SharePoint 2007 Administration for Non-Engineers

SP400 : 4 Day Instructor-Led Course

Design, Install, Administer, Manage, Monitor, Extend and Scale SharePoint 2007

In this four-day, Interface-exclusive course, you’ll learn to plan and design a successful SharePoint rollout, install and deploy SharePoint in organizations of different sizes, configure and integrate SharePoint with your existing infrastructure, administer and operate SharePoint once it’s installed, monitor and optimize SharePoint to get the most out of it, backup and restore SharePoint sucessfully, and extend and scale SharePoint to add more features, better performance and higher availability.

Audience:
This course is for people who are involved in the installation, day-to-day operations and administration of SharePoint. This is a highly technical position, though we describe this course as “for non-engineers” - we know people arrive at this role with different backgrounds. If you’re coming from a developer, webmaster or “power user” background, you may not be all that familiar with IIS, DNS and Active Directory – that’s okay: we include the necessary content to get you up to speed. (And of course, if you are an engineer, you’re more than welcome to attend.)
 
Prerequisites:
This is not an introduction to SharePoint 2007. You are expected to know the core SharePoint functionality and feature set.
The recommended prerequisite is our SP350 SharePoint 2007 Advanced Core Features class.
 
Deliverables:
SP400 Course Reference / Workbook
Certificate of Completion
 
Course Outline:

architect / design

You’ll explore the “official” Microsoft SharePoint planning and architecture guidelines. These are daunting and substantial documents that may be overkill for many organizations, so we also cover a more “agile” approach, concentrating on the most important decisions to make for a successful installation.
 
  • Example topologies for different organizations
  • Hardware Requirements
  • Understanding the logical architecture and jargon of SharePoint
  • Upgrading from previous versions of SharePoint
  • What must you decide before you install?
  • Windows Server 2003 vs. Windows Server 2008

install and deploy

You’ll understand the necessary prerequisites for installing SharePoint, then go through a full install onto a small server farm, learn to set up the initial SharePoint sites and site collections, and how to recover from “less-than-perfect” SharePoint deployments.
 
  • Creating the service accounts and groups correctly
  • Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
  • Shared Service Providers
  • Creating your first Site Collection
  • SharePoint Central Administration
  • Setting up Test and Production environments

configure and integrate

SharePoint needs to play well with other parts of your infrastructure. Explore how SharePoint works with Active Directory, Exchange, IIS, DNS and SQL Server.
  • User Profiles and importing profile data from Active Directory
  • Creating Audiences
  • Configuring My Sites
    • Setting up role-based templates for My Sites
  • Web Applications and the link between SharePoint and IIS
  • Email integration
  • DNS – what you need to know

update

Updating SharePoint is not a simple task; there’s a lot more to it than just clicking “next”. In this section, you learn methods and best practices for deploying updates, fixes and service packs.

administer

With SharePoint successfully installed, learn the tools you’ll use to keep it running successfully day-to-day.
  • Central Administration
  • Using the STSADM command-line tool
  • Powershell – it’s not essential, but it can make your life easier
  • Creating security groups
  • Making your life easier by delegating administrative responsibilities to “power users”
  • Recovering deleted content

operate

  • Understanding, activating and deactivating SharePoint features
  • Enterprise features: configuring Forms Services, Excel Services and the Business Data Catalog
  • Creating a Records Center for use in the Farm
  • Configuring Search
    • Indexing external resources
    • Crawl rules and search scopes
    • Extending search with Ifilters
  • Using SharePoint for an Extranet site
  • Using SharePoint for an Internet site

monitor and optimize

Learn how to monitor the use and performance of SharePoint. Learn the reports you should be looking at to understand what people are doing in the SharePoint installation.
  • Monitoring usage reports
  • How to improve performance without buying more hardware:
    • exploring the different background and timer jobs
    • indexing and how it affects performance
    • caching options

backup and restore

  • AntiVirus solutions for SharePoint
  • Where, when and how to backup successfully
  • Full and partial restores
  • Disaster recovery

extend

  • Deploy custom features
  • Deploy new web parts
  • Deploying custom workflows
  • Installing Site Templates and Content Types across Site Collections

scale

As your installation becomes more complex, learn when to start adding servers to support more users or more usage.
  • When to move to more machines
  • Soft (and hard) limitations of SharePoint
  • Methods of migrating to multiple machines
  • Adding a server to the farm
  • Scaling out the database
  • Quiescing the farm