Before I came to SoftArtisans, I’d never heard of SharePoint. (You can gasp here or save it for later in the post.) As is my wont, I began using it without ever reading any documentation or general how-it-works-for-essentially-tech-illiterate-fools-type information. Which, in terms of doing most of what I need to do (uploading docs to libraries and writing blog posts on my My Site), is not the worst strategy, but it left a lot of gaps. So, with Ben’s encouragement, I recently began a comprehensive SharePoint-for-the-End-User curriculum. And, to my surprise and chagrin, found that there really isn’t one. Don’t get me wrong, End User SharePoint is an amazing resource—but I’d say it’s more tailored to post-bacs. Microsoft used to have a series of training videos, but they seem to be down at the moment, and their getting started articles are pretty skimpy early on and fragmented after the ABCs. So, like any great innovator (if you’ve been holding in that gasp, you can let it out now), I decided to create my own guide. Welcome to part one of many: What SharePoint does for me and which of its parts I will use.

Ze Main Capability Buckets

• Collaboration/Social computing: Work on and share information with yo coworkers via mysites and workspaces.
• Enterprise Content Management: A good ole CMS that can hold multiple or single sites. On the editorial side, you can create, store, and manage documents. On the admin site, you can set workflows, permissions, expiration policies, holds and audit trails.
• Search: A smart search that returns results both based on their tags and on your previous searches and site activity.
• Business intelligence: Essentially this is taking loads of data and putting it into a format that n00bs like me can read. There are two main components to SP’s BI story:
  • Excel Services: Publish, share, manage Excel workbooks on SharePoint. (Marketing site note: Or you can use OfficeWriter.)
  • PerformancePoint Services: Create interactive dashboards with scorecards, reports and filters. Add charts to SharePoint sites and connect them to data from SharePoint lists, external data lists, BDC, Excel Services etc.
• Business Process: Set up workflows to manage project approval and document reviews.

All the Bits fit to Eat

And by “eat,” I mean “use if you’re an end user.” SharePoint really brings out my humorous side, if you haven’t noticed. You’re welcome.

• Site Collections: These are the grand poo-bahs of your company’s SharePoint. They contain all the sites and subsites and my sites and libraries and lists etc. There are two types of site collections: portals, which use a home hub as the top level site and areas as sites, and channel hierarchies, which use a root channel as the top level site and sub-channels as subsites.
• Sites: You know how websites tend to have a particular focus. Well, so do SharePoint sites. Some sites are built to hold a specific type of content (document centers, document workspaces, publishing sites, wikis), some are built for a specific function (meeting workspaces) and some are built for a specific group (team sites, group work sites). If you don’t like any of these pre-baked site types, you can build your own from scratch.
• My Sites: Very very terribly unoriginal and awkward name, but it gets the point across. A My Site is a user’s individual hub, and by default it holds a profile page and a blog. You can add loads of other web parts if you so choose. For more on web parts, see below.
• Lists: Gah. A list is a list, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. In SharePoint, you can create task lists that track work assignments, track team events on a calendar, conduct a survey or host heated discussions on a discussion board. Lists can be housed on their own web part pages, or they can be integrated into sites.
• Libraries: Libraries are lists that store files and information about files. This information is called metadata.
• Views: You know how, in google search, you type in “lobsters” and then if you’re like me, you fine tune the results. I want to see all news in the past 24 hours about lobsters. Well that is essentially what a configuring a view lets you do with a SharePoint site’s content.
• Web parts: Continuing on the analogy train, web parts are like morphemes, ie they are the smallest stand-alone presentable component of SharePoint. If you want to add some bit of functionality, eg a calendar to a meeting workspace, you would add it in a web part. You can also make web part pages, which are pages comprised of one or more web part.

Stand by for part two, wherein I will tell you how to use the above bits!

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