Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction 1
Chapter 2: SharePoint Technology 27
Chapter 3: Hands-On Tutorials 75
Chapter 4: Best Practice Scenarios 99
Chapter 5: Hands-On Solutions 119
Chapter 6: Conclusions 167
Index 169
Introduction
Over the last few decades, it has become an ever-increasing task to manage the mountains of structured and unstructured data required to run today’s businesses. Content management systems (CMS) are the tools of choice to help businesses get their content under control. However, as firms have different claims on CMS, depending on the type of information the firm has to deal with, the type of use, and the type of provision, different available CMS are available that usually focus more or less on different tasks. For example, some CMS focus on managing and publishing content for the web, known as web content management systems (WCMS). Other systems, known as document management systems (DMS), are not concerned with publishing on the web but are specialized for structuring paper-based content within an intranet, and other CMS focus on administrating digital non-paper-based documents, known as digital asset management systems (DAMS). Other CMS, referred to as electronic records management systems (ERMS), manage business records. And, in addition, CMS exist that focus on all the previously mentioned tasks within a single system, known as enterprise content management systems (ECMS). Such systems do not follow a single methodology or idea but have the ability to support enterprises in a holistic manner, namely as a system to depict the strategic and dynamic process inside enterprises.
The CMS Microsoft SharePoint Server (usually abbreviated as SharePoint) focused, with its first releases in 2001 and 2003, on managing documents inside a collaborative environment. However, since the release in 2007, it became a true ECMS, with permanent development and improvements coming with the subsequent releases in 2010, 2013, and 2016. Despite these, however, at the management level, the opportunities as well as limits of SharePoint are often unknown, as a concrete use case of the available features and functionalities overwhelmed by the complexity of this all-around solution, as the palette of functionalities and possibilities is too extensive. For example, the provided site collection templates include overlapping functionalities that make the right choice challenging. The same holds true for the different site collection templates included with applications. In addition, the customizing of SharePoint is often error-prone and time-consuming, as the inheritance of diverse settings is unknown, or the activation of settings that are required to allow customization is missing. In the end, this leads to dissatisfaction and, in the worst case, results in a rejection of the system on two fronts. First, managers who have decided to use SharePoint reject the system, as they do not see its benefits. Second, end users who must employ the system daily are dissatisfied, as the ECMS does not simplify their jobs if the possibilities and limits are unknown, or the system is not in a shape to effectively support daily tasks. To overcome these challenges, this book provides a hands-on introduction to this leading ECMS. As such, it explains SharePoint—more precisely, its most recent release, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2016—from the perspective of how it can concretely help enterprises in specific, but also general, use cases. In addition, it details, with more focus on management and strategic development, how to impart the possibilities of SharePoint to users, instead of focusing on users with programming skills, as provided in the very comprehensive books introduced by Tony Smith1 and Olga M. Londer.2 With the help of understandable tutorials, best practices, and solutions, this book provides transparency regarding what is available but, in turn, the most fitting technologies for a specific business goal, such as managing content for the web, structuring documents, administrating records, and managing assets. Moreover, the different chapters include guidelines for overlapping tasks, such as project management, improving collaboration, managing metadata, access level, etc. With this in mind, the book focuses on four types of practitioners and scholars across domains, as follows:
• Managers/Consultants, who decide which CMS will be used to increase the manageability of content in small, medium, and large enterprises. After reading this book, managers and consultants will be able to understand how and where SharePoint can help improve companies’ success.
• Final users, who use SharePoint for daily business, e.g., users who work together on projects or those who are responsible for editing content. With the help of this book, users of SharePoint will be able to better understand what to do within SharePoint and how to more effectively deal with this ECMS.
• Site administrators, who are responsible to customize SharePoint to improve usability and user experience. This type of audience will be able to understand the core elements and applications inside and outside SharePoint used for customizing, and how to improve the sites’ functionalities, as well as functionalities of the included applications, libraries, pages, web/template parts, etc.
• Scholars/Students, who teach or study the basics of CMS in undergraduate and postgraduate courses with a focus on applied science. Teachers will be able to better explain the use of SharePoint as a collaboration and management platform and, consequently, students will be able to more quickly understand what a CMS provides.
The remainder of the book is organized as follows. In this chapter, an introduction to CMS is given. The scope of CMS is detailed and the differences between the various types of CMS are explained. This includes the differences from a functional perspective (DMS, WCMS, DAMS, ERMS, and ECMS) but also from a license perspective (proprietary vs. open source), as well as from an operative perspective (on-premise vs. cloud computing). The second chapter elaborates ECMS SharePoint by giving details about its basic technology and the features and ideas of the provided templates (site collection, applications).
Hands-on tutorials are presented in the third chapter, in which the underlying technology and templates to be used are covered in detail. These tutorials are divided into different use cases having different level of complexity. Through
this, use cases for end users, but also use cases for site or site collection administrators are included. Best practice scenarios are presented in the fourth chapter. These include case studies, governance, and tools to improve the usability, manageability, and the look and feel of SharePoint. Solutions for the hands-on tutorials are presented in the fifth chapter. In the sixth chapter, the book finally concludes.
Content management is the process of preparing and processing information, whereby a content management system is a software application to support its collaborative management.3 CMS are used in business to manage documents, simplify web content publishing, enable business transaction traceability, and provide libraries for managing digital assets. First, this chapter presents CMS from a logical perspective. Afterward, the differences between the various functions of different types of CMS are explained.
