Course USPPS
Building Solutions for Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Products and Technologies

Course USPPS: Five days; Instructor-Led

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Introduction

With the Microsoft SharePoint 2003 Products and Technologies, you can set up a collaboration and communication infrastructure for the information workers within your company or for your customers. It starts with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and continues with the SharePoint Portal Server 2003 product. Tight integration with the Microsoft Office 2003 System is accomplished and certainly, the new product Microsoft InfoPath is worth looking at. There is a lot of out-of-the box functionality that gets you started immediately. However, often there is the need to customize, extend and build upon the existing infrastructure. This 5- day workshop is all about this: looking at the development aspects of this new family of SharePoint products and technologies.

Topics that will covered: Overview of Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) and SharePoint Portal Server v2. Setting up your development machine with portal and team sites. Administration and Configuration you need to know about. Security within the SharePoint Framework. Working with Web Parts. Building Web Parts (the official and the non-official documentation using the technique of the ASP.NET user controls). Connecting Web Parts. Packaging and Deploying Web Parts. Document Management within SharePoint. Work-Flow solutions using document library events. Personalization within the portal with user profiles and audiences. Accessing the SharePoint content using the WSS and SPS managed classes within .NET. Consuming the SharePoint Web Services. Searching in WSS and SPS. Extending the SharePoint Portal Search. Customizing SharePoint portal and team sites using FrontPage 2003. Creating Web parts using the DataView Web part in FrontPage 2003. Creation of site definitions and custom site and list templates.

Audience

This course has been created for .NET developers. Students should have a good knowledge of one of the .NET languages and of ASP.NET.
Remark: The course is focusing on development issues of SharePoint and not on infrastructural and administrative tasks.

U2U organizes SharePoint 2003 Development Courses since Augustus 2003            Patrick Tisseghem, trainer and also team lead of the SharePoint and Office 2003 technology group at U2U about his first SharePoint 2003 courses in August and October 2003: "I started with the new SharePoint 2003 products and technologies in April 2003 attending the DevCon in Seattle. One week fully packed with development opportunities on top of Windows SharePoint Services inspired me to start writing a course targeted towards .NET developers. I finished with a manual of more than 400 pages packed with custom-made material. After a couple of re-deliveries and sessions on SharePoint and Office 2003 for Microsoft, it was finally time in August 2003 to deliver that very first workshop. The group of participants consisted out of people coming from different countries (Danmark, the Netherlands and of course Belgium). The expectations were high on both sides. We went through the installation of WSS and SPS the first day (being brave and doing the work with the then newly released Technical Refresh Beta 2). Going through a number of difficulties regarding some new changes coming with this update, we managed to get everything up-and-running and started the modules on development specific topics such as the building of Web Parts, creating assemblies that sink events triggered by document libraries, the SharePoint object model and the Web Services, and many more. Everyday I saw the twinkles in the eyes of the participants and we brainstormed continuously around various opportunities for products, add-ons and custom solutions they could make. One day the discussion ended late in the evening drinking a couple of beers in our favorite pub 'The Junior'. To conclude, SharePoint 2003 is a magnificent product and any developer should have a close look at it since there are so many opportunities companies should not miss.  In the mean time I have written a number of articles that are available on the MSDN site: Articles on MSDN International Building Custom Alert Result Channels in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (June 2004) Understand how .NET developers can extend Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 with custom alert result channels. Learn about offering users extra channels on which to receive alert results. This article works through the Quick Alerts alert result channel as an example. How to Customize Your Search Using SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (October 2004) Explore three ways to incorporate Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server Search (service) into custom Web pages, SharePoint Web Parts, Microsoft Windows applications, and other smart-client front-end applications such as those in the Microsoft Office 2003 Editions. Articles on MSDN Belux Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part I : The Basics (May 2003) This article is part one of a series of articles demonstrating in a hands-on manner the different techniques of building, packaging, deploying and using Web Parts in both Windows SharePoint Services sites and SharePoint Portal pages. The focus of this first article is on the basics. You will learn how to create a Web Part in Visual Studio .NET 2003, package and deploy it, and some of the debugging techniques. The Web Part built will allow a user to enter the name of an author in a text box and access the Amazon Web Service to retrieve all the books written by this author. Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part II : Web Parts and User Controls (Aug 2003) Several people mentioned the possible usage of user controls in the development process of Web Parts for SharePoint pages in the newsgroups available on the Web. This article summarizes all these ideas and describes a framework for building Web Parts making use of ASP.NET user controls. Building Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services - Part III : Connectable Web Parts (Feb 2004) Part III of the SharePoint series discusses the basic steps of creating connectable Web Parts.  Windows SharePoint Services provides a very good framework allowing users of these sites to drop Web parts onto their pages. We have discussed in part I how to create and deploy these Web Parts. Part II introduced a technique to boost the performance of developing Web parts by making use of ASP.NET user controls to deal with the design of the body of your Web part. In this article, we are going through the basic steps of creating two Web parts that are able to interchange data with each other. Developers of Web parts can implement standard WSS interfaces (provider and/or consumer) that are recognized by the WSS Web part framework and as a result allow users of the Web parts to make a connection between the two. Processing InfoPath Data in SharePoint Forms Libraries (Oct 2003) Some time ago, I had the opportunity to have a talk at the Belgium MSDN community regarding opportunities for .NET developers to extend the Windows SharePoint Services. In addition to the Web Part development (see also my 2 articles on building Web Parts), and the access to the SharePoint object model and related XML Web Services, I demonstrated how to create document event handlers in VS.NET that hook up to a SharePoint form library. The goal of the .NET code was to process the incoming InfoPath XML. In this article I provide an overview of how to accomplish this. In addition, it shows you how you can avoid complex XPath statements within your .NET code by generating an object model out of your InfoPath form and de-serialize the incoming XML to an object created from the root class. I hope it gives you some ideas to improve your productivity when developing these types of applications. If you want more, reserve your seat for the next 5-day course covering the same content. Join the SharePoint experience. You will not regret your move!"

At Course Completion

After completing this course, students will be able to:

• set up a development machine with portal and team sites within SharePoint
• understand the different configuration and management tasks within SharePoint that matter for developers
• create custom Web parts and make them usuable by the SharePoint workers
• understand the document-management and work-flow features of SharePoint
• create your own custom document-management and work-flow solutions
• use InfoPath and SharePoint to automate the capturing and processing of information
• access valuable SharePoint data using the object models and Web services exposed by SharePoint
• customize and personalize the information provided by the various types of sites in SharePoint

Prerequisites

Students should have a good knowledge of one of the .NET languages and ASP.NET.

Course Outline

Module 1 Introducing Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies

• What is Windows SharePoint Services?
• Comparing it to Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server
• Installing WSS and SPS on a development machine
• Configuration, management and administration tasks within WSS and SPS
• Setting up the security in SharePoint
• Understand the technology behind the scenes

Module 2 Creating SharePoint Sites and Setting up the Content Infrastructure

• Creating portal and teams sites
• Working with site definitions and site templates
• Document Libraries and lists 

Module 3 Using Web Parts

• What are Web Parts?
• Creating Web Part Pages
• Web Part Galleries
• Importing and Exporting Web Parts
• Connecting Web Parts
• The Office Web Parts
• Customizing Web Parts

Module 4 Creating Web Parts

• The Basics Steps
• Packaging and Deploying Web Parts - Different Scenarios
• Web Parts and CAS
• Best Practices and Guidelines
• Debugging Web Parts
• Creating Web Parts using ASP.NET User Controls
• The SmartPart
• Creating Connectable Web Parts
• Consuming Web Services in Web Parts
• Creating Custom Properties and ToolParts

Module 5 Document Management and WorkFlow in SharePoint

• What is there out-of-the-box?
• Integration with Office 2003
• Overview of Work-Flow Architecture
• Creating Event-Handlers in .NET
• Activating .NET Event Handler 
• The WorkFlow Lite

Module 6 Information Gathering with Microsoft InfoPath

• Introducing InfoPath 
• Creating InfoPath SP1 Templates
• Publishing InfoPath Templates to SharePoint Form Libraries
• Advanced Techniques 
• Processing InfoPath Data in SharePoint

Module 7 Office 2003 Integration

• Communicating with SharePoint (Excel/Access/Word)
• Excel Lists
• Working with the List DataSheet
• Using the Research pane in Office 2003

Module 8 Working with the Object Models

• Microsoft.SharePoint.dll Explained
• Automating administrative tasks
• Building Web Parts
• Searching content using CAML query strings
• Consuming the SharePoint Web Services
• Integrating your own Web Services in SharePoint

Module 9 Personalization

• Creating Personal Sites
• User Profiles and Audiences
• Name Menus and Alerts
• Single Sign-On in SharePoint

Module 10 Extending SharePoint Portal Search

• Creating your own Search pages
• SPS Query Web Service
• Office Research Extensibility
• Customizing the Search Results

Module 11 Customizing SharePoint using FrontPage 2003

• Ghosting/Unghosting Explained
• Creating Sites/Lists using FrontPage 2003
• Web Parts and FrontPage 2003
• The DataView Web Part in FrontPage 2003

Module 12 Creating Site Definitions

• Custom Templates for Sites and Lists
• Understanding CAML
• Best Practices