Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Foreword

After three years, the time is here. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 has shipped with great fanfare and lots of accolades from customers, partners, and the press.

It's humbling to be part of the team that helped bring this monstrous release to market. When I worked on SharePoint Portal Server 2001 (codenamed Tahoe back then), Microsoft was making its first official foray into the portal market with document management added in for good measure. For those of you who worked with SharePoint in those days, the 2001 version was a good first attempt to enter into a new market for Microsoft even with some of the limitations we knew the product had. With the 2007 release, I can definitely say that we have worked hard to make sure SharePoint meets the needs of diverse sets of customers from the smallest business to the largest enterprise.

So, why should you care about SharePoint and this book?

Well, if you look at the 2007 release, we've extended the surface area of SharePoint twofold. The previous version of SharePoint was a great collaboration, portal, and enterprise search tool. We've enhanced each of those capabilities, while at the same time adding enterprise content management, business process management and e-forms, and finally business intelligence capabilities to the product. That's a lot of new technology, information, APIs, and best practices that you need to learn. You'll need a great teacher and this book is that teacher.

The authors cover the breadth of ...