Beginning SharePoint® 2010 Administration™: Microsoft® SharePoint® Foundation 2010 and Microsoft® SharePoint® Server 2010

Chapter 1. Introduction to Microsoft SharePoint 2010

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Understanding SharePoint 2010

• Planning for Requirements

• Exploring SharePoint Features

In 2008, I was hired by an organization with several thousand users who needed to get a better way of managing their documents. The challenges were several: The number of documents was more than 10 million; they had offices in a large number of locations; a large number of documents had multiple authors, some as many as 100 authors; and many documents had to be reviewed and commented by sometimes more than 50 people, in different locations and time zones. A typical scenario would look like this: Anna created a 50-page report in Microsoft Word, and she needed 25 people to review and possibly update the document, but only the sections that affected them. Anna sent the document by e-mail to each of these 25 people, and asked them to review and if needed update a specific section of the document. After about two weeks, and several reminders, she got 25 new versions back by e-mail. Now Anna had to consolidate all those versions into her original document. The easiest way to do this was to print out all 26 versions, find a really large table, put up the first page from all versions, compare them, continue with the next page, and so forth. Sometimes multiple reviewers had different opinions about the same section, so Anna had to send a new e-mail and ask these people if they could agree on a specific version of that ...