Essential SharePoint

Chapter 1. Why Use SharePoint?

SharePoint is a component of Windows 2003 that lets you share Microsoft Office documents with others through web pages. Unlike most web sites, SharePoint sites are designed to be highly dynamic. Team members can easily upload documents, add public announcements, send alerts, track work items, and call meetings right from within Office products.

Solving Problems

SharePoint solves four problems:

• It's difficult to keep track of all the documents in even a small office.

• Email isn't a great way to share files.

• We work all over the place.

• It's hard to create and maintain web sites on your own.

Most offices have addressed these problems using a combination of tools or work procedures. For instance, the boss says, "Route your proposal to me, Ed, and Jane for approval," and you email the file to each of them, asking for comments with change-tracking enabled. You set a deadline, keep copies of each reviewer's response, and reconcile conflicting comments.

That approach works because your boss, Ed, and Jane are great coworkers, check their email often, and communicate well with each other, and because the proposal is well-suited for this approach. It's pretty easy to throw a wrench into that machine, however. Say, for instance, your proposal isn't a Word document, but rather a set of drawings, a spreadsheet of test results, and a list of links to related products. How do you route that? How do you collect comments?

Or say your project has multiple authors and multiple files. Each of these complications increases the vulnerability of the process, and improvised solutions start to break down: zipped files bounce back from mail servers, comments are lost or not archived, out-of-date drawings are included, deadlines are missed.

SharePoint helps solve all these problems using the Office system. Instead of routing the files by email, you set up a workspace for project documents on a SharePoint web site. Email alerts notify reviewers when files are available; reviewers can discuss changes online, read each other's comments, and assign tasks and deadlines—and all changes are recorded in version history.

SharePoint is a big improvement over improvised solutions, but the degree of improvement is affected by two conditions:

• SharePoint affects work processes, so you need to think about how to influence process effectively before it can help.

• SharePoint is closely tied to Office 2003; although you can use earlier Office versions or even other applications, the latest Microsoft suite provides the greatest benefit.

If you can live with those two caveats, then we can get started. Otherwise, you'd probably better put this book back on the shelf so someone else can buy it.

Tip

For a list of SharePoint features supported by Office 2000 and 2002 (XP), see Appendix B.