One of the biggest reasons some SharePoint deployments fail is because they are “SharePoint Deployments”.

The public beta of SharePoint 2010 has been out for a few weeks now. Many people are discovering and blogging about some of the great new features you’re going to find. Yet there have also been some significant changes to existing features. These are things you may have been using every day in SharePoint 2007 and WSS 3.0, but which in SharePoint 2010 have moved or changed in ways could cause confusion to experienced users.

Or what if you just want to drop a Twitter search into any old SharePoint page, rather than a full Results page? And more critical – what if you don’t have direct access to the SharePoint server in order to install binary web part and feature – with or without a Solution Package (WSP)?

Well, for Office 2010, Microsoft has essentially brought that concept to uploading as well. They have created a new applet called the “Office Synchronization Center”. When you tell Word (for example) to save a file, rather than sending it directly to the SharePoint site, it hands it off to the Synchronization Center, which does the uploading, including such niceties as retrying if for some reason the upload fails the first time. It also allows you to continue working once you have started the save process – sort of like a “background save” on steroids.

SharePoint offers a lot of different ways to look at the information in your sites. One of the most interesting is the Preview Pane view. Although it doesn’t show up as a web part on its own, you can use it in almost any list or library simply by modifying the view settings.
I hope this article has encouraged you to explore this, as well as some of the other view formats available to you!

SharePoint’s wiki features are a bit like Rodney Dangerfield – they “don’t get no respect”. Yet, while on their own they may not be best-of-breed in the wiki world, they are still quite useful. In addition, they do something no other wiki system does, they bring the rest of SharePoint, with all of its power and flexibility, along for the ride.

What makes SharePoint Designer different from virtually all other web design tools is that it is fully aware of SharePoint and its functionality – such as lists, libraries, and master pages – as well. In addition, SharePoint Designer gives you easy access to many powerful SharePoint features, such as the ability to integrate with external data sources Data View/Form Web Parts, that are not readily available in any other way.

SharePoint is not merely a web server. It is a large and complex application, with many moving parts. Some of them are easy to customize; others require a bit more finesse. Tools and guidance for that customization are few and far between. Fortunately for you, SharePoint Designer is such a tool, and this book provides the guidance. Together, they enable you to look your customer in the eye and answer with a resounding: “Yes!”
Yet SharePoint Designer can do far more than customize SharePoint sites. It is a fully-featured web design tool in its own right, with excellent support for many industry standards, as well as backward compatibility with a few nonstandard capabilities.

Instead, this is about one use of a component that has been a part of SharePoint (under various names) since it was called the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit – The Web Part Page Services Component (WPSC). I devote a whole chapter in my book to using this and other client-side components, but briefly, the WPSC is a set of JavaScript objects and functions that allow Web Parts to communicate with SharePoint, each other, and your users.

One of the most frustrating things about designing for the Web is the wide array of browsers and screen formats in which your site may be displayed. SharePoint Designer helps mitigate this problem by giving you several preview options.