 Welcome. My name is Tracy Berry and I will be your instructor for SharePoint. I've been in the computer industry for 20 years and been developing web-based, data-based solutions for many of those years. And SharePoint is just the perfect example of that, so I have a lot of good advice, best practices, and tips and tricks to share with you. Getting started. In this unit, we're going to take a look at SharePoint Foundation sites, get you comfortable navigating those SharePoint sites, also making sure you're comfortable with the different components built in. SharePoint Foundation sites. In this topic, we'll take a look at some of the different features, such as navigation, also the various components that exist within SharePoint Foundation. SharePoint 2010. There are two distinct products that make up the foundation base. And these are SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, which is a more full-featured product and offers more bells and whistles and more functionality as well. Now, SharePoint Server 2010 has two versions, Standard and Enterprise. Enterprise gives you all the features that are available within the SharePoint Server environment. You can layer these products to add different features and enhance the experience of your end users. SharePoint Foundation. You use SharePoint Foundation to organize, manage, and share information. Now, storing the information in a SQL Server database makes sure that you have one central location for all content, regardless of where the individuals are when they're interacting and when they need that information, wherever they are, assuming that they're part of your secure network environment, they have access to the information. Now, multiple users can also connect in at different levels. So, I can have a user that is a reader of one portion, but yet that same user has bumped up privileges as a contributor or even an administrator of some other portion of a site. So, even though a user is logged in, they have options as well. And you may use SharePoint Foundation with their web browser, preferably IE, or Office 2010. It's greatly incorporated in between the two, and it makes it very easy to collaborate with others. SharePoint Sites. Collection and related web pages. Now, a collection is a top-level site in the sense that from central admin, your administrator must create this collection for you. Once the collection is created, it can consist of many types of templates, and those templates are made up of many web pages. Now, the tasks that can be performed, depending on the templates, are that you're able to post documents for sharing, control document versioning, also discussing topics of interest in discussion threads, creating events and announcements which are great ways to keep everybody in the loop, storing documents, images and forms. This becomes, in a sense, a content management area where we can secure, we can have versioning, as well making sure that certain individuals securely get to exactly what they need. You can create and assign tasks or to-do items. Also, contact lists. Scheduling meetings is also beneficial and helpful, utilizing some of the features such as some of the workspace templates that are available. Point hierarchy. Now, a top-level site, such as Outlander Spices, would be considered the collection level and usually someone from central admin or some other such upstream service must build this collection for you. Once you are given a collection, at that point you are in charge of its permissions, you are in charge of its ability to have sub objects as well, such as sub-sites, first-level sites like our sales, support, acquisition. If I'm in charge of sales, I have the ability to then make other second-level sub-sites, such as national sales, internet sales. You also have the ability to create sister sites, so we would consider sales, support and acquisition to be siblings, where we have national internet and technical support. These are all going to be siblings as well. So the term used by SharePoint is parent and child. So the parent-child relationship is also the backbone of the permissions, because you will have the ability as well to have inherited permissions. So whatever permissions the parent site has, naturally flow down to the child sites. Or you can have a site that has unique permissions that will break the inheritance, therefore it will not feed down. Just as unique permissions. And so the hierarchy of your site also, you typically want to keep the entire collection to this particular one, two, three structure. Because if we get the structure much deeper than this, meaning third, fourth, fifth-level sub-sites, we often run the risk of one, having a URL path that's too long, and two, it becomes very difficult to find and difficult to maintain. So try to keep a simple collection with a one, two-level site, potentially under our second-level sites, it would be okay to have a workspace, but usually not another full-fledged sub-site. Navigation tools. Now as you're navigating through in SharePoint, you have several tools available to you. You have the Navigate Up button. You have the various tabs that will be available. You will often see the Browse tab. You have the Breadcrumb Navigation. You also have a top-level navigation. Now Breadcrumb Navigation naturally happens because of the hierarchy. The top level navigation typically also feeds off of the hierarchy, but can be customized. As the left navigation bar, Quick Launch, picks up the patterns of the objects that are within a sub-site or within an area. Think of this as the local navigation, or the current navigation. And this Quick Launch bar also can have some customization practices as well to add things outside of the hierarchy within. Regardless of which technique you use, it's best to leave the top-level navigation with the primary main topics. Once you get to a main topic, the left navigation tends to then be the current changing what do we have existing in our internet, national, or trade show sites. Navigate to a SharePoint site. To navigate to a SharePoint site, you open the web browser. By doing so, you then type in the address bar the URL of your site, or paste it in if it's been copied to you in say, message body of an email through an invitation. If you're prompted, you might need to enter your username and possibly the password. Authentication is provided by Windows. However, if every install is different, so if by chance you are asked for a password, just make sure you've been given the proper credentials and then based on the security clearance that has been assigned to you, the interface will look a bit different. For example, if you're an admin, you see more features. If you're a simple reader of a site, you see fewer features. SharePoint elements. Now, elements or objects within SharePoint are our lists, libraries, views, and web parts. Now, lists and libraries are containers that hold information. A list will hold information similar to a spreadsheet type arrangement with rows and columns. Libraries are vessels or storage containers for other files such as Word, Excel, PyroPoint. Although they don't have to be Microsoft products, you may store non-Microsoft products in a library as well. Now, a view belongs to a Lister Library. And when a view belonging to a Lister Library is customized to have sorting and filtering, certain columns, certain pieces of information visible, we can use that as a reporting mechanism. Now, web parts take the best of all of these and combine them. You have the ability to have a library or a list with a default view of some sort that you can then assign to a web part. And what a web part does is it allows that particular piece of information that lists that library with that view built in to be shown on, for example, a home page. So if you have announcements and you would like those announcements to be on your home page, you would simply build a web part for the announcement that talks to the library or the list, whatever it is, in the case of an announcement, a list. And then you would optimize a view to make sure that that list is presented appropriately on that home page. And so web parts are copies or instances of the original lists and libraries with a certain view to prepare the information and share just what is needed to that specific audience on that specific web page. The ribbon Now, the ribbon allows you to change, manipulate, upload, whatever the features might be. Now, of course, we had the browse and page. These allow us to do features that will allow us to, for example, edit a page, make changes. Once we're editing a page, in the example of this ribbon, we'll have the ability to save and close any changes that we've made, cut copy paste, do an undo to just the edits, not the content we're adding, but just the edits of how we arrange items on a page. We have various formatting features that might remind you of a word processor and they are basically just that. It will allow us to add formatting to the various text elements. We also have styles, just as in the Office products you use styles, you can use styles as well within a SharePoint environment, making sure that when you have designers building pages, they are all using the same look and feel, the same syntax, et cetera. So that when I see a label that's 14 point bold and navy blue, I know that means the same thing on all sites. So we can build that into a style instead of having to build it manually. You also have an insert tab which will allow you to add items such as images, web parts, other such elements you might want to add within a page will be found in the insert area. When you're on the page ribbon and you enter into the edit mode, then and only then will this bar present itself. Once we save and close, this area will close as well and will be left with just the browse and the page again.