Professional SharePoint® 2007 Development

Chapter 3. The SharePoint User Experience

By Brendon Schwartz

Windows SharePoint Services v3 (WSS) provides tremendous functionality right out of the box. When many developers and end users think about performing custom development, they tend to think about having to write code. Because Windows SharePoint Services is a framework, and Microsoft has already written a user interface layer, you can make many development changes without writing any code. This chapter looks at some of the basic functionality that is provided when you install WSS v3. Keep in mind that you will also have this functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007 because Office SharePoint Server simply builds more functionality on top of the core functionality provided by WSS v3.

WSSv3 provides enhanced lists and libraries that you can use to create a fully functional site. The improvements made to lists give you more control over the performance of the list. For example, lists now contain easier ways to stay connected with users, such as the new RSS feature, but lists still offer you the ability to notify users with email. Lists are useful, but what really makes them powerful is the ability to add metadata that describes the columns included in a list. I start the discussion by looking at a basic list, created by using Site Columns. After that, I discuss Content Types and how you can use them to create more flexible and useful lists with a lot of distinct data in them.

In previous versions of SharePoint, it ...