SharePoint Server 2007 Revealed

Let's continue our journey into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to gain an understanding of its new features and capabilities. In "SharePoint Server 2007 Unleashed," InstantDoc ID 94652, I covered seven "experiences" that I designed to introduce you to SharePoint Server 2007 functionality. Now let's look at eight more experiences (including one that repeats a lesson from last time), which will help you become familiar with SharePoint Server 2007 sites, lists, and libraries, as well as SharePoint workflow, forms, and business intelligence.

Experience 8:
Content Management
SharePoint content management lets you control when, by whom, and how content gets published to an intranet or Internet site. We'll use SharePoint's default News site to look at some of the fundamentals of content management in SharePoint. Because this experience is browser based, you don't need any Microsoft Office 2007 applications for it.

Go to the News tab in the top link bar, then click News, Sample News Article. We'll begin by modifying this existing sample article, then we'll create a new article. Click the Site Actions button on the upper right side and choose Edit Page.

You'll see the page change into Edit mode, which Figure 1 shows, which displays the Page Editing toolbar. You can use the toolbar controls to change the content of this article. You'll see labels for content components, such as Page Image, Article Date, Byline, Content, Image Caption, and Rollup Image, which appear as a result of the specific page layout that was chosen. Notice that when you edit a content component, you use a rich, Microsoft Office Word–like WYSIWYG editor that you can configure to include features you want. Besides editing, you can format text, embed pictures, and create tables. You'll learn more about page layouts in a moment, but for now, change the title, date, byline, and content. The layout itself will look much better when the article is not in Edit mode, and you can choose Preview In New Window from the Tools menu to see that.

When you're finished, click the Publish button to make the edited page visible to users. Pages can be submitted as drafts by clicking Check In To Share Draft, in which case the page becomes a minor, or "dot" version (e.g., version 0.1 or 1.3). Draft versions aren't visible to all site users. When a page is approved and published, it becomes a major version (e.g., 1.0 or 2.0). You can configure who is allowed to view drafts and workflows to determine who can approve a submitted draft. You'll learn more about workflows in a later experience.

Now let's create a new page. Click Site Actions, Create Page. Give the page a title (I chose "More Good News") and a URL (I used moregoodnews). Then select a page layout. The page layout you select determines the content components of the page. The page we edited earlier was the Article page with image on left layout. Click Create and the page will be created and put immediately into Edit mode. Create some content for your article and click Publish to publish it. Page layouts can be completely customized by using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.

Experience 9:
Content Queries and roll Ups
SharePoint Server lets you query content from one site or across multiple sites and "roll it up" for display in one place. Go to the News home page. Click Site Actions and choose Edit Page. You use the same command that we used to modify the article to modify Web part pages such as at each site's home page. In Edit mode, you can see the three Web parts that make up the News site. In Figure 2, the Web parts appear in the main section of the window, each in their own box below an Add a Web Part heading.

Click the edit button on the Recent News Web part, and choose Modify Web Part. As Figure 2 shows, a panel will open on the right of the screen to show the Web part's properties. In our example, this Web part is, in fact, a Content Query Tool Part, one of the Web parts installed by SharePoint Server 2007. The Recent News Web part queries all news articles and, importantly, sorts them in descending order of date modified and limits display to only one item. In this way, the "headline" on the page will always show the most recently published News page.

The News Roll Up Web part is also a Content Query Tool Part. You can configure this Web part to sort news articles by such variables as date created or date modified, and to display news articles in ascending or descending order. You can also configure how many articles to display.

Experience 10:
RSS Aggregation
Although you can use an external feed reader to subscribe to a SharePoint library or list, Windows SharePoint Services includes an RSS Viewer Web part, which you can insert in any Web part page.

On the News home page, click Site Actions, Edit Page. Click the edit button on the RSS Viewer Web part and choose Modify Web Part. In the RSS Viewer Web part properties panel, expand the RSS Properties section and enter an RSS feed URL. I used http://blogs.msdn.com/ sharepoint/rss.xml, which is the Microsoft SharePoint team's blog. Click OK, then click Publish. You should see an RSS aggregation on your SharePoint page.

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