INTRODUCTION
SHAREPOINT 2010 IS THE TALK OF THE TOWN. You can barely take a subway ride in NYC these days without bumping into someone doing something with SharePoint. These are exciting times for the SharePoint community. The entire world seems to be implementing SharePoint.
And that’s great. However, when you survey the SharePoint landscape, you find that many organizations just barely scratch the surface of SharePoint 2010’s capabilities. They install and configure SharePoint and quickly turn it into an overpriced “S Drive” (shared network drive). Too many companies put up an out-of-the box team site, create a few document libraries with some views, start uploading documents left and right, and call it a day. That’s a real shame and one of the key motivations for the authors of this book.
Why is it a shame? It’s a shame because SharePoint can do a lot more than the simple stuff such as document management, lists and views, search, and so on. That’s not to say that the simple stuff isn’t valuable or unworthy in any way. However, the platform offers a lot more capability. The authors aim to expose and dive deep into one of those capabilities: business process automation using workflow.
Why does this happen? Why do so many companies underutilize this gem of a platform? It happens for a number of reasons. First, SharePoint is to a great extent a victim of its own success. It’s a very successful platform in part because it’s so very easy to install and set up. IT departments don’t ...
