SharePoint is an incredibly powerful platform that can support a wide variety of business scenarios. In many cases it needs to be configured or extended in order to deliver fully featured business solutions.

While some books merely talk about the capabilities of SharePoint in general and leave you to figure out how they apply to your situation, this book takes a different approach. Each chapter provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step instructions along with screenshots to help build exciting SharePoint business solutions that extend the platform. By the end of this book the reader will be a SharePoint developer to be reckoned with.

This book will dive into a diverse set of real-world scenarios to deliver sample business solutions that can serve as the foundation for your own solutions. This book draws from the author's extensive experience with SharePoint to leverage the platforms underlying services to provide solutions that can support Social Collaboration, Content and Document Management, as well as project collaboration. Each chapter represents a new business solution that builds on the overall platform to deliver more complex solutions and more advanced techniques. By the end of the book the reader will understand how to leverage the SharePoint platform to build their own business solutions.

What will you learn from this book

• An Effective Intranet Site for your organization that maximizes the site's ability to aggregate content and is highly effective at communicating important messages
• A Workflow Out of Office Solution that allows users to manage their out of office dates and automate task assignments to a delegated resource
• A Company Forms Site with the definition of form content types and organizing the forms into a usable interface
• An Engaging Community Site including custom features that can be used to enhance collaboration and provide an information sharing system
• A Site Request and Provisioning System to help governance and compliance activities
• A Project Site Template to support project initiatives and track Issues, Tasks, and Contacts
• A Project Management Main Site that can aggregate the key metrics and status information from the project management sites previously created
• A Task Rollup solution that can aggregate tasks from the specified sites
• A dynamic Site Directory solution that leverages Search

Approach

The hands-on example solutions in this book are based on fictitious business development briefs, and they illustrate practical ways of using SharePoint in various business scenarios.

A chapter is dedicated to each example SharePoint solution covering step-by-step instructions for building the SharePoint solutions, aided by the extensive use of screenshots.

Who this book is written for

This book is for SharePoint developers, consultants, and administrators who want to build a range of SharePoint solutions that extend the SharePoint platform, and see how to apply the many available SharePoint features in different scenarios.