Basic and start up information for SharePoint

What is the purpose of having a SharePoint site?

Collaboration at the speed of business...

Combined with Webtrix Web Hosting services, Windows SharePoint Services allow your company to quickly share information and manage documents to increase your individual and team productivity. Webtrix provides high-quality SharePoint hosting for your business allowing users to collaborate on documents, tasks, contacts, events, and other information.

With Webtrix SharePoint Hosting services, your business can be up and running on this powerful collaboration technology without the hassle and expense of server hardware.

Some of the key benefits of SharePoint Services include:

Team Community: SharePoint sites provide places to capture and share ideas, information, communication, and documents. The sites facilitate team participation in discussions, shared document collaboration, and surveys. Site content is accessible from both a Web browser and through clients that support Web Services. The document collaboration features allow for easy check in, check out and document version control.

Individual Empowerment and Management: SharePoint site members can find and communicate with key contacts and experts, both by e-mail and with instant messaging. Site content can be easily searched, and users can also receive alerts to tell them when existing documents and information has been changed, or when new information or documents have been added. Site content and layout can be personalized on a per-user basis and Web Parts can be used to present targeted information to specific users on precise topics.

Introducing the features of a SharePoint site

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA011425981033.aspx

Getting started: Take a tour of your SharePoint site

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA011404991033.aspx?pid=CH010963501033

Customizing a SharePoint site in your Web browser, Part 1

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA011228651033.aspx?pid=CH011424561033

Customizing a SharePoint site in your Web browser, Part 2

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA011275871033.aspx?pid=CH011424561033

Introduction to workflows

Across your enterprise, teams use Microsoft SharePoint sites to collaborate on documents and share information. You want to build a SharePoint application that improves team productivity and efficiency, but you don’t want to write code. Where do you start?

With Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can design workflows that add no-code application logic to your SharePoint sites and applications. Using the Workflow Designer, you create rules that associate conditions and actions with items in SharePoint lists and libraries. Changes to items in lists or libraries trigger actions in the workflow.

For example, suppose that a team's primary responsibilities are writing, revising, and approving contracts. These contracts are stored in document libraries on the team site. With Office SharePoint Designer 2007, you can create a workflow that sends a notification e-mail message to the reviewer when a new contract has been uploaded to the site. At the same time, the workflow creates a task in the Tasks list for the reviewer. When that person reviews the contract and marks the task as complete, different actions are triggered depending on whether the contract is assigned a status of Approved or Rejected.

Team efficiency and productivity improve because the workflow drives the process so that the team can focus on doing the work, rather than on managing the workflow. And no programming is required to build such a solution. By creating rules in the Workflow Designer, you can quickly add interactivity to a SharePoint solution or application.

This article introduces the basics of workflows. When you understand the basic building blocks of a workflow — events, actions, conditions, and steps — you can quickly add application logic to your SharePoint applications.

Important To create a workflow, your SharePoint site must be located on a server running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

In this article

1. What is a workflow?

2. What are events, actions, conditions, and steps?

· What are events?

· What are actions?

· What are conditions?

· Parallel vs. serial actions

· What are steps?

3. What are workflow forms?

4. Where are workflows stored?

5. Where can I check the status of a workflow?

For more information please download below document

Don’t Change the World, try to adjust yourself

Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled a prosperous country. One day, he went for a trip to some distant areas of his country.

When he was back to his palace, he complained that his feet were very painful, because it was the first time that he went for such a long trip, and the road that he went through was very rough and stony. He then ordered his people to cover every road of the entire country with leather. Definitely, this would need thousands of cows’ skin, and would cost a huge amount of money.

Then one of his wise servant dared himself to tell the king, “Why do you have to spend that unnecessary amount of money ? Why don’t you just cut a little piece of leather to cover your feet?”

The king was surprised, but he later agreed to his suggestion, to make a “shoe” for himself.

There is actually a valuable lesson of life in this story: to make this world a happy place to live, you better change yourself - your heart; and not the world.

Difference between asp.net server controls and html server controls

Advantages:

1. ASP .NET Server Controls can detect the target browser’s capabilities and render themselves accordingly. No issues for compatibility issues of Browsers i.e page that might be used by both HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 browsers code is written in the Server Controls.

2. Newer set of controls that can be used in the same manner as any HTML control like Calender controls. Without any need of Activex Control without bringing up issues of Browser compatibility).

3. Processing would be done at the server side. In built functionality to check for few values(with Validation controls) so no need to choose between scripting language which would be incompatible with few browsers.

4. ASP .NET Server Controls have an object model different from the traditional HTML and even provide a set of properties and methods that can change the outlook and behavior of the controls.

5. ASP .NET Server Controls have higher level of abstraction. An output of an ASP .NET server control can be the result of many HTML tags that combine together to produce that control and its events. Example Gridview or Form control.

Disadvantages:

1. The control of the code is inbuilt with the web server controls so you have no much of direct control on these controls

HTML Server Controls

Advantages:

1. The HTML Server Controls follow the HTML-centric object model. Model similar to HTML

2. Here the controls can be made to interact with Client side scripting. Processing would be done at client as well as server depending on your code.

5. A HTML Server Control has similar abstraction with its corresponding HTML tag and offers no abstraction.

Disadvantages:

1. You would need to code for the browser compatibility.

2. The HTML Server Controls have no mechanism of identifying the capabilities of the client browser accessing the current page.

How to make Productive in Project Meetings?

• Every meeting MUST have 3 elements: purpose, agenda and maximum duration. If any of these items is missing, the meeting is meaningless and should not happen.
• Make sure you are able to define a purpose for the meeting in a maximum of 2 sentences, for instance:”This meeting is to plan the new developments for the project X”. This way, everyone will know why they are there, what needs to be done and how to proceed in order to well-succeed.
• Define a clear agenda in advance. Make a list of all the items to be discussed, revised, analyzed, displayed etc. When I conduct meetings, my personal strategy is to allocate a time limit for each item in the agenda and to assign the responsibility to lead the discussion to someone in the group. Works as a charm.
• Define duration for the meeting, how many minutes/hours it should last. From the start make crystal clear to everyone what time the meeting will start and, sometimes more importantly, when it will end. It is amazing the number of managers who have absolutely no control of their meetings and do not know how to enforce the finishing rule. If you think you have this habit…CHANGE THIS !!!
• Do not wait for the delayed people. Meetings must start on the agreeded time. Do not wait about late arrivals. Do not wait for those who need to be called for the meeting. You just make sure everyone gets notified, then when someone arrives after the meeting have started, DO NOT STOP TO REVIEW WHAT WAS SAID. Do this as a proof of respect to those who arrived on time.
• If the meeting’s organizer is late, Consider the meeting cancelled, and get back to work. How long is considered late? Depends on the company, but I would not wait more than 5 minutes.
• Document your meeting. What I do is to put someone in charge of writing down the notes. What to put in the meeting notes? Basically the name of the attendants, the discussed subject, the agreed points, the next developments and/or actions with dates and their respective responsible.
• When the meeting is over - do not wait more than 24 hours - the meeting notes must be sent to: All the participants, to those who could not make it to the meeting and to those who might be influenced by upcoming decisions.
• Keep the focus. Every meeting must have a regulator to notify the others when someone is discussing any subject outside the scope of the current topic. Ask one of the presents to volunteer for this task when the meeting is about to start. His/her task is to interrupt the meeting at any given time when the focus is lost and bring back the main subject. This new outside topic can maybe then be noted and even can be discussed in future meetings. In case of doubt regarding a specific topic being in or outside the scope, the meeting organizer has the final word.