Introduction
Whether you work in a large multinational corporation or in a tiny family-owned company,
you have at least one thing in common: it’s a challenge to secure IT resources to solve
common everyday business problems. In a large corporation, resources are typically
spent on the big projects that have a significant cost benefit to the company. When you
make a request for assistance, you’re probably called upon to justify the business value of
your request. If you aren’t planning to save the company millions of dollars, you’re out of luck.
At the other end of the spectrum, all a small company might know about IT is that it was
a member of the cast of the Addams Family TV show.
Although initial installation of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server requires administrative
expertise, even a company with no technical staff can buy hosting from a SharePoint
hosting company (see Appendix C), and in minutes have aWindows SharePoint Services
site for its team. As we’ve delved deeper and deeper into the possibilities that SharePoint
offers, one thing has become crystal clear: a high-end user within a department can develop
highly sophisticated SharePoint sites, business dashboard, and data sharing systems without
a lick of programming. This puts tremendous power in the hands of end users and IT
business analysts who want quick, easy-to-implement solutions for their users.

Who This Book Is For
This book is intended for IT professionals and for business users who see the benefits of
electronic collaboration and want to maximize the tools they already have available. Most
books of this type are written for programmers and require a high level of technical
knowledge. Because there’s so much you can do with SharePoint and Excel without
programming, we intentionally excluded techniques and solutions that require programming.
Our intention was to make this book accessible to those high-end users who aren’t
programmers but who, with the right level of knowledge, can still make a big difference in
solving business problems in their organizations. In other words, even if you don’t know
the difference between XML, SQL, and .NET, you can create powerful team collaboration
solutions with SharePoint and Exce