SharePoint 101 A. SharePoint A Bird's Eye View (through click programming)

Functional overview of SharePoint's capabilities and infrastructure.

##Central Administration

• Services & Service Applications
  • Term Store (Plan managed metadata in SharePoint Server 2013)
  • Search (Plan search in SharePoint Server 2013)
  • User Profile Service (Plan user profiles and identities)
• Monitoring
  • Using ULSViewer
    • New and improved 2014 ULSViewer
  • How to turn on Verbose logs (Overview of monitoring in SharePoint 2013)

Web Applications, Site Collections & Sites

• Alternate Access Mappings & Host-named Site Collection
  • Zones
  • Authentication Providers
• How the execution model maps to IIS
  • More details here
• Site definitions vs. Web Templates
  • MSDN blog by Vesa "vesku" Juvonen: SharePoint 2010 and web templates
• Site collection vs Site
  • Managed paths
  • SPSite == Site Collection
  • SPWeb == Site == Root Web + Sub Webs

References:

• Blog: A guide to Alternate Access Mappings Basics in SharePoint 2013
• Technet Download: The final guide to Alternate Access Mappings
• MSDN Blog: Alternate Access Mappings Explained
• Technet: Host-named site collection architecture and deployment (SharePoint 2013)
• MSDN Blog: Beware crawling the non-Default zone for a SharePoint 2013 Web Application
• Technet: ADFS setup

Farm topology

• Single-server
• Distributed farm: DB + APP + WFE roles
• The SharePoint file system:
  • 14 + 15 hive: C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions
  • Virtual Directories: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories

References:

• Technical diagrams for SharePoint 2013
• Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Architecture

Content Types, Fields and Lists

• Site vs List fields
• Content types
• How to associate multiple content types to a single list

References

• MSDN: Building Block: Columns and Field Types

Document Libraries & Pages

• Why avoiding folders is generally a good idea:
  • Blog: 12 reasons folders in SharePoint are a bad idea
  • Technet blog: Folders Not Necessarily Considered Evil
• Document versionning and the simple moderation/approval process

References:

• Technet: Versioning, content approval, and check-out planning

Pages and Web Parts

• Wiki vs Publishing Pages
• Web Part Pages
• Content Editor Web Part

References:

• Blog: Wiki Pages vs Web Part Pages vs Publishing Pages for SharePoint 2010 Intranet Content Pages

Language Packs, the SharePoint MUI (Multilingual User Interface) and Regional Settings

• Language packs drive the language of SharePoint's "chrome" (menu elements, settings pages, etc.)
• When you create a site, you must specify a default language. You can also activate alternate languages (if you have the language pack installed)
• How the user's browser language and User Profile is used to determine which of the alternate languages will be shown
• The MUI is NOT meant for content translation - for this, you must use SharePoint Variations.
• How to translate list titles, content type names and other "content container titles" by toggling between the various MUI languages
• How to activate alternate languages in the Term Store
• Don't confuse the MUI Language and the Regional Settings' locale
  • MUI == Site Languages == Language Packs == en-US + fr-FR == CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture
  • Regional Settings == Locale == en-CA + fr-CA == date and money formats == CultureInfo.CurrentCulture

References:

• Plan for the multilingual user interface in SharePoint 2013