SharePoint 2010 at Work

Preface

Most people have heard the timeless parable of the six blind men trying to describe an elephant. Each man touches the elephant and, based upon the part of the body he touches, proceeds to give a definitive description of “an elephant.” None of the descriptions are correct, and yet they are all correct. Talking about SharePoint, even for those of us who have worked with it for years, is like a blind man describing an elephant. It is impossible, and yet we do it every day.

The NothingButSharePoint/EndUserSharePoint community site that I run has hundreds of contributors trying to describe the SharePoint elephant on a daily basis. They examine the beast from every angle, as a Developer, as an IT Pro, or as an End User, each with a different perspective and for different reasons. This book is a compilation of stories from the end user perspective, for those who must use and support SharePoint at their companies but don’t have access to the technical server side of the platform.

Background

My official title in the SharePoint Community is Mark Miller, Senior Storyteller. As such, I like to think of the articles provided to EndUserSharePoint (EUSP) as stories, not blog posts. We “publish” content each day, as opposed to “posting” content. There’s a subtle distinction. Publishing insinuates something more than a simple thought dashed off and posted in a matter of minutes. To publish means the item is meant to be read as a thoughtful narrative. It is implied that there is an idea behind the content that will be useful at multiple levels. When we publish an article on EUSP, we think of it as a story that will resonate with the SharePoint End User. Underlying the process is the premise that a story will engage readers by putting them into the narrative as participants, not as passive observers.

Each of the authors in this collection was selected because of his or her ability to tell a good story. They take the technical aspects of the narrative and weave a tale around the daily life of a SharePoint Site Administrator or the constant struggles and frustrations of a typical End User. Each author has his or her own voice and perspective, but the stories are tied together with a consistent theme: SharePoint is flexible enough to help solve real-world business problems, if you can determine the right part of the elephant to examine.

This book will be most effective for those who are looking to solve business problems through the use of SharePoint but don’t know which end of the elephant to tackle. For those who have never encountered an elephant, or SharePoint, the stories here might not be very helpful. Those who will benefit the most are those who have worked with SharePoint for a while and need to know which end of the beast to examine for the specific problem they are trying to solve. For them, the stories will become the catalyst for further investigation and discovery.

The Authors and Their Stories

The stories in this collection were chosen because of their popularity on EndUserSharePoint. Like a blind man describing an elephant, each tale takes a different view of the platform and shows how you can use SharePoint to solve real-world business problems. The solutions and concepts have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on the EndUserSharePoint site. The authors have used the feedback on those articles to refine their ideas, making them useful for the broadest spectrum of the SharePoint Community. The technical aspects of each of the stories have been updated to the SharePoint 2010 environment, but the concepts remain timeless and can be applied to any version of SharePoint 2007 or 2010.

The stories can be read in any order, but I suggest that everyone at least review Chapter 1 just to get an idea of where your SharePoint implementation sits on the maturity scale. From there, glance through the rest of the stories and see what you’d like to tackle first.

The SharePoint Maturity Model—Sadie Van Buren

If there is a single chapter in the book that will be useful for everyone, Chapter 1 is it. It helps you examine the entire elephant. Sadie has experience with over 50 SharePoint implementations and uses the knowledge she has gained to create a documented framework for evaluating where your company stands when it comes to getting the most value from SharePoint.

Empower the Power User—Kerri Abraham

For some reason, OneNote has never really received the recognition it deserves, nor has the internal SharePoint Power User. I use OneNote every day and know people like Kerri who can’t even imagine getting work done without it. Kerri’s story in this collection is one of the longer ones, but when you see the power of what she has done to create documentation and script management within OneNote and a SharePoint library, you might consider opening up your environment a little more to give real power to your internal SharePoint heroes.

jQuery to the Rescue—Jim Bob Howard

jQuery is that special sauce that makes everything go better with the presentation layer. Jim Bob gives us five solutions you can implement immediately without recourse to the server. Some of the solutions are jaw-dropping to people who didn’t think it was possible to do cool stuff in SharePoint. As Jim Bob says, “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Unlocking the Mysteries of the SharePoint Data View Web Part XSL Tags—Marc Anderson

In this story, Marc takes a core piece of what is needed to implement presentation-layer solutions with the Data View web part (DVWP) and the XSL that drives it. It’s one of those things that hardly ever gets touched, because it seems so mysterious. With the DVWP as the main character and XSL as its sidekick, this little adventure story is the beginning of a much longer tale.

Hyperlinks in the Data View Web Part—Laura Rogers

As a professional storyteller, I like to engage the audience immediately when I’m giving a talk. One of the things I can always count on is the audience knowing the answer to the question, “Who is Queen of the Data View web part?” Laura owns that space in the mind of the SharePoint community. In this update to one of her most popular articles, she demonstrates how to create hyperlinks from existing data in SharePoint.

Building a Quote of the Day Web Part in SharePoint 2010—Waldek Mastykarz

Without exception, the Quote of the Day web part is one of the most popular downloads at EndUserSharePoint. I created it in a half hour after hearing Lori Garcia tell a story about manually updating her site each day with a new quote. Waldek saw the solution and extended it to pull the quotes from a SharePoint list instead of having them embedded in the Content Editor web part.

SPJS Charts for SharePoint—Alexander Bautz

“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a cliché for a reason. Visualization of data within SharePoint is one of the most powerful and useful aspects of the platform. Unfortunately, it’s not all that easy to do. In this story, Alexander shows us a solution that any site manager or site collection administrator can implement, even without access to the SharePoint server.

Taming the Elusive Calculated Column—Logic Functions—Dessie Lunsford

Dessie’s a funny kind of guy. I met him on the SharePointU forums when I first started working with SharePoint. He likes to go four-wheeling when he’s not cranking out stories for EUSP. The calculated column is one of the most underutilized features in SharePoint, useful for displaying inline visualization within any list or library. With his series of over 40 articles on EUSP, I think I can easily crown Dessie “King of the Calculated Column.” This story is a comprehensive step-through of the logic functions available within the calculated column.

Creating Document Libraries with Mixed Content Sources—Eric Alexander

Eric is my “go-to guy” when there’s a SharePoint issue I don’t know how to handle. As a matter of fact, Eric is the go-to guy for the thousands of people who have asked questions on our Stump the Panel Forum (STP) at EUSP, since he is the lead moderator. He has taken an interesting question from the forum, how to provide mixed content in a library, and created a solution that can be used in any version of SharePoint.

SharePoint 2010 Tab Page—Peter Allen

I first met Peter when he redid a solution I had created for formatting pages in a SharePoint wiki. In the updated solution he provides here for a tab-based interface, the fun part of the story is that he actually uses the solution to describe the solution.

A Global Navigation Solution Across Site Collections—Peter Allen

In this solution, Peter utilizes the SharePoint Web Services library created by Marc Anderson to pull information from disparate locations into a single navigation system. It is one of the most requested solutions when people have expanded beyond their first site collection and realize there is no visibility between data across domains.

Summary

There you have it. Eleven stories, each with a moral that clarifies a different piece of SharePoint. There is a second parable that is apropos for SharePoint that we have used at EndUserSharePoint. It’s the one on how to eat an elephant, but we’ll leave that to another time and place.

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Using Code Examples

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Acknowledgments

It has been exciting working with the authors on this book. We are in contact daily, but it’s still a thrill and surprise to see what they come up with each morning. In addition, there are hundreds of other authors who have written for EUSP who deserve recognition for their contributions. Thank you to every author who has contributed to the site.

Marsee Henon, Ken Brown, and Rachel Roumeliotis at O’Reilly have been some of my biggest supporters over the past couple years after a chance meeting at SPTechCon in Boston. Thank you from me, and the authors, for the opportunity to publish our stories.

As Marc Anderson says in his chapter, Natasha Felshman is the engine that keeps EUSP running. It would not be in existence if not for her. Dr. Susan Zolla-Pazner allowed me to work with her team to coordinate AIDS vaccine research data for my first SharePoint project in 2006. Barbara Straw and Pat Iovanella believed in me enough to allow me to act as a SharePoint teacher and mentor in their companies. EUSP is a much more viable resource because of all of them.

My family—Rosemary, Orion, and Aurora—encourages me every day to do what I love, which is to write and tell stories. I look forward to many more years of tall tales and outright lies that keep us laughing and growing together as a family.

Mark Miller, @eusp Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com cofounder, NothingButSharePoint.com Director of Global Strategy and Senior Storyteller, Fpweb.net