Announcing: Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007

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[Updated March 11, 2008: Based on your feedback, we have created a downloadable version of this guide. It's the same content, but now available in a convenient .doc format.]

 

Hello, ECM Team Blog readers. My name is Rob Silver. I'm a technical writer working on the IT Pro content team for Office SharePoint Server 2007. I'm excited to announce that the Office SharePoint Server 2007 content teams for the IT pro, developer, and site designer audiences have combined efforts to write and publish a new online guide: Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007. This guide is aimed at developers, solution designers, architects, and business unit IT pros who plan to develop one or more custom enterprise sites by using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 - such as company-wide portal sites or Internet presence sites.

Roadmaps to customization content

Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes highly customizable features and capabilities across multiple product areas, such as business intelligence, forms, workflows, and document management. The levels of expertise required to customize these various features ranges from software developer to site designer to information worker. Content supporting these customization tasks is spread across multiple Microsoft Web sites, including the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN), TechNet, and Office Online, depending on the targeted audience for the content. Rather than duplicate all that content in Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007, the guide includes Feature roadmap pages for most customizable product areas. Each roadmap page for an area provides links to customization resources for that area, across all of the above-listed Web sites. In this guide, we include feature roadmap pages for:

Guidance for configuring development, integration, pilot, and production environments

Coordinating the development and deployment of an enterprise-level custom site based on Office SharePoint Server 2007 is quite a complex activity. Custom sites often combine coded elements, such as workflows, document converters, and Web Parts, along with content, such as master pages, layout pages, graphics files, and Web pages. We've rolled up best practices for developing these sites including instructions for setting up multiple environments for developing, integrating, piloting, and deploying the coded elements and content from one environment to another.

Our Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007 content describes how to set up the multiple environments used in the development process and describes the range of your choices for deploying the content and code from one environment to another.

Feedback wanted

We're very excited about publishing Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007, but particularly we're interested in your feedback on this new content. Do you find it useful? Is it the right level of detail? Is there additional content you'd like to see added? Do you agree or disagree with particular recommendations? We want to make this guide more and more useful in response to your feedback.

There are three ways you can provide feedback on Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007. First, in each topic you will find a "Was this information helpful?" control with a text box for supplying feedback. Second, you can send us mail at o12ITdx at Microsoft.com. Third, you can use the "Leave a Comment" interface in this blog to provide comments, either on this blog entry or on the Design and build sites for Office SharePoint Server 2007 content.

We're looking forward to hearing from you and to evolving this content in partnership with you!

Thanks,

Rob Silver

Office SharePoint Server IT Pro content team