Real World SharePoint® 2007: Indispensable Experiences from 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs

Chapter 1. Introduction to SharePoint

by Mike Walsh

When PCs were new, there were two main computer magazines — Byte from McGraw-Hill and PC Magazine from Ziff-Davis. The older Byte covered not just PCs, but also Apples, and was a tough read in parts, whereas PC Magazine concentrated entirely on PCs and was placed at the ability level of most of its readers. Ziff-Davis covered the "professional" market with a magazine called PC Tech Journal, and despite hardly being able to understand much of it, I subscribed to this because I thought that in time I would. Two years later, I was just about able to start following the articles, so naturally Ziff-Davis then pulled it and that was the end of that.

If you bought this book without having been responsible in some way for any previous SharePoint product, you are roughly at the level with SharePoint where I was with PC computing more than 20 years ago — that is, you have a good knowledge of computing in general, just no specific experience of the SharePoint products. Because I'm assuming that you don't have a couple of years available to you while things click into place, this first chapter is for you. This chapter provides the basic knowledge you need to be able to follow the rest of the book.

This chapter is not for people with existing knowledge of SharePoint products. You have the choice of going directly to Chapter 2 or (and this seems most likely) picking and choosing among the chapters that follow. Some chapters will talk about SharePoint ...