The Administrator's Guide to Sharepoint Portal Server 2001 (2002)

From the Book:
Welcome to SharePoint Portal Server!
I was introduced to SharePoint Portal Server when I attended the beta presentation of Microsoft Official Curriculum Course 2095 in February 2001. The course was taught by Goga Kukrika, one of the technical editors for this book. I remember being excited about what this product could do and how it would enjoy a wide install base. My excitement remains, and I think time will prove that this product will be widely installed and heavily used.

SharePoint Portal Server is both simple and complex. Although it has a simple front end for nontechnical users, under the hood it's complex. In this book, I hope to illustrate the ease of using SharePoint Portal Server, its depth (especially in its architecture), and the current problems that I hope will be resolved in future revisions.

When this product was first developed (over more than two years), it was written by developers who were under the larger .NET server umbrella development group. Since its release, it has been moved under the Office group's management. This means, among other things, that SharePoint Portal Server and SharePoint Team Services will meld into a single product in the coming releases. 

Some observers have suggested that, over time, public folder functionality will be trimmed and then removed from Exchange 2000 Server and placed into SharePoint Portal Server. Whether this is true remains to be seen. But it is certain that SharePoint Portal Server is here to stay and will mature as a product over the next five years.

This book reflects my honest thoughts about SharePoint Portal Server. I state at times that this or that feature is a great one and, in somecases, is a compelling reason to purchase the product. In other places, however, I express my less-than-positive thoughts on parts of this product. Overall, I'm hopeful that the negatives of this product will be rectified in future releases, and I think it will enjoy wide support in the market.

This book is not about programming in SharePoint Portal Server, although you will see some code where it is appropriate. If you're an experienced developer, you'll probably find the code elementary. I have included what I think will be helpful to a nonprogramming administrator. Chapters 2-4 are the most difficult to read. And frankly, they were the most difficult to write. In them, you'll find granular information that any SPS administrator must understand in order to effectively administer SPS. I find that many administrators can better troubleshoot a problem if they have good architectural information.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is written for coordinators and those who administer a SharePoint Portal Server. Some server-level activities belong to the person in the Coordinator role, but in many environments, a fairly nontechnical person is the coordinator and the IT person ends up being responsible for the overall functionality of the SharePoint server.

Hence, I don't expect a nontechnical coordinator to be interested in reading Chapter 4 (Planning for SharePoint Portal Server 2001) or Chapter 12 (Monitoring SharePoint Portal Server 2001). However, I would expect a non-technical coordinator to read the chapters that are more focused on the workspace and management of documents, categories, and profiles. Therefore, this book will benefit both the nontechnical coordinator and the technically oriented IT administrator. 
Contacting the Author
I've decided to try something new and make available a newsgroup that will be specific to the readers of this book. Simply point your newsreader client to snoopy.networknowledge.com and subscribe to the book.sharepointportalserver newsgroup. I will monitor this group regularly and will keep an up-to-date errata list posted that will enumerate this book's corrections. 

I view the existence of such as newsgroup as doing two positive things. First, it gives us a chance to interact. Too often, authors are not available to their readers for interaction on their own book's contents, and I feel that if people are going to invest their own hard-earned money and read my book, I would like to be available to interact with them. Second, a well-developed errata list from the first edition of a book will mean that future editions will have even greater technical integrity and accuracy. It may sound crazy, but I've seen technical mistakes in one edition carried over to the next edition of a book without the authors or editors catching it. Hard to believe, but it's true.

What I will not do in the newsgroup is to try to answer situational questions about why something isn't working. In other words, I won't do news-group consulting, to coin a phrase. I will, however, discuss concepts in the book and try to field questions about the material. There will probably be times that I'll need to find the answer, and thus all of us will learn and grow. If you want help with a specific problem, use the public newsgroups at news.microsoft.com. These groups exist for this purpose, and I visit the SharePoint groups regularly and try to answer some questions there.

So I hope to see you on my newsgroup. And if you'd like to learn more about me and my work, please visit my Web site at www.networknowledge.com. Remember that this is a marketing Web site. I also run a SharePoint-specific Web site at www.sharepointknowledge.com. In addition, here are some great SharePoint-focused sites from which you might get additional information:
www.sharepointcode.com
www.spsfaq.com
www.sharepointserver.com
www.sharepointtips.com (focused on SharePoint Team Services)
www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

I'll also suggest that if you are a coordinator or administrator of a SharePoint Portal Server, you should seriously consider taking course 2095 at your local Microsoft Certified Technical Education Center, or contact me directly for a private delivery of this course. Course 2095 will give you hands-on experience in working with SharePoint Portal Server and will help you learn how to install and deploy this product. Also, if you don't know Active Directory very well, take courses 1560 (Updating Support Skills from Windows NT Server to Windows 2000 Server) and 2154 (the advanced course focused on Active Directory in Windows 2000 Server). These two courses are essential to an understanding of Active Directory. 

Thank you for purchasing this book. I hope you'll enjoy it and find it to be a great reference that helps you grow in your knowledge of and expertise with SharePoint Portal Server.

—Bill English

Maple Grove, Minnesota

May 10, 2002