Understanding the Basics of Collaboration in SharePoint 2010 (part 1) - Using SharePoint Sites and Templates

1. Introducing SharePoint 2010 Capabilities

SharePoint 2010 builds on the value of SharePoint Server 2007 and provides a core team collaboration experience along with a strong, consistent, development platform that can be used to tailor the SharePoint experience to meet specific corporate and user needs. Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is focused on providing and satisfying business needs by

• Connecting and empowering people

• Cutting costs with a unified infrastructure

• Rapidly responding to business needs

The enhanced features provided in this release of SharePoint can be categorized into groups that help describe the various editions and features available. Table 1 describes these capabilities in detail.

With the release of SharePoint 2010, as with previous releases, there are two basic platforms: SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Table 2 describes the editions of SharePoint that are available.

SharePoint Foundation Services provides a low-cost, entry-level solution for secure, Web-based collaboration. SharePoint Foundation 2010 allows collaboration among users to coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussion forums through team workspaces, blogs, or wikis. Because SharePoint Foundation is the underlying infrastructure for SharePoint Server, straightforward upgrade paths are possible as corporate needs require additional functionality and advanced content capabilities. Table 3 summarizes the capabilities for SharePoint Foundation 2010.

For organizations that require scalable business platforms, SharePoint 2010 has been divided into two editions: Intranet and Internet/Extranet; each of these software editions has different fee structures based on the product purchased. Both editions share the capabilities with SharePoint Foundation and are listed in Table 1-3; they also have the additional capabilities listed in Table 4.

^[1] Supported in SharePoint 2010 Server only.

^[2] Supported in SharePoint 2010 Server only.

^[3] Supported in SharePoint 2010 Server only.

2. Using SharePoint Sites and Templates

SharePoint 2010 comes with site templates to help you begin the journey into user collaboration. These templates provide a basic framework design for building SharePoint sites to meet an organization’s needs and requirements. More often than not, these templates are used by organizations out of the box, with very few—if any—customizations. If you understand how to use the different templates that are available when designing and implementing a SharePoint installation, you can help ensure that both farm administrators and nontechnical users choose the correct site template to allow employees in your organization to collaborate effectively. SharePoint 2010 site templates can be categorized as follows.

• Collaboration sites allow users to quickly author and convey information (press releases, project information, events, announcements, and so on) through one or more Web pages, blogs, or wikis. These sites contain document libraries, calendar items, tasks, and discussions.

• Content sites assist with the management of documents, using version and change controls.

• Publishing sites help SharePoint sites adhere to corporate workflow policies and procedures. For example, an extranet portal provides access to corporate content in a secure manner. Generally, extranet sites are exposed to the public Internet and require additional update processes and procedures.

• Web database sites are new in SharePoint 2010 and allow for advanced functionality and allow modifiable database templates that can be used or modified as necessary.

• Search site functionality has been revamped in SharePoint 2010, and it now provides a better overall user search experience, providing features such as phonetic name matching and query suggestions. These sites include pages for search results and advanced searches. The SharePoint Server 2007 search sites such as the Search Center have been deprecated.

SharePoint 2010 allows for the combination of one or more of these site types to provide the best possible user experience platform. Before identifying which primary site templates to use, you must first determine the primary purpose of the site. Table 5 identifies the templates available in SharePoint 2010 (items new to SharePoint 2010 are shown in italics).

The team collaboration site provides much of the functionality of the other sites.

2.1. Interacting with SharePoint Sites

The SharePoint 2010 user interface (UI) provides better user interaction and simplifies feature and content adjustments. The relocation of the Site Actions button to the upper left along with new action tabs simplify the ways a user can interact with the site. The new Ribbon bars are context- and security-sensitive, which means that they change depending on which user is logged in and what level of security role the user has.

The Ribbon displays possible actions that are available within the site. For example, a site administrator will see the Page tab, which allows modification to the page and the ability to add SharePoint Web parts, while a user who is not an administrator will not see this tab. Other features, such as the Quick Launch menu and site search text box function, remain similar in look to SharePoint Server 2007.

2.2. Site Creation in SharePoint 2010

Users designated as farm administrators within SharePoint 2010 can define and group sites, along with their respective subsites, using a common URL namespace. For example, a company could have a site URL of http://contoso and create multiple subsites URLs such as http://contoso/operations/engineering, http://contoso/operations/IT, or http://contoso/operations/facilities. No physical limit exists to the URL depth, and URLs can be adjusted to suit the needs of the users who use that site.

A top-level site, such as http://contoso, with its associated subsites, is referred to as a site collection. There are additional administrative settings that will apply to the entire collection of sites rather than any one individual site within the collection. For example, site quotas define the total amount of data that can be hosted within a site collection. Site quotas are applied at the site collection layer and cannot be broken down into quotas for each individual site. By contrast, user security applies specifically to an individual site, an individual Web Part, or a specific list item. Hence, different configurations apply at different levels within the SharePoint platform, and your users will need to learn which settings apply at which levels in order to administer their site collections and sites properly.

When a top-level site is created, subsites are added to target collaboration flow and functionality. For example, consider a company intranet website where management wants to control access to change content. To do this, the top-level site might be configured as a publishing site to limit updates and require user workflows for publishing. However, the company’s engineering department requires an intranet subsite for updating documentation, management of wikis, and project management functions. A new subsite might be created for this purpose so that access can be granted, as required, by the engineering department but still keeping those functions quarantined within a site.

SharePoint 2010 enhances the administration-user interface by employing Silverlight to pop up new pages as needed, thereby retaining the users’ context within the site. By clicking Site Settings in the upper-left corner of the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration application window, the Site Actions menu appears. New quick links as well as the traditional site settings provide easy access to most administrative functions, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Note:

If you click the Site Actions button and the Site Actions menu does not appear, try adding the URL of the root site in the site collection to your trusted sites list in Internet Explorer.

The Site Settings link will take you to a page very similar to the SharePoint Server 2007 Site Settings menu. Although the page is formatted in a slightly different way, SharePoint 2010 navigation is similar enough to SharePoint Server 2007 to make navigation during the upgrade process easier for site and farm administrators. If Silverlight is installed, the new Silverlight administrative pages are accessible by clicking New Site in the Site Actions menu (refer back to Figure 1-1). This action opens the Create page shown in Figure 1-2. If Silverlight is not installed and you click New Site on the Site Actions menu, you will be taken directly to the New SharePoint Site page (Newsbweb.aspx).

From the Create page shown in Figure 2, choose the site template you want to use to create a new site. Then enter the site title and URL name and click the Create button. Because each site contains different lists and libraries, this article uses the Team Site template for demonstration purposes.