Introduction
The “cloud” is one of the most tossed-around words these days in any IT conversation. But what does it mean? And what are the implications of the cloud for SharePoint? In fact, there are many implications for SharePoint with the cloud, ranging from extending existing solutions to use code or services that are deployed to the cloud to getting code off of the server and having that live in the cloud. And each of these is interesting in its own way and more generally marks the importance of cloud computing as an area.
In this book, we hope to shine some light not only on what the cloud and cloud computing mean, but also what it means to integrate the cloud with SharePoint. We'll focus predominantly on SharePoint on-premises (or SharePoint Server 2010), but you'll see there are many lessons that can be applied to SharePoint 2007 or, in some cases, to SharePoint Online (within the new Office 365 offering).
Who This Book Is For
This book is primarily aimed towards SharePoint developers, IT pros, or enthusiasts who want to better understand different ways to integrate the cloud with their SharePoint installation(s). That said, you will get more out of this book if you're a SharePoint developer who has had at least six month's experience with SharePoint. You should also have some understanding of ASP.NET and broader web-development technologies. If you're looking for an introduction to SharePoint, you might want to check out Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development (Wrox, 2010) ...
