The Microsoft Project 2009 Conference kicked off yesterday officially, but today the big news around what will come in 2010 was announced and we have the details for you. Of course, we won't be talking about MS Project 2010 without talking about SharePoint — that's just how it will be from now on.
3Mar/111
Accessing the term store as a manager or contributor
Accessing the term store as a manager or contributor
Today 03/03, we ran into a situation where one of the users who manage the SharePoint 2010 Site was unable to access the term store management links.
I've touched on the term store a few times in posts this year. But as ever the best way to learn a new tool is to get a bit of practical experience. So I came across this little nugget this week when onsite with a client. Firstly a bit of background on the term store.
The building blocks of the term store are:
- Metadata application: Top level container of our term store. Contains groups
- Groups: Term sets are collected together in groups
- Term set: A hierarchical group of related terms
- Term: The basic building block of the term store. A metadata word
The term store can be managed by the following three groups of people:
- Term store administrator: Full control over the term store, and able to assign other people roles.
- Group managers: This role allows a user to manage a particular group of term sets
- Contributers: This role allows users to manage terms sets in a particular group, but they are not able to create additional contributers.
Term sets also have 'owner' and 'stakeholders' properties but these aren't actually used for anything.
Anyway the reason for this was post was to talk about how the roles described above access the term store. If the user has sufficient permissions to see 'site settings in 'site actions' then there isn't really an issue. They can navigate to site settings, and into the term store. However if the user cannot see the 'site actions' button their is no easy way to navigate to the term store at all. In fact it seems the only way is to link directly to it (and make sure you link to the term stored access via 'site setting's not central administration) and either distribute the link or post it somewhere. Whilst we have always had different permissions models outside of the standard user access model, this feels a bit different and all a bit unfinished. Have a look and see what you think. Comments below please.
9Feb/111
Catch 22 for Approval Workflow in SharePoint Designer
Today 02/09 I began blogging on this, and found someone else's blogpost from Dec 2010 who also blogged on this exact topic. Though I never saw his blog post prior to writing this, credit to Lars Nielson.
I ran into an interesting dilemma while working on my most recent project. The project involved a number of document libraries that required content approval as well as versioning.
The scope of work greatly limited the amount of customizations that could be made to SharePoint (i.e. building workflows in Visual Studio).
This introduced an interesting problem based on our initial game plan. The workflow is basically a document goes through a change process and committee approvals before it is published. End Users cannot see changes until an approved document is published.
The change process was the complicated piece to this because the organization had a number of variables within the process, so the only solution was to require each step in the workflow to be manually kicked off.
When I made it to the approval stage, we initially had content approval on in the libraries. And here is where the catch 22 comes in, trying to set content approval status to Approved in a document library that requires a document to be checked out and content approval is on.
To set the content approval status from Designer, ok easy enough, there is an action for that....uh oh, the document must first be checked out. ok, check out document, set approval status....uh oh, I get an error that says content approval status cannot be set while a document is checked out.
Catch 22. Basically to set content approval status in designer, the document must be checked out, but content approval status cannot be changed while a document is checked out.
Possible work-around - We did not go this route, we basically turned off content approval, and used a workflow to notify approvals, and once approval was granted, a user would publish a major version of the document. This was acceptable for this engagement.
I was going to explain the workaround here, but I ran across a blog post while getting my info together of someone who already documented it. So in the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, Lars gets credit for this solution. Lars Nielson blogged on this exact topic in late 2010. http://discoverlars.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/update-the-approval-status-in-a-sharepoint-designer-workflow/
The bottom line in this is that for highly complex workflows, you really need Visual Studio.
9Feb/111
SharePoint 2010 boundaries, Thresholds and Supported limits
SharePoint 2010 boundaries, Thresholds and Supported limits
Many would be considering SharePoint 2010 for their environment and questions will be asked to SharePoint Admins and Architects on the product.
Here is some handy information from Microsoft on the limitations (boundaries) of SharePoint 2010.
Before we dive into it, letz define what are the limit types:
- Boundaries: Static limits that cannot be exceeded by design
- Thresholds: Configurable limits that can be exceeded to accommodate specific requirements
- Supported limits: Configurable limits that have been set by default to a tested value.
8Oct/102
What Drives Social Media in SharePoint?
Ask a crowd of people whether they believe social computing is important within the enterprise, and you usually see -- at best -- an even split of yes and no answers. More often than not, the majority of people answer no. As I present on the topic at various conferences and SharePoint Saturday events, most people attend my session not because they believe social computing is critical to their business, but because they want to understand why they should care.
With so many people ambivalent to social computing, why is it that one of the top technology trends is the expansion of social computing features across enterprise applications? One problem with perception is that people tend to focus on the consumer social media applications without considering the underlying application of the technologies that power them, and how those features and capabilities might improve the enterprise.
So why should you care about social media in SharePoint? Well, let’s take a look at some of the problems you may be experiencing within your environment:
- You’ve spent months migrating content into your shiny, new SharePoint environment. You’ve moved your information silos from your old, proprietary portal or file shares to SharePoint. NOW WHAT???
- You were sold on the idea of search, but you can’t find anything.
- You can’t tell who owns what.
- You can’t tell what’s new, what’s old, or what has changed.
- You realize that all of your data is now disconnected.
How do you solve these problems? The answer is managed metadata, thoughtful taxonomy, and a solid governance model. The answer is to roll out social computing tools within SharePoint to improve search and provide additional methods for surfacing data within your environment. Think of it as a software stack:
Metadata powers both structured (taxonomy) and unstructured (ad hoc) collaboration, which is then filtered by the various social media tools, which is an extension of search, which makes your team site, portal, and content relevant to end users. Across all of these pieces is your governance model, ensuring all of the moving parts are working together.
Metadata is the key to making social media work inside the enterprise. It makes social media work within SharePoint, it makes your content visible to end users, and it powers search. Metadata makes your environment useable, linkable, relevant. Metadata is the building block of social media within SharePoint.
When thinking through your own social media strategy, its important that you recognize this connection between social computing, metadata, and search. It will help you to sell your team and management chain on the powerful impact of social media in the enterprise, and, more importantly, help you realize the full potential of your SharePoint investments.
8Oct/100
SharePoint Security Update
Microsoft announced a security advisory that affects many SharePoint deployments.
Recently Microsoft announced Security Advisory 2416728 (Vulnerability in ASP.NET) and SharePoint. The vulnerability affects the following SharePoint versions
- SharePoint 2010
- SharePoint Foundation 2010
- Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
- Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
- Windows SharePoint Services 2.0
Microsoft has posted an out-of-band security update that should be applied ASAP on the SharePoint web front-end servers for affected deployments. The SharePoint team blog is the best source for more information:
SharePoint Team Blog
2Aug/100
Best Practices in Developing Requirements for SharePoint Projects
This is one of my favorites blog posts from SharePoint Project Management Guru-Dux Raymond Sy.
I had the great opportunity to facilitate "Best Practices in Developing Requirements for SharePoint Projects" webcast for O'Reilly Media last July 28, 2010.
You can download the PPT presentation at: http://bit.ly/d1xbLN
Click the image below to watch the recorded presentation:
As promised, you can download the templates I showed at: http://www.meetdux.com/dl/req4sp.zip
In addition, I have compiled a list of valuable SharePoint resources related to the webcast:
- PM Resources for SharePoint 2010 Projects
- How SharePoint Can Deliver Project Transparency
- 5 Reasons Why SharePoint Ignorance is not Bliss
- Are you doing what it takes to Success at Implementing SharePoint?
- SharePoint Worst Practices: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid
Lastly, if you want to join this session live, make sure you attend Best Practices Conference in DC from Aug 24-27, 2010
26Jul/102
Download SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit 1.0
A new collection of resources offered by Microsoft as a free download is designed to streamline the administration and management of SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit is essentially a package of tools, some of which were already available as standalone releases before SharePoint 2010 shipped. However, version 1.0 of the toolkit comes with functionality tailored to the latest iteration of SharePoint, the Redmond Company emphasized.
There are no less than four tools packaged in the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit 1.0. Doron Bar-Caspi, Sr. Program Manager, SharePoint, offered a description of the toolkit’s content, which you will be able to find included below. Customers running SharePoint 2010 can now leverage Security Configuration Wizard (SCW) manifests; Load Testing Toolkit (LTK); User Profile Replication Engine 2010 (UPRE2010); and the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) connector in order to perform management tasks.
Here is Bar-Caspi’s description of the tools included in the first release of the SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit:
“• User Profile Replication Engine 2010 (UPRE2010): this tool got a complete overhaul and was converted to PowerShell. It now allows you to replicate Profile and Social data between SharePoint 2010’s User Profile Application (UPA), as well as backward compatibility with SharePoint 2007’s SSP. You can replicate between SSP’s or UPA services, as well as across versions. (Note that only Profile data can be replicated across versions, as SSP contains no Social activity tracking).
• The Security Configuration (SCW) Manifest: SCW is an attack surface reduction feature in Windows Server. This manifest adds roles for SharePoint 2010 Products to Windows Server 2008 with SP2 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
• The Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Connector: enables SharePoint users to interact with content stored in any repository that has implemented the CMIS standard, as well as making SharePoint 2010 content available to any application that has implemented the CMIS standard.
• The Load Testing Kit (LTK): LTK generates a Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) load test based on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 IIS logs. The VSTS load test can be used to generate synthetic load against Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 as part of a capacity planning exercise or a pre-upgrade stress test.”
The SharePoint 2010 Administration Toolkit 1.0 is available for download here
23Jun/100
Excel 2002 and SharePoint- Unable to open and edit the spreadsheet and save
Today one of the SharePoint Users called me for help with Sharepoint. The User was trying to open the Excel Spreadsheet from Sharepoint and was not able to make any changes or edits to the document and also could not save any changes. when he tries to open the Excel Spreadsheet(.xslx). the spreadsheet opens up in the web browser but will not allow the user to make any changes and the option to save it is not available.
I remoted in to his machine and found that the user had Office 2002 installed on his machine. Once we upgraded the current version of office 2002 to office 2007, everything worked like charm....
23Jun/100
Reasons Why Your SharePoint Users Hate You!
SharePoint User Adoption is key for a Successful SharePoint Implementation, you might not realize this, but your users hate you. That’s right. Hate you. They hate you because you are responsible for SharePoint and their experience sucks of late. What started out as a promising way to collaborate has turned into a burden. Your users know they should use SharePoint to better manage the vast amount of information and data they create. They love the power and ease of use of SharePoint, but after a litany of issues with their environment they have given up and gone back to using file shares and email. Here’s why they hate you and what you can do to make them love you again.
No one is in charge.... That's not right?
Your users need help. They have lots of questions, concerns, and issues. They want to know how to design their site, how to recover data, and if they should trust their site after that 2 hour outage yesterday. But there is no one to talk to. There’s no face of SharePoint, no one cares about them and their problems. Sites go down and come back up hours later with no explanation. Worse, users contact helpdesk for help. Three days later they find out that nothing can be done and their ticket is closed.
Maybe you know this is a problem and you are trying to solve it. Perhaps you are too busy managing the company’s Exchange infrastructure to focus on this little SharePoint niche. Maybe you don’t want users to know you are in charge. All those questions, accusations, and anger are too much to handle. Regardless, it’s time to step up and take charge. Here’s how:
- Create a FAQ wiki. Make sure users can ask questions and that you answer them.
- Take charge of helpdesk.
- Send an email to the entire company. Communicate 3 main things. You’re in charge. You care. You are looking into their problems and will communicate solutions soon. Let them know about your helpdesk improvements and your new wiki.
- Follow up.
- After reading the rest of this series and resolving issues 1 through 4, send out another email letting your users know what you have done. It’s a quick way to garner respect and possibly a way to build an empire.
26Apr/100
Microsoft Announces SharePoint 2010 Launch
SharePoint 2010 news:
Microsoft has announced that Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 will be released on May 12, 2010.
The description of product enhancements is both impressive and exciting. From the complete feature list, posted on the official Microsoft Team Blog, my top 5 feature enhancements are as follows.
- Large Lists and Libraries – We made architecture and user experience investments so you have much larger document libraries with metadata driven navigation to help users go quickly to the content that is most important to them. Libraries will scale to tens of millions and archives to hundreds of millions of documents. This is a key investment for high-end document and records management but also helps organizations with lots of smaller sites. We enhanced the workflow capabilities and tools in SharePoint Designer.
- Document Sets – We are introducing a way to manage a collection of documents as a single object for workflow, metadata, etc. within SharePoint and Office so experience more closely models your work product (e.g. a proposal that may contain a presentation, budget, contract, etc.).
- Excel Services – Excel rendering and interactivity in SharePoint gets better with richer pivoting, slicing and visualizations like heatmaps and sparklines. New REST support makes it easier to add server-based calculations and charts to web pages and mash-ups.
- SQL Server – The SharePoint and SQL Server teams have worked together so SQL Server capabilities like Analysis Services and Reporting Services are easier to access from within SharePoint and Excel. We are exposing these interfaces and working with other BI vendors so they can plug in their solutions as well.
- Access Services - Users have long loved the ability to create database applications quickly with forms and views. Access Services lets you publish new Access solutions to a SharePoint site where they can be managed centrally and accessed (necessary pun) from a web browser.
21Apr/100
Don’t Miss DC’s Biggest SharePoint Saturday Event in May! It’s FREE!
I hope you’re having a great week! It’s a little over 3 weeks and it’s SharePoint Saturday DC! We’d like to update you on what we were doing to prepare for this major event on May 15:
Venue has been finalized and it’s confirmed that we can fit 1200 people
Sponsors have been confirmed and finalized
There will be around 89 speakers and 84 sessions that will be delivered
Raffle prizes include Apple iPad, Netbook, Zune HD, SharePoint books, training passes, Access to online content from Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, and many more!
WE NEED YOUR HELP to spread the word about SPSDC and make sure people know about this event. So if you can, pls. contact at least 1 person via email/IM/facebook/twitter/linkedin/blog with the following message:
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SUBJECT: Don’t Miss DC’s Biggest SharePoint Event in May! It’s FREE!
BODY:
Hi!
I’d like to invite you to SharePoint Saturday DC on May 15. SharePoint Saturday DC is a FREE, community driven, 1-day event that provides education around SharePoint at all levels.
You wouldn’t want to miss this event as there will be around 89 speakers and 84 sessions that will be delivered. Touted as the biggest SharePoint event in Washington, DC right after SharePoint 2010 is launched, 800 people are expected to attend. Get to network with SharePoint experts and get a chance to win raffle prizes such as Apple iPad, Netbook, Zune HD, SharePoint books, training passes, Access to online content from Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2009, and many more!
So what are you waiting for? Register now http://bit.ly/spsdc3
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Let us know if you have any questions! Looking forward to see you on May 15!
13Apr/101
SharePoint, Be My Valentine: From a Glorified Network Share to an Enterprise Platform
I really liked the way Dux made this anology of SharePoint to "My Valentine"
Being known Dux for his sense of Humor, it is always great to see Dux in action especially in his seminars and the workshops. I personally know Dux for quite some time now and always try to get with him. His Favorite answer is "IT Depends"
13Apr/101
Is SharePoint 2010 Relevant?
We did the installation of MOSS 2010 Beta in our lab for testing and every thing looked great except that many of our users were not really ready for it. We did a survey to whether or not move to MOSS 2010. Surprisingly the Poll results were ... we were not MOSS 2010 Ready yet?... and we also recently figured out that we do not have the Software Assurance for MOSS 2007 and now we have to continue with the existing version. But in my personal opinion, I completely agree with Mark Miller with his statement on MOSS 2010.
13Apr/100
MOSS Installation Pitfalls
The Office SharePoint Server 2007 administrators now have three years of experience in installing MOSS in various environments. I thought to gather here all the common errors faced in MOSS installation process. Most of these are now luckily documented in MS KB articles. This was not case a year or two ago.
13Apr/101
MS Project 2010: Goodbye Portfolio Server, Hello SharePoint
MS Project 2010: Goodbye Portfolio Server, Hello SharePoint