Back to the basics of SharePoint
By Jennifer Mason
SharePoint offers great functionality out of the box. I find that when I spend too much time looking at complex issues, I often forget the simple things that provide so much impact to my solutions.Most of the time, these things are just little configurations that I can set that provide an extra layer of usability for my end users. I think it is good to take some time to remember all those basics, so here are some of the basics to remind you of the simple things, and to encourage you to try them out in your current solutions.• Using InfoPath to Display a List Form on a Page: You can use this trick when you need a way to take the data within the list and display it in a nice clean format. An example would be if you want an easy way to display Project Data on the home page. The data is stored in a list, so it is easily edited, but it is displayed using the Form Web Part. Easy to read and easy to administrate. Two wins for your power users! • Using the Calendar Overlay to Display Items Based on Category: If you need to quickly add color to an existing calendar, then Calendar Overlays are the way to go. You can do things such as color-code the items based on type or even based on due date. This trick would allow you to quickly display what tasks are late in red and anything due soon in yellow. By visually providing this information, you are helping get information quickly and in an easy-to-understand format to your users.• Default List Styles: There are many different ways to style your list views using out-of-the-box functionality. Each different style provides a different type of formatting. By taking advantage of these styles, you can help provide data in a clear and meaningful format for your users.• Create New Quick Steps & Custom Actions: One way that you can really help out your users is by making sure that they have all the information they need available to them right when they need it. By adding Quick Steps and Custom Actions, you can customize the Ribbon and the List Item drop-down and add links to the information they need. You can also use these to allow users to quickly start custom workflows. By taking the time to configure these items, you can really save your users a few clicks!I know it’s easy to see these items and think how easy it would be to use them in a solution, but oftentimes by the time we get around to our solution, we seem to have forgotten all the tricks and tips we learned along the way. So I would like to encourage you to spend some time with each solution you build to really look at the solution and identify the simple things that you can implement that can provide value to your users. Sometimes the smallest and simplest changes can have the biggest impact! Jennifer Mason is a consultant specializing in business user issues at SharePoint911, a Rackspace company.
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How to get the most from SPTechCon
By Eric Riz
The SharePoint community is known to be the most exciting and vibrant in the Microsoft space, with grassroots conferences seemingly weekly and a number of major conferences throughout the calendar year. BZ Media, the producer of SPTechCon, produces two of those major conferences annually, the first of which is coming up later this month.This year’s SPTechCon San Francisco is in two short weeks, taking place from February 26-29 and features 18 Microsoft MVPs and many other experts who are currently gearing up to share their knowledge with readers just like you! Having outgrown the previous conference site, the event has moved to the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and is guaranteed to be four days of non-stop-SharePoint. If you have never attended a SharePoint conference, you need to. These are great opportunities to speak with the best and brightest in the SharePoint community, including authors, speakers and vendors in the industry. You can pick up some pretty cool swag too, including all the pens you can possibly use and potentially some flying monkeys.For those already registered, here are some tips to maximize your conference experience:Plan Ahead: Work out your goals for the conference and find out what you want to learn, whom you want to meet, and how you want to connect with people. Knowing your goals for the conference before you get to your first session is very important; it will help you navigate the venue and ensure you’re in the right place at the right time. Each time slot features many different topics and presentations, so make sure that you’re attending the session that interests you most, and don’t be afraid to get up and switch talks if you don’t feel like the topic is for you. There will be many others available to choose from.Expert Access: Tuesday afternoon, you will have a chance to meet personally with many of the expert speakers featured by the conference. Experts will be divided into groups based on SharePoint categories (Governance, Branding, Customization, Adoption, Admin, Business, etc.), so be sure to come to the event with your toughest question.Follow Your Track: If you are attending the conference with colleagues, speak to your team and be sure that each track is appropriately represented. Once in your session, take notes and record the questions being asked in the room. When you’re online, upload the information to your team SharePoint site (which I’m sure you’ve created for the conference), giving your team and business access to your newly created SPTechCon library. If you are attending alone, follow the track that is best suited to your role and interests.Plan to Roam: The tradeshow floor is a not-to-be-missed venue and a great way to see the latest and greatest products and services in the community. With more than 60 exhibitors this year, the floor should certainly be visited many times throughout the conference.Attend the Keynotes: The keynotes are a great way to hear and learn about all things SharePoint. If you missed the SharePoint Conference in October, this is your chance to hear Jared Spataro and Dene Cleaver talk about this critical time for SharePoint as it climbs over the 125-million license mark.Collaborate and Share: SharePoint is all about collaborating, and SPTechCon gives attendees a great opportunity to connect with others in the community. The schedule and venue setup have been created to maximize the time people have to connect. Make sure you meet new people, peers and the speakers; you never know what information can be shared or learned through a simple conversation. If you have specific questions that you want answered, approach your speaker and set up a time to chat; we would be happy to set some time aside. Also, don’t forget to add the speakers on Twitter as most will be live-Tweeting and updating during the show. (Handles are available on www.sptechcon.com.)Attend the Parties: Need I say more?See you in San Francisco!Eric is the EVP of Systems Integration for Concatenate, a software firm focused on maximizing SharePoint through product innovation and systems integration based in Toronto. You can reach Eric by e-mail at ericr@concatenateinc.com or on Twitter at @rizinsights. Read his other SharePoint thoughts on his blog at www.ericriz.com.
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Branding SharePoint
By Ryan Keller
Your organization has successfully deployed SharePoint, and you and your colleagues have learned all about its document-management, collaboration and content-management features. But somehow you just can't shake the feeling that the look of such a powerful product leaves a little to be desired. Apparently management feels the same way, because now it's time to apply a little bit of style to SharePoint to spice it up a little, and maybe give it a look that's a little more in line with your organization's branding. So how do you go about this?There are a few options for branding a SharePoint site, ranging from the simple to the complex. In the simplest terms, you can apply a company logo to the SharePoint portal and call it a day. For some organizations, this may be enough to keep management happy, but what are the other options available?There is the theme engine, which essentially applies a color skin to the out-of-the-box SharePoint site. If none of the themes that ship with SharePoint work for you (and there's a good chance they won't), you can always create a custom theme using Office 2007 or 2010 and upload it, but even that might not get you the end results you want.Finally, you can dive in and do some custom branding yourself. This in itself is a bigger topic than a single article can cover, but the theory behind this point is the main focus of this article.Generally speaking, when you start branding SharePoint, you want to have an end goal in mind; that is, you should have an idea of what your branded site will look like. The best way to start thinking about this is to look at your organization's branding and think about how it can be applied to SharePoint. Think about the colors you generally see on company letterhead, the company's public website, the company logo, and other branded applications you may use on a day-to-day basis.Once you have a good idea about the color scheme, spend a little time surfing the Web for some additional inspiration, and if your boss catches you doing this, at least you can honestly say you're working! Maybe there are a few sites that have a certain look that you want to replicate. If this is your first time branding SharePoint, it's best to not get too crazy with your design, but whatever strikes your fancy can generally be replicated one way or another.#!Now that you have your inspiration, the next step generally is to create a mockup of what the end site will be. This will be helpful later for saving off any custom image files you want to use in the design. Think about the major components of SharePoint: You'll need to account for the ribbon interface; a header area, the top navigation and the left navigation; a place for the search box; and finally the main body area for content. You can use whatever image software you feel most comfortable with.This article assumes you have done your design and have enough CSS and HTML knowledge to get going. If you have experience with Web design in the past, some of what you know will come in handy, but SharePoint can sometimes be a tricky beast to style. This is because there is a lot going on behind the scenes to render the final HTML output you see in your browser window. Tracking down each little piece to which you’ll apply your custom styling can sometimes take a little extra work, but the end result will be well worth it.Most of the look of SharePoint is driven by three things: the master page, a page layout, and cascading style sheets. The master page acts as the skeleton of the page, and holds the position of the major components, such as the navigation areas, search, and the ribbon, and controls where the main content of the page will go. The page layout fits within a master page and controls how the main content of the page will look. Finally, CSS is used to add images, colors, text styles, and some positioning to the elements in the master page and page layout.When you are ready to start your custom branding, you will generally be using SharePoint Designer 2010 to create your custom master page, page layout and CSS. But where should all these components live? Master pages and page layouts live in the Master Page Gallery, which is accessed from the Site Settings Screen (Site Actions > Site Settings > Master Page and Page Layouts). CSS files, along with any custom images that accompany it, go in the Style Library (Site Actions > View All Site Content > Style Library), generally within a folder within the library to keep everything nice and tidy. If possible, you should try to do your branding in a development environment and deploy everything to the production server later.In SharePoint Designer, you'll start by creating a new master page. You can either start by copying one of the out-of-the-box master pages—v4.master or nightandday.master as a starting point for your new design—or you can create one from scratch. SharePoint requires several placeholders and controls to be present on a master page in order to render properly, so if you are starting from scratch, it is generally recommended to use a starter master page developed by members of the SharePoint community.For example, SharePoint MVP Randy Drisgill has an excellent starter master page with all the necessary placeholders already on the page. You can wrap these placeholders in your custom HTML and styles.#!As you build out the custom HTML in the master page, you will generally simultaneously build out the custom CSS that will determine the look and feel of the site once it renders in the browser. Once this is all finished, you can start building out any custom page layouts that you need, such as creating pages with different column layouts for various types of content. With a handful of images and some CSS knowhow you can really change the look of SharePoint pretty quickly.Two valuable tools you may end up using extensively are the IE Developer Tools (built into Internet Explorer), and Firebug, an add-on for Firefox. These tools can be very helpful to use when trying to track down a specific style to override within your custom CSS.Once you dive deeper into branding, you might start to work with content types and site columns, which allow you to add various fields to your pages. You can also add Web zones and Web Parts directly to your page layouts for even more customizations. The possibilities are nearly endless.When your design is done, the master page and page layouts work together, and you are happy with the final result, the next step would be to get the design applied to your production site. There are a few ways to do this: You could manually upload the master page, page layouts, CSS and image files, or the other (and more preferred) option is to have a developer package the files up into a solution file (a WSP file) and deploy it to the server. This topic is also out of scope for this article, but there is plenty of information out there on the Web.Hopefully this gives you a good start to planning out and implementing your custom SharePoint design when the boss comes around and asks you to give the SharePoint site more pizazz. Until next time, happy branding! Ryan Keller is a consultant with SharePoint911.
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More on the Content Organizer in SharePoint (Second of three parts)
By Chris Geier
In my previous article, I talked about the affects of the “Redirect Users to the Drop off Library” setting. This time I’ll dig into some more things you should know about the Content Organizer, including folder partitioning, managing duplicates and setting up rule managers.The Content Organizer is not just about moving content from library A to library B, or even between folder A and folder B. It can also help you partition those libraries and folders based on their sizes.How do you divide up containers, and how do you set thresholds as to how many items should be in each? The Content Organizer can help with this partitioning. As you can see from the Content Organizer settings image below, you can set thresholds to prevent destinations from getting too large in any one container:This setting allows you to specify your individual site threshold for each library or folder before it creates a new container (folder). You can also specify how you want the folder named. This does not have to be a permanent condition; rather, it can be a way of alerting you that you may need to do some reorganization of different folders or libraries manually.Managing duplicatesYou may be wondering what happens if in all this routing there are duplicate file names. Well, not only can you control the number of files going into your libraries or folders, but you can also control file duplicates. There is a provision for this: The Content Organizer will simply append a unique character to the end of each duplicate file as it writes the file to the destination folder or library.#!Rule managersBy now, you are blown away by the Content Organizer and can’t wait to get out there and start experimenting with it in your environment. But don’t forget about your rule managers. See the figure below for how this may look in the Content Organizer settings screen:These are the people who can be designated managers, and can come in and modify the rules you have set up so you don’t have to do it all yourself. These are also the people who can be notified via e-mail when files are being uploaded and are not matching rules, and thus placed in the drop-off library. Not only that, but if the file is placed in the drop-off library and you are expecting someone else to take care of it, you can also have it e-mail the rule managers if the file has been left there for a specified number of days, kind of like a reminder: “Hey this file is still over here waiting.”This is important because when a file does not match rules and is placed in the drop-off library, it is assigned unique permissions. Only the person who uploaded it and the rule managers will be able to go into the drop-off library and edit the metadata on that document, thus allowing it to be resubmitted to the Content Organizer—hopefully, this time, with enough information to match a rule.In part 3, I will look at Content Organizer and permissions, and sending to connections.Chris Geier is the community manager for K2, and is a participant in, and advocate for, the SharePoint community. He is a 15-year veteran of the technology industry and specializes in all things Microsoft. He was introduced to SharePoint in 2001 while working for Microsoft services.
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Keeping things simple to ensure SharePoint success
By John Ross
People often ask about tips for getting started with their SharePoint project, and usually my advice is to keep things simple and focus on what SharePoint does best (and avoid what it doesn’t do as well). Normally whenever these words come out of my mouth, I’m very aware of how silly it must sound to someone because it sounds rhetorical. But the fact of the matter is that failure to follow these two little tips is the reason why most SharePoint projects jump the tracks.The K.I.S.S. principleIf you aren’t familiar with the acronym K.I.S.S., it stands for Keep It Simple Stupid/Silly/SharePoint. The solution to any problem should be reasonably simple, but just for clarification that doesn’t mean that I’m advocating a specific way of solving the problem. For example, we’ve all talked to stakeholders who have some problem to solve, and we’ve probably all heard (or proposed) solutions that are the technical equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine (i.e. www.rubegoldberg.com). In these cases, you might address the original problem but would likely end up with long-term supportability issues.If you happen to find yourself in a position where a complex solution has been proposed by someone (or maybe you’ve been the one who proposed it), the best thing is often to step back and look at the original goal. Many times the answer is to improve and streamline the process (executives love stuff like that!), or maybe it would be possible to just make the technical solution less elaborate so that you’d still get business value but not the perceived “perfect world” solution. In my experience, it is okay. Remember that you can always enhance functionality in the future, but it is far more difficult to dial back complexity once it has been implemented.If you ignore the K.I.S.S. principle, you run the risk of delivering an overly complex solution that might be difficult to support and use. This can lead to loss of trust by your stakeholders. Start simple and create things that create real value for your stakeholders. If you do it right, they’ll ask you to do more, which is a very good problem to have! Focus on what SharePoint does best (and avoid what it doesn’t do as well)It seems like obvious advice to focus on what SharePoint does best and avoid what it doesn’t do so well. But when you are starting a SharePoint project, this could mean the difference between success and failure. You should be honest and ask yourself if you (or your team) really understand SharePoint well enough that you could be confident to propose a solution. And if it turns out that there’s a gap in your understanding, that’s okay too. We’ve all be there. SharePoint is a big product. But there are plenty of ways to close that gap, through books, training, online resources, or even getting some good help from an experienced external resource.One last thingThe other piece of advice that I normally tell people is to “avoid doing things that are hard.” Let me give you an example: We’ve all been in meetings where a business user asks for something, and the technical team looks at each other with pure horror, but then for some strange reason someone says to the user, “Yeah, we can do that.”This advice isn’t intended to mean that you should never implement anything difficult on a SharePoint project; the real moral is to pick your battles. Depending on your experience level of you or your team, what you consider difficult is going to vary. The most common issue I see is that a team that is experienced with other technologies, usually .NET, takes on a SharePoint project and then quickly realizes that things are more complex and nuanced than they expect. Usually one of two things happens: They either try to simplify functionality, or they forge ahead and implement something that many times that wouldn’t be considered a “best practice.”The reality is that every project is going to require that we tackle some difficult requirements. The analogy that I usually use to describe this is that back when I was in college, I’d try to be mindful of the courses that I was registering for. I knew that as I got closer to graduating, some of the courses I needed to take were going to be very difficult. I tried to spread these difficult classes out so that I never took more than one or two at a time and balanced them out with much easier classes. You can do the same thing with your SharePoint project: Split it up into several phases and try to spread out the more complex functionality so that it doesn’t become too overwhelming. Another thing to consider is that the complex functionality often takes more time to implement. Spreading that functionality into phases allows stakeholders to see things sooner. It normally makes a project go smoother when functionality can be rolled out for people to start using sooner as opposed to later. This approach also makes it easier to make small course corrections along the way as people start to use the functionality, which tends to lead to a better product in the long run.It seems like it wasn’t that long ago that I did my first SharePoint project. I’ll never forget when my boss walked past my cube, clapping his hands and shouting, “Who wants to do SharePoint?” That person ended up being me. Things have turned out pretty well, but I learned a lot of hard lessons during that first project—many of which I’ve shared in this short article.I’d be interested to hear from readers about these tips or others that they give. You can find me on Twitter: twitter.com/johnrossjr.John Ross is a SharePoint MVP and Senior Consultant with SharePoint911. He has over eight years of experience implementing solutions for clients ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, as well as government organizations. John is coauthor of the books “Professional SharePoint 2010 Branding and User Interface Design” and “Real World SharePoint 2010: Indispensable Experiences from 23 SharePoint MVPs.” Visit his blog at johnrossjr.wordpress.com.
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