First post on SharePoint, so "How to start with SharePoint?"
Hello,
Here we are. The idea to share the knowledge gathered through projects, customers, and fun questions imagined to push SharePoint to its deeps roots, was here for weeks. My tema and I came to the idea that blogging could benefit the community on how we helped adoption and solution design of SharePoint.
Let's start, willing these resources and experiences will help.
Starting with SharePoint
Using good starting points:
As customers often underlines, infos on SharePoint are abondant but spread through the Web, and they are right :-). Nevertheless the efforts from the Product Group, the product is that huge and powerful that it will always be (quite hopefully).
To help them, I point them on "starting references". These hooks help them to go up in speed with SharePoint.
The first References I point them to are Technet and MSDN:
- Starting points on Technet could be:
- Starting point on MSDN could be:
Then, I show the SDKs (standing for Software Develoment Kit) of WSS v3 and MOSS 2007. They are oriented on development, but can help understanding how SharePoint's built.
They are available here : SDK WSS v3 and here : SDK MOSS 2007.
Offline releases are there : MOSS 2007 SDK download and : WSS v3 SDK download.
Now infos flow begins.
Then come the project and THE solution:
SharePoint help building solutions. Once said, it's needed to realize it means "project" and "(design) choices".
For project aspects, a close look to the "Planning" section of Technet (here : Planning and Architecture of SharePoint Server 2007 ) will help a lot. Then a look to the project template Joel published is highly valuable : Office SharePoint Server Deployment Plan sample.
There's now a good idea on how to lead the project.
Building the solution, decisions will happen. This link helps to choose how to customize SharePoint : SharePoint Customization Best Practices (beware some customizations are not supported by Microsoft)
And solve everyday questions:
To get control on SharePoint and have it realizing the project vision, the team will need support, and feedbacks to work on the different items. Especially if they start with the technology.
The good way to work these, is to search the Web. "What's the web answer?" is a sentence I often hear when development questions are raised. I do it myself a lot, even if caution is necessary when using this source.
To help on this, I attached an OPML file listing quite a lot of the main Blogs on SharePoint that can help any team. Most of these (readable through RSS feeds) are in English.
Here's how I help customers starting with MOSS/WSS. Of course, nothing's definitive or "a must" in this description. A lot of aspects and resources are missing. That's why Blog will help : feel free to add through the comments.
I decided not to cover performance/scalability, topology or hardware subjects. This is already too detailed for the aim.
Now, to finish, here's my last link : some customers asked what was SharePoint and what could hey benefit with this technology in their project.
It's always surprising but decision makers (often) are not the project makers.
After the surprise, I send them here : SharePoint Server 2007 Reference Page
Enjoy the product and start well.
<Emmanuel />