SharePoint For Dummies. Rosemarie Withee

also be responsible for a site for a small team, in which case they are site administrators. As you can see, a user can play many different roles.

       SharePoint power users: Power users are not only familiar with the main SharePoint features and functionality but also dive deeper. Power users might be familiar with the functionality differences of different features, routing documents using workflows, and building site hierarchies. Power users might also be a site collection administrator and thus responsible for a collection of sites.

       SharePoint technical administrators: Technical administrators are people from the IT department who are responsible for SharePoint. Technical administrators are less concerned with using SharePoint for business and more concerned about making sure the platform is available and responsive. An administrator might play many different roles. For example, farm administrators are responsible for all the servers that make up SharePoint, such as web front end servers, applications servers, and database servers. Specialized database administrators focus just on the database components. There are even administrative roles for specific services, such as the search service or user profile service. Depending on the size of the SharePoint implementation, these technical administrator roles might be filled by a single overworked individual or a team with highly specialized skills.

      More than a website

      SharePoint is called a web platform, as opposed to just a website, because of the sheer amount of functionality and capabilities it includes. In fact, if you already administer a SharePoint website, you can easily create a new website right within the existing website. You can also develop websites with an extraordinary amount of functionality without writing a single line of code. The result is a platform for websites instead of just a single website. The multitude of features and the complexity of the product are what lead to confusion.

      

The terms SharePoint website and SharePoint site can be used interchangeably. Both terms mean a website that is powered by SharePoint. Because this book is all about SharePoint, we sometimes abbreviate these terms to just site.

      One thing that makes SharePoint so special is that you don’t need to be a computer genius or even a power user to be a website developer and administrator in SharePoint. You just need to be comfortable using a computer.

      

The terms website and web application are often used interchangeably. In the deep, dark technical world of SharePoint administration, the term web application has a very specific meaning. A web application is a technical construct, and each web application has its own databases associated with it. If you create two SharePoint web applications, they store their content and configuration information in different databases. As with technology these days, a simple word can have different meanings, depending on the context of the conversation.

      THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND SHAREPOINT

      SharePoint has some similarities with social media services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but differs from them in its intended use. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are designed for consumers as a whole, whereas SharePoint is designed for individual organizations.

SharePoint has many of the social and profile features of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but these features are only available to people within your organization. In other words, only the people in your organization can use the features of SharePoint. Although SharePoint includes social and profile features, it also includes much, much more. Think of SharePoint as a product for business and productivity that also happens to have the social and profile features of sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Taking a Peek at a SharePoint Site

The primary purpose of SharePoint is to provide websites to members of an organization or employees of a company. When you create a website, you select which type of template you want to use to create the site. The dialog box shown in Figure 1-9 shows the different templates available.

      FIGURE 1-9: The dialog box used to select a website template when creating a SharePoint site.

      

The templates you have available depend on where you are creating your SharePoint site and what features have been activated for your SharePoint environment. For example, in SharePoint Online, a tab for Duet Enterprise appears, and if the publishing feature is active, you will see Publishing. If you are looking for a template that doesn’t appear in the list of templates, you will need to figure out which SharePoint feature makes the template available. SharePoint features are explored in more detail in Chapter 18. In general, Microsoft is moving to simplify SharePoint. One way it is doing this is by making it easy to create a Team or Communication site, which means you would need to hunt a bit to find the other templates. (We cover this in Chapter 18.)

      The template tells SharePoint which features and functionality should be included on the site. Keep in mind that you can always add more features and add and remove features as you decide to make your site more specific for your needs.

One of the most common SharePoint site templates is called the Team site template (the template you used at the beginning of this chapter). The Team site template includes features such as a discussion board, a library to store documents, and a calendar. In fact, many books simply talk about the Team site template and call that SharePoint. As you learn in this book, the Team site template is very important, but it is just another SharePoint website template. Part 3 explores building and customizing a site based on the Team site template.

      TECHNICAL DIVE INTO THE SHAREPOINT BUILDING BLOCKS

      To obtain a perspective on SharePoint, it is important to understand how SharePoint is put together. As mentioned in this chapter, SharePoint is a web-based platform. A number of technologies are required in order to make the platform available. Each technology builds on the one below it. In this manner, it is common to call the whole ball of wax a technology stack.

      The SharePoint technology stack begins with server computers running the Microsoft Windows Server operating system. On top of Windows Server are some additional technologies required by SharePoint. In particular, SharePoint needs a database and a web server — Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), respectively. In addition, SharePoint also needs Active Directory, which manages the servers in the domain. Only when this entire stack of technology is available can you install SharePoint, as shown in the figure.

SharePoint will only work with the Microsoft stack of supporting technologies. For example, you cannot swap in an Oracle database or the open source Apache web server. SharePoint would simply refuse to install and might ask you what the heck you are trying to do using a non-Microsoft product to install SharePoint.

Getting Familiar with SharePoint Terminology

      You should add a number of terms to your SharePoint vocabulary. Some terms are made up by Microsoft marketing, some are industry standards, and others are buzzwords that have grown to have various meanings depending