The traditional collaborative file share has lived its 15-odd–year life
well. From its roots in other network OSs, through its proliferation during
the explosive growth of Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 file
servers, to today, the file share served our needs. But it's fading into the
sunset, and a new day is dawning: the era of collaborative document sharing
using Windows SharePoint Services document libraries. To grasp the implications
of the shift to document libraries, you'll need to understand first why they're
destined to replace file shares in most common filesharing scenarios. (Sometimes,
file shares still serve the purpose better than document libraries. For a look
at these scenarios, see the sidebar "I'm Not Dead Yet!".) From there, you'll
need to get a handle on the fundamentals of document library implementation:
creating, configuring, and securing libraries and viewing, editing, and monitoring
documents in those libraries.
By document libraries, I mean primarily typical information-worker shared folder
scenarios, in which groups of users—a team, a department, or even an
entire organization—share access to files for day-to-day reference and
collaboration. SharePoint document libraries will very likely replace file shares
in these scenarios. Document libraries enable capabilities that are crucial
to an agile, collaborative enterprise—including checkout and monitoring,
which I'll discuss here—as well as version history, content approval,
workflow, and remote and offline access, which I'll cover in upcoming articles.
Creating a Document Library
Let's start with how to implement document libraries in Windows SharePoint Services
3.0 (the process is virtually identical in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server
2007). To create a document library from a standard SharePoint team site, or
most other templates, either click View All Site Content in the Quick Launch
bar and click Create, or click the Site Actions button and choose Create.
In the Libraries section, you can see what libraries are available, and your
first task will be to determine what type of library you require. Document libraries
are the closest equivalent to traditional, collaborative file shares. Picture
libraries are specialized for graphics and include a useful thumbnails view
and a well-implemented slide-show view. There are also form libraries, wiki
page libraries, and (in SharePoint Server 2007) several other types of document
libraries.
When you choose to create a document library, you're asked to enter a name
and description, and you can configure the document library to appear in the
left panel, Quick Launch navigation, and whether versioning is enabled. In the
Document Template section of the page, which Figure
1 shows, you can also specify the type of document that's created when users
click the New button in the document library.
If a document library will generally or exclusively contain one type of document,
such as generic Microsoft Office Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and if that type
is in the Document Template drop-down list, select it. However, in certain situations
you should choose None as the template:
- The template for the type of document you want to create when clicking the
New button in the document library isn't listed.
- The library will contain a custom document type (e.g., Contracts, Expense
Reports).
- The library will be used to create multiple document types.
- A document library will be populated only by uploading documents, not by
clicking the New button.
After you've created the document library, you can modify each of these configurations
in the document library settings by clicking the Settings button and choosing
Document Library Settings. In fact, I urge you to go to the document library's
settings immediately after creating the library, so that you can configure it
to fully support the capabilities you require, such as forced check-out and
version history.
Finally, if you expect to provide search for your document library, you might
need to add IFilters, which are plug-ins that enable SharePoint to index specific
document types, such as PDFs. The Microsoft article "No Adobe PDF documents
are returned in the search results when you search a Windows SharePoint Services
3.0 Web Site" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=927675)
explains how to install the Adobe PDF IFilter and modify the registry to enable
SharePoint search to crawl and index PDF documents. Be sure to install the IFilter
early, before adding documents of that type to the library. SharePoint includes
a number of IFilters for common document types, including Microsoft's own document
types. Contact application vendors, such as Adobe Systems, for IFilters that
support their document types.
Managing Security
You'll probably want to configure permissions, which can be assigned to any
securable object in the SharePoint model—that is, a top-level site,
subsite, library or list, folder, document, or item. By default, permissions
are inherited from the parent object, so that permissions applied to the top-level
site are inherited by all sites, libraries, and documents. But you can "break"
the inheritance at any object in the hierarchy, then configure permissions on
that object, which will then be inherited from that point downward.
To set permissions on a document library, open the library. Click Settings,
Document Library Settings, then click Permissions for this document library.
Current permissions are displayed, and the description bar shows the text This
library inherits permissions from its parent web site. Click the
Actions menu button, then click Edit Permissions, and confirm by clicking OK.
Permissions previously inherited from the parent object will be copied as the
default new explicit permissions for this library, and you can then add, remove,
or modify permissions to meet your requirements. To change the permissions of
users or groups, you can select groups or users and use commands in the
Actions button menu (Remove User Permissions and Edit User Permissions). To
add a new user or group and configure its permissions, click New, as Figure
2 shows.
Although the UI suggests that these are "user permissions," in actuality you
can configure permissions for any user or group. Accounts can be SharePoint
groups (created by clicking Site Actions, finding the Site Settings command,
then navigating to People and Groups) or users or groups from the site's
authentication provider(s) such as Active Directory (AD). As with Windows folder
permissions, it's a best practice to manage permissions by using groups, not
individual users, but there are always exceptions to that rule. I also recommend
that you use SharePoint, rather than AD, groups because of the ease with which
site administrators who are nontechnical users can manage SharePoint group memberships.
Using SharePoint groups also makes it possible to configure SharePoint groups
to enable access requests—a powerful permissions-management provisioning
capability.
Be aware that once an object no longer inherits permissions from its parent,
any changes to the parent won't "drill down" to the object. To revert an object
to inheriting permissions from its parent, click the Actions button on the Permissions
Settings page and choose Inherit Permissions. Doing so removes all explicit
permissions. Unlike Windows NTFS permissions, a SharePoint object can't have
a mixture of both inherited and explicit permissions: only one or the other.
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