Chapter 32: Understanding Windows SharePoint Services
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l (^) Employee Activities Site
l Employee Self-Service Benefits
l (^) Employee Training Scheduling and Materials
l Integrated Marketing Campaign Tracking
l (^) Manufacturing Process Management
l New Store Opening
l (^) Product and Marketing Requirements Planning
l Request for Proposal
l (^) Sports League
l Team Work Site
l (^) Timecard Management
SharePoint is frequently used, for example, to handle the documentation required for product
development. A SharePoint site devoted to a development project easily handles the project initia-
tion, tracking, and progress reporting tasks. Because SharePoint easily handles virtually any type of
document, project drawings, videos, schematics, photographs, and so on can be added to the proj-
ect’s SharePoint site for review and comment by project members.
Companies often use SharePoint for distributing human-resource and policy documents. Because
SharePoint provides user- and group-level security, it’s quite easy to grant a particular department
access to a SharePoint page while denying other users access to the same site.
SharePoint also logs changes to documents, and supports a check-in/check-out paradigm for con-
trolling who is eligible to make changes to existing documents, and who is allowed to post new
documents and files.
Some of the most common SharePoint deployments are storing of version-controlled documents,
such as Word document and Excel worksheets. In many environments, e-mail is used for passing
documents back and forth between users. The potential for mixing up different versions of the
same document is considerable. Also, storing multiple copies of the same document takes up a lot
of disk space. Because SharePoint provides a single source for storing, viewing, and updating docu-
ments, many of these issues are eliminated entirely.
Working with SharePoint Lists
The primary storage object in SharePoint is the list. Although conceptually similar to database
tables, there are significant differences, and the differences have an impact on how Access works
with SharePoint data.
SharePoint lists consist of rows and columns of data. Each column holds a particular type of data
such as text, a date, or an object (such as a photo). From this simplistic perspective, SharePoint
lists are analogous to Access tables.