of ready-to-assemble tools and features. It is a simple example of how you can use SharePoint to get things done.
Key Points
We’ve covered a lot of information in this chapter—from an overview of the SharePoint 2013 family of products, to what to do with your file shares, to a sample collaborative SharePoint 2013 tracking application. We hope that you’re starting to get a feel for the functionality of SharePoint and the types of business problems it can help address. In summary:
Microsoft’s family of communication and collaboration products (including Office client applications, Microsoft SharePoint 2013, Lync 2013, and Exchange Server 2013) constitute the foundation for Microsoft’s Information Worker strategy.
SharePoint Foundation 2013 provides a number of feature and developer enhancements over SharePoint Foundation 2010 but keeps the fundamental architecture intact.
SharePoint 2013 is optimized for cloud-based deployment (specifically Office 365 and SharePoint Online).
SharePoint Foundation 2013 is based on ASP.NET and .NET 4.5.
SharePoint Foundation provides a set of collaborative functionality, including Web page support, collaboration, document management, and a team workspace platform.
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides additional features built on SharePoint Foundation, including enterprise content management, social computing, search, business process management, and business intelligence.
Both SharePoint Foundation 2013 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 require the 64-bit versions of Windows Server (either 2008 R2 SP1 or 2012) and Microsoft SQL Server (either 2008 R2 SP1 or 2012) to run.
Unlike previous versions, SharePoint 2013 requires claims-based authentication.
SharePoint 2013 is a great place to build collaborative-style tracking applications with little to no code.