Steve Wright

Managing Web Parts

Web parts are an important piece for quickly creating dynamic and robust SharePoint sites. SharePoint 2010 provides several web parts to help you quickly get started. Although you can add web parts to web pages in the browser, it is much quicker and more efficient to create web part pages in SharePoint Designer.

Styles and Themes

Throughout my years of helping different businesses and business units plan and implement SharePoint, the most requested requirement is to make a SharePoint site look not like SharePoint. SharePoint’s look is bland for a reason. It emphasizes function over form. It provides a basic road map, so to speak, to get you where you want to go. I always tell people that SharePoint is a platform with enormous functionality that is just waiting to be the foundation of your own creation! This chapter covers the main areas in customizing your own SharePoint look, or brand, with the use of styles and themes.

Managing Publishing Sites

The publishing features of SharePoint Server 2010 provide a sophisticated web content management (WCM) architecture for SharePoint-based sites. Publishing sites use a multilayered page structure that allows for tight control over and efficient maintenance of web content. Pages are created and published based on a common data management and approval workflow. Content can be managed centrally or through a series of content repositories that allow for the staging of content.

Using SharePoint to Store Data

SharePoint provides containers called lists to store information. Microsoft provides many predefined list templates that you can use to build powerful applications in SharePoint. SharePoint also has a generic list that can be customized to fit specific requirements. Libraries are special kinds of lists in which each list item refers to a file. Data in SharePoint is organized by creating different types of content that consists of columns or data. Once the data is stored in SharePoint, custom views of the data can be created.

Consuming External Data

SharePoint is very good at enabling you to store data and present it on the Web, but most organizations have data in many different areas and systems that they would like to present in a web format. In previous chapters, you learned how to create data sources of internal data stores. In this chapter, you will learn how to connect to external sources of data and present that data on your SharePoint site. This chapter also covers SharePoint’s new Business Connectivity Services, which makes it easier to surface your line-of-business data on your SharePoint site.

Automating with Workflows

SharePoint Server 2010 contains a powerful workflow engine based on the .NET Framework’s Workflow Foundation. Using SharePoint Designer, you can leverage this engine to automate many business processes quickly and easily.

A Quick Guide to SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer (SPD) is a Windows client application used to design rich, highly customized SharePoint solutions. SPD is intended for use primarily by web site designers to enable detailed customization of pages, lists, libraries, and many other SharePoint artifacts. Although SPD includes features that may be useful to developers and administrators, it is first and foremost a design tool. SPD is ideal for creating business process workflows, integrating with line-of-business databases, and creating custom presentations of business information on the SharePoint Server platform.

Advanced Site Customizations

Now that you have explored creating content for your sites and tailoring their appearance, you will look at some more advanced topics for creating a rich, easy-to-use web site. Specifically, in this chapter, you will focus on customizing the search and site navigation features available in SharePoint. You will learn about the following topics in this chapter: How ASP.NET is used to provide a structure for SharePoint’s navigation system What components to use to create an intuitive site navigation structure How to customize the out-of-the-box controls and web parts to improve the search and navigation experience of your site How to present search criteria and results in a way that aids users in finding the content that is most relevant to them

Using InfoPath Forms

InfoPath forms allow designers to create rich, custom forms that can create and consume data from a variety of sources including SharePoint. In this chapter, you will explore the features of InfoPath forms that make them well-suited to inclusion in a SharePoint-based solution. You will examine the concepts and security considerations to be addressed when working with InfoPath forms in SharePoint. You will then learn the process for building and publishing different types of forms for use within SharePoint.

Client-Side Programming

At this point, you are going to take a slight detour from building the visual components of your sites into the magical realm of code writing. As you have seen throughout this book, some amazing things can be accomplished with SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010 without ever writing a line of code. However, in order to build the richest of user experiences, it is sometimes necessary to crack open the toolbox and pull out the power tools.