By ,
August 05, 2011 - 7:27 PM
Every week seems to have a theme. Last week it was OCR in the cloud, this week it is how to get started with SharePoint. Four of my @CloudShare peers, and two Industry peers asked me this week “Chris, I want to learn SharePoint where do I begin?” My first response was a blank face, like I did not even know what SharePoint was. But I got better with my responses the more I was asked. Why was this question so difficult to answer?
The reason is, it’s not easy to “begin” with SharePoint. The sheer power of the platform makes it something you can’t just roll up your sleeves and dive into. Conventional wisdom would say the proper answer to this question should have been:
“Ask an expert” or
“Google it …. Oops I mean Bing it, sorry SharePoint gods” or
“Watch this video” or
“Read this article”
These are ALL wrong. As a matter of fact the second part to the question was almost always “do you know a good resource to get started?” again the answer was almost universally, NO! The reason is, if you took these traditional approaches to getting information, you would end up in the SharePoint technology weeds very quickly.
Here is a better approach. First, understand what SharePoint is, it’s a platform. Meaning for the most part it’s a bag of features that does not do much until you form it into what you want. Like my favorite box of Legos that I want to become an airplane. This is what my SharePoint looks like:
The very first thing to do is understand on the key lingo:
Farm: Top most Physical and Logical structure of SharePoint. Farms contain servers.
Central Administration: Is a SharePoint application written by Microsoft to manage SharePoint J. That is the cool thing about SharePoint, architecturally it uses itself. Farm administrations will use Central Administration to setup the platform and distribute it as a service to the organization.
Service Applications: More features either provided by Microsoft or third party vendor. They are enabled at a farm level. The benefit of service applications over features is they can be syndicated across farms and more powerful.
Web Application: This is the thing that makes SharePoint sites work in a browser. This is also your nice naming convention for site collections like \\Extranet or http://www.mydomain.com/mysharepointstuff.
Site Collection: This is the top most content container and security envelop. Usually site collections are divided by business use cases, for example Extranet, Intranet, ECM, BPM, Internet, BI, Search, etc.
Sites: Site collections contain sites, this is the next container level that can have its own security, but should be the deepest administration point of security. Sites can even have sub-sites.
Features: More features, and sometimes hard to distinguish from service applications. These are usually enabled on a site collection or site level, but can even be a farm feature. Again some are provided out of the box by Microsoft and others by ISVs.
Libraries: This is where the meat is. Libraries are what hold your documents; this is where most end-users interact with SharePoint. Libraries contain the content of your documents, the organization of your documents, and their meta-data. Libraries can also be setup to contain unique views to help organize content.
Lists: List are exactly like libraries (technically vice versa), except they contain list items not documents. You know those things that we have way too many of. I’m going on three to-do lists, but a better example is phone lists, agreement lists, contact lists etc. There are also special types of lists like Calendar, and Task list.
Content Types: Content types are the containers of meta-data (data about data) and align with either a document in a library or list item in a list.
SharePoint community, like all technology communities, likes to speak in their native tongue. There are other SharePoint specific terms, but this is a good start to understanding the rest. Just think of them as different types of Lego blocks. Put in the right order, you have something cool! A SharePoint solution is some combination of all of the above. For example a project site will have a task list, a members list, a document library, maybe even an asset library, all in a single site.
So now that you have some words down, decide what you want to make out of the Legos.
Have an end result in mind, “I want to see how SharePoint is as an ECM solution” is of course what you are probably thinking. Well if you want to use SharePoint for ECM, of course I’m the best resource, and you should check out this slide deck http://www.slideshare.net/rileybeebs/sharepoint-meet-ecm-for-spsla . Just kidding. But you can start spotting the experts like John Holliday (@JHolliday) and Chris Mcnulty (@cmcnulty2000) for ECM and Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet) for migration, all of whom you will find here. You can also start spotting the right resources by searching for “SharePoint ECM” or “SharePoint Records Management”. The more specific the better like, “SharePoint Managed Meta-data” the service application used to build taxonomies in SharePoint or “SharePoint Information Architecture” which is the chief task required to form SharePoint into an ECM solution.
The point is, know clearly what you want SharePoint to be, or what your curiosity is. Then go down the path of finding the resources for it. Really there is no better way to learn SharePoint, then to dig in and use it. Getting your hands on a sample SharePoint Farm or templates is a great place to start kicking the tires (see below for a way to get started). Whatever farm you play with, make sure it’s a playground where you can mess up and “fail fast”.
To begin with SharePoint, forget about the platform and focus on a solution. The next time I am asked “Chris, where do I start”, the answer will be this blog post of course (Ahh there is the hidden motive).
----------------
Want to try SharePoint? I have setup 26 of the Microsoft Fab 40 templates to play with. Here is how to do it.
1.) Go Here http://use.cloudshare.com/Pro/ShareEnv/KP97DZ5RC4NG
2.) Register for a free account
3.) Once done click “View Environment”
4.) The SharePoint farm will boot up – be patient about 5 minutes
5.) Click “View Machine”
6.) You’re done. You are now logged into a Single Server SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition farm. On this farm are pre-installed SharePoint templates for sample use cases like “Board of Directors” and “HR onboarding”. You can click on which ever template you want, and start playing with the application. Have fun!
Rate Post
You need to log in to rate blog posts.
Click here to login.
Type the code shown below to submit your report
This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
