How This Book Is Organized

I began my technical career training professional developers in Visual Basic 3.0. As a result, my writing style and chapter organization reflect a training class. Each chapter in the book begins with an explanation of the appropriate foundational concepts followed by practical exercises to reinforce the explanation. A brief description of each chapter follows.

• Chapter 1, SharePoint Business Solutions: This chapter is an overview of SPS and the Office System from a business perspective.

• Chapter 2, SharePoint Products and Technologies Overview: This chapter is an overview of SPS and the Office System from a technical perspective, and it contains the detailed instructions necessary to set up the development environment for this book. All of the exercises in the book assume the environment established in this chapter.

• Chapter 3, SharePoint Portal Server Basics: This chapter is a detailed look at SPS features and functions and contains detailed instructions on setting up the basic portal.

• Chapter 4, SharePoint Content Development: This chapter examines the different ways to create content for SPS that do not explicitly require programming.

• Chapter 5, Building Web Parts: This chapter thoroughly investigates the web part life cycle and all the steps necessary to create web parts for SPS.

• Chapter 6, The Microsoft Single Sign-On Service: This chapter covers the single sign-on capabilities of SPS and how to use them in web part development.

• Chapter 7, Advanced Web Part Development: This chapter examines all of the advanced web part concepts. These include the processes of implementing interfaces for web part interoperability, custom web part properties, and client-side web parts.

• Chapter 8, The Microsoft Office System: This chapter focuses on development for Microsoft Office products. In particular, the chapter covers Smart Documents and custom Research Services.

• Chapter 9, Programming SharePoint Services: This chapter focuses on programming SharePoint Services through the .NET API. Readers will create a custom workflow engine and create several web parts to overcome limitations found in SharePoint Services.

• Chapter 10, SharePoint Portal Server Administration: This chapter presents the basic administration tools associated with SPS.

• Chapter 11, Office Solution Accelerators: This chapter examines two of the available accelerators for the Office System. Accelerators are solution foundations available as a free download from Microsoft. This chapter examines the proposal and recruiting accelerators.