Getting Started with SharePoint 2010

welcome everyone to today's webinar on getting started with SharePoint 2010 hosted by experts exchange I'm Jenn Prentiss with experts exchange and I'd personally like to thank all of you for attending this webinar we are thrilled to have Jamie McAllister one of our top SharePoint experts on experts exchange giving our presentation today I'm going to tell you a little bit more about Jamie in just a minute and let him give his presentation but first a few housekeeping items to note before we get started if you take a look at the right side of your screen you should see a chat window this is where you can ask questions that you might have for Jamie about his presentation just type your question into the message box and it will be sent directly to me if we have time at the end we will address those questions if not Jamie and I will follow up with you after the webinar and make sure that you get an answer second if any of you have to leave the webinar early don't worry rear recording Jamie's presentation and we will make it available to everyone within the next week so as I said a minute ago this webinar is hosted by experts exchange I'm sure that by now most of you are familiar with the site but if you're not we are a technology resource where both individuals and businesses go to either troubleshoot problems that they're having with a certain technology or to further educate themselves about a technology earlier this year we launched a redesign of experts exchange so if you haven't been to the site in a while you might want to come check it out and now in addition to over three million technology solutions and 24-hour access to tech experts in Microsoft MVPs like Jamie we also have an in-depth tech tech training library of videos a tech news blog and an EE tech news podcast and job board so if you're attending this webinar and you are not currently an active member of experts exchange which you should have indicated when you registered for the webinar initially you'll be receiving a 30-day free trial to check out the site no credit card required if for some reason I do not send that to you time's emails get bounced back at the end of the webinar feel free to email me my email will be up at the end of the webinar so like I said I want to tell you a little bit about Jamie he has been using SharePoint since 2006 to implement solutions for clients across a wide range of industries in the UK the US and Switzerland he's been a member of experts exchange since 2008 answering questions mainly on Microsoft SharePoint and he's currently one of the top-ranked experts in the experts exchange sharepoint zone i believe that he has over 1 million points which if anyone in sharepoint alone not counting his other points on the site so if any of you are familiar with experts exchange you know that the experts answer questions and earn points for answering questions so to have over a million points in sharepoint alone is quite a feat without further ado i am going to turn this webinar over to jamie to give his presentation on getting started with sharepoint 2010 thanks for a march in hi everyone and welcome to this webinar I'm titling it SharePoint 2010 lists and libraries for the end user as Jen said my name is Jamie McAllister and I'm a SharePoint concern in sunny Geneva Switzerland now my day job is usually implementing SharePoint at client sites and making sure that clients get the best use out of their SharePoint install one thing I've seen over the years I will have been doing that day job is many users are unaware of some of the features which they get with lists and libraries which would make their life much easier on a day to day basis so I wanted to put this webinar together along with experts exchange to let you know about some of these features which is sometimes ignored okay so what are we going to look at today well first of all I'm going to justify why we might be using lists in SharePoint at all hopefully if you're convinced by that we'll be looking at lists the basic storage unit of information within SharePoint we'd be seeing how we create lists how we use them how we create information inside them then we'll be looking at the concept of views which allows us to saw and filter information in useful ways we'll be seeing how we introduce basic validation into lists to make sure our data is of the quality and form that we need we'll be seeing how we introduce versioning to lists we'll see how content approval can ensure that the right content and the right message is published out to the readers of our content within SharePoint and I'll be showing you how we can introduce basic relationships between the information in lists which can be very useful moving on from that then we'll talk about libraries and we'll discover that libraries are actually just a specialized form of Lists and we'll see that they present richer version in possibilities major and minor versioning they also allow us to check in and check out content whilst we're editing it to make sure that our edits and don't clash with other people's editing and we'll see that libraries are really about document storage finally we'll discuss site columns and content types which is a concept allowing a good information management within your SharePoint site now I don't want to introduce death by PowerPoint on this webinar so most of it is going to be demonstration with Shep on itself and for this you'll have to bear with me I have to flip between windows okay if you are all familiar with SharePoint this might be a familiar site this is a default site which you get in the chiffon product when a site is created this is called the team site it's really just a collection of pages and lists built on a pre-built template and those lists and pages are designed to help teams get together on a task and collaborate on information and tasks and come up with a good end result one thing you'll notice immediately looking at the left navigation there is already mention of blight libraries and lists here on the Left we actually get several lists and libraries created to do different discreet useful tasks for us in this type of site let's leap in and have a look at the shared documents library just to start getting an idea what a list or a library really is okay so when I open this library we can see it's actually already got a document in it which I placed there earlier this is called the document library and it's for storing documents not just Word documents by the way any type of document not even Office documents we could put images Adobe files you name it could actually go in here we see we have a link to the file which is actually stored within here we have the name of this file we have some basic information about when it was modified and who it was modified by you may notice that when I hover over the name I get this drop down menu here which I can click on the proper name for this is the edit control block if I click on this it drops down a menu and there are lots of interesting things I can do with the file in the library for instance I could edit the properties of this document which is a form of metadata information tagging something we'll talking be talking about more in a while I could edit the content of the document in Microsoft Word as this is a Word document and for instance if I thought that one of my colleagues was interested in this document I could email a link to others within the organization and notice here I would be emailing a link to it not the document itself so I wouldn't be sending a heavy attachment file attachment to my colleague okay let's just go back to the front page then that's a very basic idea of what a list is so we see that we're holding some sort of content in a centralized place and there's an emphasis there on not sending the file itself to other people it remains in this central place to be used and when other people want to view it or edit it they will come here to do that let's see why we might want to play things that way so why do we want to use SharePoint at all okay here is a list of what you might find to be very common problems in the modern professionals work if you're working in an office you work with documents and you probably have some or perhaps all of these problems you might have trouble collaborating and sharing and collaborating on in sharing information with colleagues such as developing documents or Excel spreadsheets you may be sending documents between yourselves to share information which may result in bulging email boxes you might find have difficulty finding information that you need you may be constantly searching on file shares or within your inbox to try and find that document attachment which you need right now if your information is stored in file shares it could well be organized in very complex folder structures which are difficult to navigate and you may find that when team members move on to other teams or even other organizations valuable information is lost you may also be in certain uncertain if many versions of documents and other material are being emailed around the company which one of those attachments is the authoritative latest latest version who can say okay well lists are here to help solve those problems and let's have a look at lists in more detail now hopefully I can convince you that lists in SharePoint are a solution to some of these problems okay without further ado then I'm actually going to create a new list of our own since we've already examined the document library let's see what lists are all about to do this in SharePoint I would click appear on site actions and it should be a little more obvious there's an option here more options I actually have to click on that one and then a dialog box will open allowing me to choose what I would like to create when it pops up you will actually see it's going to show me lots of options there are many types of thing that I could create within SharePoint the suspense is killing me there we go okay as you can see there's a bit of an overwhelming list here but we can filter it over here by the type of thing we want to do now we want to create a list so we click on that and filter you'll notice even now there are lots of different types of predefined list which we could create an instance of now for instance let's have a look at some of those there's an announcements list which allows you to publicize information within your organization there's a calendar so that you could store events and meeting times there's a contact list which allows you to store the contact information for colleagues or perhaps customers there's a discussion board which allows people to post questions or start and debates within your organization and for instance would allow you to start off a knowledge sharing exercise within knew your company and there are several others down here which could be of interest depending on your needs for my purposes I want to create a custom list because I want to show you how to create a list from scratch now as an example I am going to create an example list called presenters the scenario we're going to work with here is there in my organization I have a number of employees who like to do lunchtime presentations for knowledge sharing within the company and so I want to keep a list of which of my employees have said that they're interested in doing these lunchtime presentations so we'll click to create this list called presenters ok excellent so now we have a list you can see many things looks similar to the document library we saw just now we have a title field here we have a link to add new content you may have noticed there was an add new item link on the document library we saw before one other thing of particular interest which I didn't mention before was this concept of the ribbon if you have ever used any of the recent Microsoft Office products like ms word ms excel you should be familiar with the concept of the ribbon already this is a conceptual this is a contextual view of options and actions which you can choose and it changes what it displays based on what you're doing at the time to try and be the most helpful it can be it usually has tabs so that you can also switch and see even further options to the ones that's showing you because I've just created a new list it's opened it at me conveniently at the lists tab now this list very simple it's just got this title field to be useful I'm going to have to add some more fields or actually we call them columns in SharePoint so that I can put further information in here there is a link here on the ribbon to do that so if I click this a window will open allowing me to define this new column which I want to create in the list now a presenter has to have a name so let's type that here one thing you might notice below the column name which I've typed just now is that you can choose different types of information that the column will hold a single line of text is the default but if it was some other information such as a presentation description I might actually choose multiple lines of text that I wanted to store in a given column which I wanted to define here choice field would allow me to define several fixed choices which people could select that's if I didn't want them to type a column with any free value we have number fields for numbers here for currency we can have columns that specifically store dates and times links to people etc there are actually several here and I encourage you to explore your options here if you can get your hands on SharePoint looking down here further additional column settings I can require that this new column that I create always has a value in it otherwise the user will be warned that they can't save it require that this column contains information well I think a presenter should have a name so let's say yes we want that enforce unique values no it's possible the two people in the organization could have the same name so let's leave that the number of characters we don't need a default value so we'll okay and there we have it it's now been added as an extra column to the list let's go through that process again because I'd like to know for instance which specialities my presenter has so that I can ask them to do different types of presentation based on the specialities they have now instead of this being free text I want to tie this down a bit more I'm going to select a choice and when I select something different two single line of text you may notice that down here the settings that you're allowed to do have changed to suit the type of column which I selected above I could also type a description here so that when people came along before so after and they wanted to know what the speciality column was all about they would see from the description what its intent was it's good practice to do that but I guess we're a bit pushed for time so I might skip some of the little things like that should this require should we require that this has a value well no maybe they won't be there specialism on the list so let's type few specialisms you can see I got each choice on a different line and I don't want to be all about IT so let's put some other things on the okay now I also have the choice here which effectively gives people the option to choose one of these and one only or they could actually select several now people may have several specialities so I'm going to allow them to select several and I don't think we need a default for this okay that one and once again we get our new column here now I'll hurry along a bit because I think you're uncomfortable with this idea I also want a department and this should also be choice yes I definitely want my department okay gray someone's under going to be in one department so we'll leave the default like this we'll okay that one okay so far so good we have the basic information that we wanted here now you'll notice we still have this title column which is a bit of a problem I don't really want the title column I have no need for it the thing is in the list the title column on items is the thing that gives us that useful drop-down menu so I don't really want to get rid of this but I don't want it to be called title one thing that might be useful to me though is a job title column now bear with me here but I'm actually going to go into the settings of the list to change the name of this can go into the list settings once again by clicking on the ribbon here now when I open this there are quite a few options inside which I don't really want to ponder now so please don't be worried about these we will talk about some of these later in the webinar but for now I just want to see the columns in here this is a list of the columns that I created and some default ones which you doesn't really see which are also in there I'm going to click on title and I'm going to change it to job title instead okay everything else looks fine to me it's going to hold text great I'm using this navigation feature here called the breadcrumb to go back to the list itself there you go right without further ado let's create a list item in our brand new presenters list so we click here add item and once again a form opens this time to allow us to add values you'll notice that title which is now a job title and presenter name we marked as those been required and also department they have a red star against them to denote to the user that this is a required field we must put a value inside otherwise we won't be able to save a row within this list okay so let's start off with me I'm willing to do presentations my specialisms there we go in services excellent save that let's have another presenter whoops wrong field and is a specialist in Excel and work in sale okay so I'm rapidly building some information which is now stored in a central place people within my team could access this information if I directed them to it and they had the relevant permissions so you can see very rapidly sharepoint is allowed us to store some interesting and useful information within eyesight whoops okay we'll just do one more because it really will aid when when we look at views in a while okay so excellent there we have it we have some views now sorry we have some list items now one of the things which is quite interesting here for me and you couldn't do this so easily in older versions of the product is you can sort and filter columns that you're seeing here to get information quite easily now if I click here on the action bar of the column you'll see here it allows me to sort the whole list in ascending or descending order which could help me find information it also allows me to click on these and filter based on values that are in that column this is very much like what you see in Excel so if I click on this I can make sure that I see on the consultants for instance clear that one or if I was in true in finding people who were in specialists in Excel and in finance for instance I could filter by Excel and then I could go to the department column and then further filter by Finance and there we go John Dale fits the profile we're looking for ok so you can see we've got fairly powerful methods to find information right here out-of-the-box building our own list one other thing of interest here if I click over on the ribbon again into list we're looking at this in the standard view if we had a lot of information which we needed to put in in one go the form view that we use to enter these before might not be very useful we can actually flip into datasheet view here and when that opens we see an excel like a grid representation of the list that we're working with this whoops this allows us to very rapidly indeed you can imagine if this was numeric information once again we could really speed things up by doing this sort of thing let's just have a go at this you see we still got the dropdowns for our choices we get a tick list here so we've not lost anything by being in this view there we go we now have a new roan we could do several quite quickly like this let's go back to the standard view it's just updating the information this doesn't this doesn't usually happen by the way but let's call it live demo gremlins ok back to standard view now when we're looking at this we are looking at a view of the information already we said would talk about views this view is called all items and every time that you create a list you get an all items view created by default for you if I drop down this view name I have some options here modify create another view because from configure views for this location I don't have any other views to switch to turns out I can create my own new view to slice and dice this information in any way I want so let's have a look at that when I choose to create a new view I get these options there are several different flavors of view which I could create there's the standard view which we were looking at just now there's a datasheet view that by default has that datasheet grid-view which would which is particularly good if you had a lot of dates and times etc in your list information we don't of course there's again view if you had tasks which operated over time for different people this might be particularly useful you could even do some basic project management by storing at tasks in a list and then having again view of the information there's an access of view which allows us to Mel the list data with microsoft access like functionality and there's a external tool called SharePoint designer which we're not going to cover today which can make which can allow you to do even more complicated views one option I really like is if you have some views already you get this option start from an existing view the old items is the only one we have so that's here if I click on this it will create a view for me with all the options exactly as they are in the existing view so I don't have to reinvent the wheel with my new view now in this view we're going to call this department experts this is going to be a public view so that everyone can see it I would have the option here to create a personal view that only I could see and use I'm going to remove columns which I'm not very interested in there are no extra columns I need to add for now but by ticking here I could do I could also change the position of the column in the view by changing these boxes here at the moment the view is sorted by the ID of the item which is an invisible column we haven't really seen I'd like to sort by department instead and then I'd second rule like to sort by presenter name further to filter here now I could select this and I could say for instance that I only want to show items if the department is equal to HR now you can imagine if I had many items and actually you could potentially store many thousands of items in a list like this you might want certain views where you could show for instance information from just the one department so if you have a column with a value such as Department you can filter on it here and get information much more easily than you could otherwise for our purposes here no we don't need to filter that's just an example there are several other options here which I encourage you to explore if you get the chance the last one we'll look at for the purposes of this is the group by so we can actually group our values by and once again it's Department because we want to see the department experts we're happy with everything so we'll just okay that and now it's created a new view and you'll notice this one as we said is grouped by departments you if I want to change back to the other view I can just drop down here and click the all items view instead have to say that's not the only way you can do it there's usually two or three ways to accomplish the same thing I could switch views here as well on the ribbon I could also modify views and even create a new view from there but we don't have to do that right now next let's look at validation I would like to introduce some rules to make sure the information people put into my presenters list is suitable for my purposes so I'm going to go into list settings for this one because I'm going to go in to one of the columns the column I'm going to introduce validation on is the job title column one area of this page which we didn't look at before when we changed the column name to job title was this one column validation if I drop column validation down there we go you'll see that I have the option here to introduce a formula if the formula returns true the value in the column that someone has entered when they're creating a new item is good if it's false they will get a message which I can define here telling them no that's no good so what should we do for job title let's say sorry wrong keys let's say for instance that if job title is not equal to project manager then everything is okay and the reason for this the validation message will be sorry project managers are too busy to be presenters some of you might agree with that sentiment okay it's just complained to me because it doesn't like these brackets sorry these quotes it needs them to be double quotes and then struggling my Swiss keyboard doesn't show me the characters I think I'm typing there we go project manager let's okay that one happy a result okay now let's see that in action so we'll put a project manager in here especially yeah save that one no sorry validation message project managers are too busy to be presenters okay then I guess we better not add John to the list okay what else can we do here well it's all very well me adding information into these rows which I've been doing but if I change something here who's going to know what if I change some information here and I find later that I want to get that information back the change was the wrong thing to do well I can introduce versioning here automatically without me having to keep versions myself to do this we're going into the list tab again we're going over to list settings and I promised we'd look at these settings in a while we have here a thing called versioning settings so we'll click into that one we have various things here but the main one is do you want to create a version every time you edit an item in this list and of course yes we do by default it allows you to keep major versions of items within this list which is a concept we'll explain a little while gives you the option of limiting the number of versions that are kept for instance if we did 30 edits on a particular row do we really want to keep 30 versions that could use up a lot of space in our environment and we probably don't want to do that the value that you might want to set to limit versions is going to depend on your own circumstances in your organization but the general best practice which I see in a lot of organizations is to limit major versions to five so let's okay that one and one thing we'll do to really illustrate this is we're going to add an extra column so into the view of the list it's already in there actually so let's do modify our view before we do anything else and we're going to add the version column which was hiding down here all along okay that one now we see that everything in our list is version 1.0 okay John Dale has done a lot of good work recently we don't want him to be a junior associate anymore it's really time he was a full associate so let's edit John's information here he's got a promotion okay John now has new information and you'll notice that the version number for John's Row is now at two if I drop down the Edit control block for this row I have this option here to view version history clicking on version history I can see that John had this information in version 1 and in version 2 we notice his job title has now changed if I discover that the Edit was wrong and his job title shouldn't have been changed at all rather than having to go in and just edit again I can actually drop down a menu here and I could restore the version 1 information put everything back to it as it was there so you can see this could be really useful if I wanted to save space of course I could also just delete that prior version okay so that was to versioning one other thing which is really interesting is the ability to be able to create relationships between lists you Rea remember that when we defined our speciality in our department columns we made them choice fields and we typed out the different values that these could be now it could be that there was a central source list of departments for instance or source list of specialities so instead of defining them here in for instance in a column in every list where we might want to have department we might want to define department in a single list and use in many places to demonstrate this then I'm going to create a new list of departments and I'm going to use that instead of the choice field which we put here so once again we go to the site Actions menu more options you'll get the daunting window filter by list custom list and we're going to call our list department create that we only need one column in department lists and it can be a text one so I'm going to do that little trick in list settings again which we saw click into title and we're going to change this to be department okay now we can add a few values into this so here we are hedge our finance information services accounting whoops sales you get the picture okay so we now have a list with some values in it let's go back to our presenters list which you'll notice is now automatically in the navigation over here because we created it before and we're going to create a new column in the list this time and this is something called a lookup column and so this is going to be called department lookup just to differentiate the other one to look up column once again the options down here changed to suit the type of column that we have and we get a choice well which list do you want to call this value from so we have a look in here Department which column in there do we want well there's only one so we get to choose there are there any extra columns that sit alongside that these are those hidden ones that we don't usually see that we'd like to bring through as well no none of those are really useful to us down here we have the option to define what sort of relationship this is we could enforce a thing called referential integrity between whoops between the two lists so we could for instance restrict delete we could say that if a list is using any given value from our department list we wouldn't be able to delete it from our department list we could also say cascade delete if we deleted a department here such as Finance row in another list which used this look up to the finance would actually be deleted automatically as a kind of cleaner so we have some very basic relationships that we can do here let's okay that one and we now have our department field if you want to see how that looks in action you see now it's effectively a drop-down we could then delete the original department list which we had before one benefit of this is in terms of update if I came up with a new name for information services perhaps the department became known as information technology instead stranger things have happened if this was in a choice field and I changed it anyone who currently had that in their row you would have to go in and edit the row again to what date the value there if I'm using a lookup column if I changed information services to information technology within the lookup every row which used that one would be updated automatically without me having to go and edit again now imagine if we've got 10,000 presenters in this list you're saving yourself an awful lot of time by not having to do that so choose the one which is right for you I will say though that Department sorry that lookups and have a few performance not issues but if you use too many of them it might run a bit more slowly but up to about six is absolutely fine in any given list so that will Whistlestop tour of lists so let's have a look at the PowerPoint yes it's still there and see what we've learned well we've discussed that virtually all SharePoint content is stored in a list we mentioned that lists allow multiple views to allow sorting filtering grouping different columns we can introduce validation into lists we can have a thing called content approval which actually we're going to look at with libraries we have item versioning and we can create relationships between lists okay excellent okay going back to our environment here then we haven't really looked at libraries yet now libraries are just another type of list but have some extra features such as allowing you to check in and check out items they allow you to have major and minor versions and they'll I wish to store actual documents in them actual files they allow us that give us a certain amount of office integration as well such as this edit in Microsoft Word been available there in the menu look at a few concepts which we will then enable within SharePoint itself so some introductions it's very common in a SharePoint environment to have readers readers consume company information they have the right to read information search for information print information but not to edit information we also have contributors they have the rights their role is to write information which is stored for instance within SharePoint so they can create and edit documents and pages and then we have this guy over here the approver he reviews information which the contributor has produced and he approves it if it's suitable for publishing so that our reader over there can see it what does this mean then well this is the publishing process which you can optionally enable within these lists and libraries within SharePoint okay so we have a couple of contributors here contributor a contributor B they work on content within SharePoint contributor Rea creates a document in Word and he saves that as a draft version 0.1 this is a minor version and we'll see why we have those in a moment into SharePoint is now in a draft state contributor B takes that out and works on it and when he saves his changes and checks it in he gets a new version version 0.2 a new draft version contributor a decides that the version zero point two is ready for primetime it's ready to be published out and for people to see it so contributor a publishes the document but instead of it being immediately available to people to read it it's actually held in this awaiting approval state because we want things to be approved before they read we want to make sure they're correct our approver gets a mess telling him that something needs to be approved so he clicks on the link in the message he reviews the document in this case he decides everything's good and he says yeah I prove in the document is therefore pushed into a new state of published and it gets a new version number it's major version version 1.0 at this point our readers can now see that information and read it the reader was completely unaware of the editing process in the interaction between the contributors and the approver and the draft state of the document before okay well why do we cover this because we can actually enable this if we have content which warrants it we can enable this in libraries within SharePoint okay so this is our document library which we saw before and we have a single document in here for now if I click on the library tab which is the equivalent of the list tab we saw before going to library settings I have the option here going into versioning again of not only enabling version in which I can do here and let's set those all-important limits again you'll find five and two is the magic number I can require that that content approval process which we saw just now happens ie an approver of God has got to say yes before this is going to be published out to for people to read we also are going to say that documents need to be checked out before they can be edited ie people have an explicit lock on the document while they're editing it and then they can check it back in again so we're okay this and one thing we'll do because I know it's in the view again I always get caught out in the view we're going to put the version number again just so we can see what's happening so there we go hiding at the bottom as always okay there we have this current document is version 1 by the way we never really saw adding items to a document library it's not exactly the same as for a list because in this case we're actually storing a file in there as well so if I click add document it's going to open a window and I'll be able to browse to a file to upload here things should be easier than this come on now oh there we go okay so I have some more training material here that I want to upload so I'll select this I'll okay that and it will get uploaded to the library you'll notice I get the option to fill out more information about it such as the title I'll save this and that document is now stored as a draft version in the library the reason it's draft is because no one has ever approved this for people to see it's only just being created it's never been reviewed as such it's a minor version 0.1 notice it doesn't have a whole number at the front it has a fraction number and the second digit that indicates that it's a minor version okay excellent so we now have content here if I was to edit just the properties of this document here I don't want it ah I forgot to check this out and as you saw I said that everything has to be checked out before it's changed so it's telling me do you want to check it out yes please check it out for me I could actually just make some basic changes to the title save that all I've done is save it it's still in draft it's still checked out what I want to do is I want to check it back in so other people could work on it now and you just want to check it in no I think this is ready for the primetime night I would like to publish it so I'm going to select this and I'm going to okay and you'll notice now we have this column which is showing as automatically the state of this and it's saying that this is pending that means it's pending approval we're waiting for an approver to review this and say everything is okay so it's been held in this draft state version 1.1 if I come along just so happens I'm an approver as well so I can approve this myself so I drop down this I could also do this for your an email by the way and I'm going to say I could reject it say no we don't want this but no it's fine for our purposes right now approved okay that one it becomes approved and it's now a fully fledged version of 2.0 so we've looked at their the ability to store documents within the library to have major and minor versioning and to have content approval and check-in and check-out let's go back to our death by PowerPoint here we go and this is everything I said just now one thing to mention I've been talking about columns a lot when we talk about columns in a in a library where they can also be called tags or properties or metadata you may hear these terms bended around the organization basically there are a way of telling us more about the information that's in that document or file held in the library okay one final important concept to talk about them is that of site columns and content types so far we've been creating lists as a one-off usage which is all very well but what if some of the columns are created like the department column like the speciality column or the series of columns that I grouped together to form a useful purpose in my list what if I wanted to reuse it we use those elsewhere what am I talking about let's look at an example we have here John he's the guy who didn't quite get into our presenter list before he comes up with a great idea he pitches to the company so he pitches to his department first of all information services that they should store employee appraisal information for information services in a SharePoint list this is going to be secured to only the manager and the relevant people can see it but it means no more paper copies floating around the office knowing what the most current version is etc it's a great idea of the company loves it and information services get a lot of benefit out of there so much benefit in fact that HR comes along to him and says hey we were just talking to finance marketing in the other departments we want an appraisal list to use in our own departments as well we need one each we don't want to use yours this creates a lot of problems for John John has got to go around each of the department sites create an appraisal list from scratch and so that they can each use it it gets worse because after a while the company decides that an objectives field should also be stored in the list and because he's created different lists for every single department he has to once again go around and do the work to update that list in several different places it could have all been so different however if John had created a definition of which columns worked together usefully together he could have created these as sight columns so that they could be used in different places woman's in the site and reused he could have created this as a content type which is effectively a template of which columns you might want to use again together if he'd done this when the other departments came along to say we won that list as well he could have used that content-type as a template as the kind of cookie cutter to easily produce instances of the list exactly like the one he produced in the first place and the difference would be in this case if he introduced a new column to it and there was an update such as the objectives when we spoke about before it would be easy to actually introduce that to the original content type and automatically push it out to update all these different lists in the different departments further if he defined some of his columns such as manager name as site column he could have reused that in other content types and other lists not just the one he originally intended it for so you can see if you start introducing site columns and content types for information that's particularly useful in your company you get this reuse of your definitions of what information is useful together now I don't really have time I'm afraid to demonstrate content types in any real detail here all I will say just to give you a pointer is you define these things and really want to look into this more if you want to do it but you go to site actions site settings in the top level site and you will see some options here and please don't be daunted by all the other stuff here I wish I could hide it in galleries you have site columns and site content types and by clicking within there you can actually define these things which I'm talking about just now okay so finish then because I'm sure you're getting tired of my voice cyclones and content types usually if you define columns that they're in a list level they're not reusable in other lists but if you use cite columns and content types you effectively have this schema as it's known which you can reuse in many different sites cite columns are also reusable column definitions there are actually many benefits to content types and I strongly encourage you to look into them further if you decide to use SharePoint seriously now many content types are already defined for you they come out of the box of SharePoint and for calendars for task lists for document libraries and you can work with those you can extend them yourself if you so wish you I've only really scratched the surface of sharepoint and lists and libraries due to the short nature of this webinar there is so much more that we could cover and which would be of interest and use to you for further information I can recommend you my blog which is www - NORTHCOM slash SharePoint I will be posting a copy of this presentation on to that blog in the near future if you'd like that for reference also of course if you have any technical questions a wonderful place to ask questions is experts exchange comm and I am available to ask answer SharePoint questions and on the site there ok so further adue does anyone have any questions I could answer before we finish up actually Jamie a lot of people had questions my goodness I think this is probably one of our most popular webinars thus far we had a very high number of attendees and a very large number of questions and not necessarily about your presentation people are saying that you did an awesome job so if it's okay with you actually what I think I'd like to do since it's getting close to the noon hour here on the west coast and we like to keep these webinars to an hour I have a copy of all of the questions and I can actually email those questions to you and then I can email out your answers to everyone after the fact if that would be okay okay perfect that sounds great I know that I speak for everyone whenever I say that this is just such an awesome presentation I am NOT incredibly familiar with SharePoint but I learned quite a bit from watching your presentation so I cannot thank you enough I hope that all of you will visit not only Jamie's blog but also experts exchange and you can definitely get great access to guys like Jamie 24 hours a day seven days a week on experts exchange I'm going to put my email up here at the end so that you guys can guys and gals can see my email if you have any other questions you can email those to me I will be getting in touch with all of you with the answers that Jamie provides to your questions as well as the video of this recording whenever it's available so I hope that you all have a wonderful day and thank you again Jamie this was great

Channel: Experts Exchange

Views: 15,293

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, software tutorial

Id: qJExPPfOdRo

Length: 59min 55sec (3595 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 16 2012