SharePoint Insights by Keller Schroeder - Evansville, Indiana's SharePoint Experts

Keller Schroeder is a K2 Partner

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Thu, 16 May 2013 04:10:00 +0000

If I haven’t mentioned it lately, I wanted to remind you that every business needs SharePoint – some just don’t know it yet. I have said many times that if the only reason you use SharePoint is for document management, then it is still worth it. There are many benefits to classifying and versioning your documents and forms in SharePoint that result in efficiency gained and dollars saved. I often say, however, that document management is just the tip of the SharePoint iceberg. You can multiply efficiency and cost savings by using workflow to automate your business activities.

Unfortunately, as computer processing power has increased exponentially over the past few decades, human beings have not kept up with the pace. In fact, the digital advances have ultimately resulted in more information for a person to process, more responsibilities for a person to manage, and higher expectations set for a person – often making that person more of a bottleneck. Opinions vary widely regarding the number of decisions a person makes in a day – ranging from hundreds to thousands. As an organization, it is critical that the participants in your key business activities make their decisions and perform their duties in a timely manner. “Yes,” you wonder, “but how can SharePoint help with that?”

In addition to storing, versioning, and categorizing your documents, SharePoint provides a framework for workflow to move key documents and information from one person to the next. Information is validated in real time, and routed to the appropriate participants along the way. The information is secure. The activities are logged for auditing purposes. A well-structured workflow will eliminate most of the guess work. There are some useful workflows included with SharePoint, but we have often found that our clients would want us to develop workflows that are unique to their business requirements. As we developed these custom workflows, we began to recognize patterns in what our clients were asking for, and gaps that SharePoint did not fill out of the box. Sometimes the gaps were costly to develop around, so we began to look for a better way. The better way, in our case, came in the form of a partnership with K2.

Before I continue, I want to mention that although I am convinced that every business needs SharePoint, I am also convinced that not every software development project is a great fit for SharePoint. In the same way, not every workflow project is a fit for K2. One advantage to working with an experienced SharePoint partner such as Keller Schroeder is that you can rely on our guidance for which approach is best for your particular situation. You really need to consider both the near term and the long term. The minute you choose to automate a second business activity with SharePoint (or possibly without), you double the importance of evaluating a product like K2.

For now, I wanted to take this opportunity to announce our partnership with K2. We appreciate their great products, and we appreciate just as much their partnering attitude and their quality people. In a coming series of posts, I am going to focus on some use cases for business process automation. I will introduce you to the K2 products. Other members of our team will post some how-to articles with great examples of our K2 and/or SharePoint work. I will kick it all off with a post on the gaps that K2 fills, and the reasons we chose to partner with K2.

SharePoint – Understanding Your Options

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 03:18:00 +0000

As a veteran software consultant (in my 20th year), I take pride in not overusing the phrase "it depends." I realize a client works with us because he or she is looking for a solution, and we try to narrow it down to the best solution possible. Unfortunately, working with SharePoint the last several years, I sometimes have to bite my tongue to avoid saying those words. Arriving at the best solution seems to take a little more diligence than before, simply because there are more choices than before. Having choices is not necessarily a bad thing, but having an abundance of choices can certainly complicate things a bit.

There are numerous ways to address many business challenges in SharePoint. There are so many books, so many blogs, and so many experts. Sometimes, the experts seem to contradict each other on what is a best practice. Sometimes, even the Microsoft product teams seem to contradict each other. I definitely have my preferences, based on good and not-so-good experiences over time. I suggest that “best practice” should be used a little differently than it is often used. For example, someone may ask me to identify the “best practice” for surfacing his or her line of business data in SharePoint. Once I have considered the unique business requirements and environment, I will make a recommendation (the best of many considered), then follow best practices to implement the solution.

Some experts will say that it is a best practice to always use Visual Studio to develop SharePoint solutions. They make good points. Some try to do everything “out of the box,” and others favor power user tools, such as SharePoint Designer. My own experiences tell me that it is best to have isolated development, test, and production environments – and I certainly prefer developing SharePoint features as Visual Studio solutions. However, the reality is that some clients have limited environments, no means for supporting Visual Studio solutions, and a propensity for the power user tools. So we use the tools that are the best fit based on the circumstances. If I am using SharePoint Designer, I follow best practices for developing with SharePoint Designer.

Some of the more popular, and sometimes controversial, blog posts and articles on SharePoint are the ones about "what does it really mean to be a SharePoint developer?" and "what not to do on SharePoint." A recent example from my feed reader was this one. The author makes some good points, but as you can see in the comments, there is some dissention. Personally, I think all three points are valid in certain situations. The dissenters think that some of the points are invalid – probably because their situations were different. What this demonstrates is that the best solution is relative to the circumstances, and the best experts are those who have seen the most situations over the longest period of time. I have yet to find a solution that is “always” the best solution, and I rarely say “never.”

A consultant may architect a development approach with the best intentions. The approach may align with your in-house skills, allow for rapid application development, and produce quality code on a consistent basis over an extended time period. Then, three years later, you may be required to upgrade your SharePoint farm to the latest version, and find that all of that code is going to make the upgrade much more complicated because of the way it was implemented. An architect that has gone through SharePoint migrations before may have steered you in a different direction architecturally.

I was recently privileged to hear Dr. Sheena Iyengar speak at a leadership summit. She made the point that the more choices with which you are presented, the better the chance you will make a bad one. So why does Microsoft give us so many choices when it comes to customizing SharePoint? I may have offered fewer choices myself, but let us attempt to address that question.

I want to reference one of the best articles I have come across for identifying and explaining the various SharePoint development approaches. I will almost assuredly reference it in future blog posts. In addition, I want to mention just a few of the factors that I consider when determining the best development approach for a project or project team:

Are development, test, and production servers available?
What are the required skills? Are these skills available in the organization for ongoing support?
What tools does the development team have available to them? What tools can be available if they do not have them already?
Is this project a good fit for SharePoint in the first place?
Will this solution scale to the degree needed?
Is there a third party solution that would add value to this project?
What is the budget? What is the return on investment? The most affordable solution is often not the best solution, but a solution may often be phased to offset the cost.

There is definitely an approach to determine the best solution. A good consultant keeps an open mind, but also identifies the potential risks based on his or her experience and on the experiences of others. Setting the proper expectations is critical. In my experience, the end result is typically a positive one. Why? As it turns out, having an abundance of development options is vital to SharePoint’s success. Having a trusted partner that understands the options and can work with you to understand which one is best for you, well that’s priceless.

Make InfoPath Better with Web Services

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:12:00 +0000

So you might know I’m a fan of InfoPath and think it is underused, but I also acknowledge that (as with most development tools) it has its limitations. There is only so much you can do with an InfoPath rule to make your forms more dynamic. There are third party products that provide additional rules, but even they fall short of integrating with your line of business systems. Most of the time your only option is to inject custom .NET code. This gives you good flexibility as a developer, but it could potentially require that the Web form be administrator approved and not run as a sandboxed solution. Perhaps a better approach is a service-oriented one.

We recently developed a form that required a button to lookup a customer ID and populate the customer’s address. In this case, a Web service already existed to return the address for valid customers. We added a rule to the lookup button to call the Web service and populate the address from the response. No development required, so the form can be published directly by the form designer.

Another example is for forms that have an email rule. A common requirement is to email a confirmation to the consumer who filled out the form and submitted it. InfoPath makes this easy by allowing you to add an email rule after the submit rule. However, if the mail server is down when the form is submitted, the form data will still be saved into a SharePoint library, but the consumer receives a non-descriptive error from the email rule. As a result, no confirmation email is sent and the consumer thinks the form data was lost, so they resubmit the form. A solution is to develop a Web service to check the state of the mail server, and condition the email rule based on a positive response from the Web service. If the email is not sent, then a property is set within the form to let the form owner know that a manual email needs to be sent later.

The only real caveat in all of this is that the InfoPath data connection that is associated with the Web service must be converted to a data connection file (udcx) and stored in a library on the SharePoint site. Is that a bad thing? Not really. It makes the administrator responsible for which Web services are allowed to be called from forms, and encourages portability for promoting forms from development to staging to production environments. There is a good walk through of connecting a form with a Web service in the MSDN Blogs. Consider making your forms more dynamic by taking this service-oriented approach.

What You Need to Know to Get Started with InfoPath 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 03:22:00 +0000

Before I dive into sample electronic forms solutions with InfoPath 2010, there are some things that you should know.

InfoPath 2010 is a Microsoft Office product. InfoPath 2010 is included with Office 2010 Professional Plus, or it can be purchased as a standalone product. There are two icons included with the program: InfoPath Designer 2010 and InfoPath Filler 2010. Designer is used to create form templates (.xsn files) that can be filled out using Filler, or published to a SharePoint server and filled out online. Filler is used to fill out an InfoPath form on your desktop (similar to filling out an PDF form in Adobe Acrobat Reader). When you fill out a form using Filler or SharePoint’s forms services, the form is saved as an XML document and contains a reference to the template from which it was created.

You do not have to have SharePoint 2010, but it does work better. If you do not have SharePoint, InfoPath forms can be created using the desktop Filler, saved to a network share, emailed, and so forth. If you have SharePoint Foundation 2010 (often referred to as the “free” edition of SharePoint), you can publish your form templates to a form library and save your form data (XML) to a form library. You can also take advantage of SharePoint’s workflows to route the forms, but the forms must be filled out using the desktop Filler. If you have SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition, you get all of the same benefits as Foundation, but you may also publish your forms as Web forms – which means that each user in your organization does not need to have the desktop Filler installed to fill out a form. There is an Enterprise CAL license required for each user that will access the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise server. Of course, the license also grants you rights to the other SharePoint Enterprise features, and the cost is offset by the fact that you do not need to purchase the Filler product for every desktop. It is worth mentioning, that some of the Office 365 plans also allow for InfoPath forms to be published as Web forms.

There are two types of forms on SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition. Form Library Forms allow for one or many related forms to be served from and stored in a single document library on SharePoint. These forms are often used in conjunction with SharePoint workflows for routing and approval. List Forms, new to SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition, allow an InfoPath designer to customize the look and behavior of the data entry forms of any SharePoint list. Using InfoPath to brush up these forms allows a non-developer to do more creative and robust things that were previously only possible for developers.

That is enough background to get us started. I will provide more helpful tips as we work through some of the solutions. I will introduce the first form solution in my next post.

A Focus on InfoPath

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Thirty-three months ago I first covered SharePoint on our blog. Since then I have presented InfoPath 2007 and 2010 sessions at a few regional technical conferences. Yesterday, I presented InfoPath to around seventy local professionals at an invitation-only event. As the product has evolved, so has the interest, so has the local user base, and so has the number and variety of our projects. InfoPath is one of the driving forces behind SharePoint’s unprecedented growth.

InfoPath brings to the table:

Rapid development of electronic forms for non-developers
Rules based business process automation
The ability to extend the forms using .NET programming if required
The inherent ability to gather data to SharePoint for detailed analysis

There are definitely some caveats to keep in mind when implementing InfoPath forms. For your run-of-the-mill, rules-based forms for automating internal business processes, you will find InfoPath is a great fit and a piece of cake. For programmer-enhanced forms, you will need to manage trust levels and get an administrator’s help with publishing the form. And anonymous forms, well, they present numerous challenges that I will guide you through in upcoming posts. What if you want to create a form that gathers data to two separate SharePoint lists? InfoPath does not do that out of the box, but it is possible.

Because of the growing demand for InfoPath, and because of the new InfoPath 2010 capabilities in SharePoint 2010 Enterprise and Office365, I am going to spend some time focusing on InfoPath solutions for SharePoint. I personally believe that this is one of the more valuable, but often overlooked features of SharePoint. My goal with this upcoming series of posts is to hear you say “I wish I had known that sooner!”

A Big Week for SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced the release of SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1. Visit the Update Center on TechNet to learn more about this update and to keep up with updates for other Microsoft products. If you have SharePoint 2010 Foundation, you will want to install SP1 for SharePoint 2010 Foundation, then SP1 for SharePoint 2010 Foundation Language Pack if applicable. If you have SharePoint 2010 Server (Standard or Enterprise), you will want to install SP1 for SharePoint 2010 Foundation, the SP1 for SharePoint 2010 Foundation Language Pack (if applicable), SP1 for SharePoint 2010 Server, and SP1 for SharePoint 2010 Server Language Pack (if applicable). After you install SP1, you should also Install the June 2011 Cumulative Updates. (Also see http://blogs.technet.com/b/office_sustained_engineering/archive/2011/06/29/sharepoint-2010-sp1-and-the-june-cumulative-update-for-sharepoint-2010.aspx)

As usual, the Office 2010 updates were released in conjunction with the SharePoint 2010 updates. It’s a great idea to update Office, too, especially if you use the SharePoint 2010 desktop products that are contained in the Office 2010 suites.

Last Friday (June 24), our Evansville SharePoint Users Group co-sponsored a Windows 7 Phone “Hackathon.” It was a great time and there were some interesting app ideas. I bring it up, because it was great to see the integration included with SharePoint, Office, Dynamics CRM, and Office 365 in the upcoming Windows Phone 7 update code-named “Mango.”

Speaking of Office 365, it was officially launched to the public this week! It is not a bad deal for individuals and companies of all sizes. It is all written on SharePoint, so you can customize it using familiar SharePoint tools. Take a look at Office 365. What a week!

SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 Coming in June

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:36:00 +0000

Microsoft's SharePoint Team has announced the release date of Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010. Look for the release in late June of 2011. A couple of my favorite features: Site Recycle Bin and the return of StorMan.aspx. With Site Recycle Bin, administrators will be able to recover sites and site collections that were accidentally deleted by authorized users much like the way documents and lists are recovered. StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation) will allow you to see which large documents and document libraries are consuming your disk space. You can read more about the service pack on the SharePoint team's blog at http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=973.

IE 9 Pinned Sites With SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Eric Maurer, MCPD, MCTS) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 14:03:00 +0000

After I started using Internet Explorer 9, I quickly noticed how powerful the pinned site feature was with sites like Bing and Twitter. If you haven’t seen the feature yet install IE9, pin one of the sites to your Windows 7 task bar, and right-click on the pinned site.

I starting thinking about how this could be used with SharePoint to improve site navigation and it turned out to be a lot easier than I expected.

To add pinned site customization to your site, open up your site’s master page in SharePoint designer. The following meta tags can then be added to the page header section.

Once the meta tags have been added, save the master page and then pin the site to your task bar to view the changes.

In the example I am adding a Jump List with links to a Search page and a Calendar on my SharePoint site. I am also setting the navigation buttons’ color for the site. With this quick customization you and your users can now easily navigate to different parts of your site directly from their taskbar.

Learn more about Pinned Sites from Microsoft

Happy Birthday SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 16:40:00 +0000

This month, SharePoint turned 10 years old. Where has the time gone? Aside from making me feel old, it makes me excited about what is next. Having been involved with SharePoint since SharePoint Services 2/SharePoint Portal Server 2003, I have seen countless improvements with each release. With SharePoint 2010, the improvements have been seemingly exponential in terms of customization, administration, and integration.

If we compare SharePoint to a child, as Dan Holmes points out, SharePoint is now a “tweener”. In my experience as a father, that means that SharePoint now has a personality that clearly sets it apart from others. And now SharePoint, like a teenager, has some tough decisions to make that will shape the rest of its life. SharePoint has the full support of its parent (Microsoft) and has a solid support structure (the community). It is selling at a reported rate of 20,000 licenses per day for the last five years without enjoying all of the mainstream advertising that Windows, Office and Xbox enjoy.

But ultimately, it is going to be up to SharePoint (the product team) to determine its own success. Businesses are definitely adopting the product – probably even faster than what the product team can support. The documentation is starting to catch up and more training is becoming available, but from my vantage point it is the community that is responsible for the success SharePoint has had to date. When faced with technical challenges to business problems, SharePoint professionals often have to turn to each other to solve them – and thankfully they are usually willing and able to help.

As businesses continue to invest in SharePoint and start to leverage it in ways they were not before, it is going to be key for the product team to stay on top of that. It is a shame that some of the limitations I noticed my first week with SharePoint almost seven years ago are still limitations. For example, parent-child data relationships are a fundamental need in developing business applications. SharePoint 2010 introduced a few new features in this regard, but there is much work still to be done. I would hope that in the next release, one would still not need to use SharePoint Designer and XSL coding to develop forms that relate. I would hope that in the near future InfoPath would be able to do simple things like write to two related SharePoint lists without the need for code-behind or third party components.

More and more functionality has been added to SharePoint over the years (CMS, Performance Point, etc.), but more emphasis needs to be placed on making that functionality align with business needs. In my opinion, there are two critical success factors for the future of SharePoint:

1) The product team needs to continue to understand the fundamental needs of its customers and respond to them.

2) Training needs to go deeper than the surface level and deeper into solving problems that are more like those businesses face.

We will do what we can about the latter. Until then, Happy Birthday SharePoint!!!

2010 in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 17:32:00 +0000

This has been an exciting year for SharePoint and for the Keller Schroeder SharePoint team. From the successful launch of SharePoint 2010 to the ensuing migrations, it seems like we never slowed down. We are continuing to work with some of our great clients to migrate their existing portals to SharePoint 2010. In addition, we worked with a number of new clients and new-to-SharePoint clients in 2010. We are grateful for each one. It has been gratifying to work with a product that has provided cost saving solutions to real world challenges, but even more gratifying to be blessed to do work for some of the best businesses and business people imaginable.

There is another group of people we want to thank: our readers. So far this year, we have had over 4,200 unique visitors to our SharePoint blog. This is our eighteenth article posted this year. Our most popular posts have been about jQuery, forms, and Data View Web Parts – combining for about 7,000 page views. You can expect more posts on those topics in 2011 – along with some other great topics.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

SharePoint and Your Health, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:13:00 +0000

In my previous post, I introduced you to our Step It Up wellness portal at a high level. In this post I will get a little deeper into the infrastructure and SharePoint architecture.

Our infrastructure consists of a combination of physical and virtualized servers. SQL Server 2008 is installed on a dedicated physical server. SharePoint is installed on a virtualized server using Microsoft’s Hyper-V. We use Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 (ISA) on the perimeter (now called ForeFront Threat Management Gateway 2010) to manage authentication (Kerberos), serve the digital certificate, and proxy requests to our SharePoint farm. This is a great model if you need to build-out multiple servers efficiently in a semi-dedicated environment.

On the home page, I am going to explain the features in eight different zones on the page:

1. Left upper: The “My Activity” web part is a Content Editor Web Part that includes icons and links to ease navigation, resulting is a better user experience. The links simply link to the new page, list view, and calendar view pages for the user’s Activity Log list.

2. Left middle: This is a custom web part (written in Visual Studio) that uses SharePoint’s Object Model to calculate how many drawing chances I have earned to date and how many wellness minutes I have accumulated to date.

3. Left bottom: My activity as of the current date is displayed. We have a summary list that stores the amount of activity for a user by month. When an entry is added or removed from the activity log, an event handler (written in Visual Studio) increments or decrements the monthly total for the currently logged-in user. The presentation on this page is another custom web part that uses the Object Model to query the user’s totals.

4. Center top: The welcome message is in a Content Editor Web Part that is edited by the program administrator. The content contains a hyperlink for displaying the complete rules. When clicked, the hyperlink executes jQuery script to show or hide the complete program rules. If you are interested in learning more about jQuery in SharePoint, check out our earlier blog posts.

5. Center bottom: The chart that appears in this section is a visual representation of the company’s progress – averaged by user. This is a nice feature on any SharePoint site to give it that dashboard look-and-feel. While this chart could have been built dynamically using jQuery, it only takes a few seconds to build it in Excel and save it to a SharePoint image library. Since it is only updated once a month (after the preview month’s data has been tallied), we decided to take this approach to save time. We believe in using the right tools for the job out-of-the-box, and customizing when it is necessary or produces a Return on Investment.

6. Right upper: The “Company Progress thru [Month]” section numerically displays the company-wide average activity to date. This is the same information that is plotted on the center chart by month.

7. Right middle: The “Monthly Drawing Winners” image link links to the list view for a custom list that simply displays the winners for each month in columnar format.

8. Right bottom: The “Team Bragging Rights” section displays the totals for our two teams (Applications and Infrastructure) to date and for the last month. A lookup column is included in our Participants list to link a participant to a team. A custom web part uses the Object Model to summarize the results by team.

That gets us a little closer than the 20,000 foot view. Whether this blog series lives on or not is up to you. If you are interested in learning more about how these sections were developed, leave a comment and tell which of the sections (1-8) is of interest to you. I will talk about the nuts and bolts of how these sections were developed only if you ask.

Warning: SharePoint Can Be GOOD for Your Health

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 14:21:00 +0000

I am often asked by clients and prospects how we use SharePoint at Keller Schroeder. There are a couple of reasons they ask this. First and foremost, they seek to validate our team before they engage with us on a SharePoint engagement. Second, they are looking for ways that to use SharePoint that they have not have considered. Obviously many software solutions span verticals or industries. SharePoint solutions are definitely no exception to this. While most of our clients would not benefit from seeing how we use SharePoint to track consulting opportunities and schedule consultants, we do have internal solutions with a more universal appeal. One way that we are excited to use SharePoint at Keller Schroeder may come as a surprise to you, and it has generated a “healthy enthusiasm” among our employee-owners for many months now. Allow me to introduce the Step It Up wellness program. I will introduce the program and the SharePoint site at a high level in this post. Next month I will expand on the details.

Wellness is something we are serious about at Keller Schroeder – from our walking-fanatic president to our globe-cycling account managers and engineers. We started a wellness program several years ago, with various contests and campaigns since then, and have found that simple is better. This particular campaign started this month. There are monthly drawings for gift cards. Everyone who meets his or her exercise goal for the month gets one or two chances. Those same qualifying people are given chances for a larger drawing at the end of the wellness program cycle. We have added some flavor to this cycle by pitting our Sales and Infrastructure employee-owners (EOs) against our Applications EOs for bragging rights.

The picture above is a personalized dashboard that I see when I log on to the site. Since this is the end of the first month, you will notice on the bottom-left that I have already met my goals for the month. At the start of November I will see metrics telling me how many minutes I have left to meet my “goal” and my “stretch goal.” On the right, you will notice that we have no monthly metrics yet for performance against the “company goal” or for the team competition. Next month I will show you a screen shot with all of these metrics tabulated, including some nice charts to show company and team progress.

The site has all the characteristics of a successful SharePoint implementation, including:

Top-down support (C-level involvement and promotion)
Broad-reaching appeal (all EOs use it)
Consistent usage (it is used daily)
Governance and continuous improvement (it is reviewed regularly by the steering team; this is the second version and is better than the first)
Dynamic content (daily and monthly metrics; monthly content changes; regular email newsletters referring to the site)
Usability and functionality (it has a friendly user interface and we looked for every opportunity to reduce required mouse-clicks and replace confusing out-of-the-box controls)
Aesthetic appeal (thanks to our in-house SharePoint branding team)

Some of the SharePoint Features represented are:

Sites – A primary site personalized for EOs, views for the administrators, a sub-site for the SharePoint implementation team
Content – Dynamic content and user content that draws a continued interest in the site
Insights – Metrics provided in the form of calculated fields, charts, calendar views and other custom views
Composites – Custom-developed and no-code solutions for EOs to enter time and track their activity
Communities – Discussions and tasks on the implementation team site facilitate continuous improvement

What I appreciate about the site is that it depicts all of these elements in a simple and concise fashion. If you have read about SharePoint at all, you have probably seen many of the buzzwords I mentioned above. Many organizations feel overwhelmed when evaluating SharePoint or get lost in the terminology. As you can see, a SharePoint implementation does not have to be complicated to be successful. In fact, sometimes less is more. Next month, I will follow up with more detail on the site and infrastructure.

SharePoint Pillar: Composites

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:48:00 +0000

The sixth and final pillar in my “Pillars of SharePoint” series is “Composites.” The concept of composites in SharePoint is to enable lay people to build their own business applications without requiring code. This is accomplished by hosting as services on SharePoint tools that these people are used to using, such as Excel, Access and Visio. In addition, developers may develop Business Connectivity Services components, or building blocks, to allow a non-developer to create web pages to view and edit functionality against the core business systems.

SharePoint has been designed to present data from your disparate business systems in one place without the requirement to duplicate that data in the SharePoint database. Rather than using Enterprise Application Integration or Business Process Management to keep disparate systems in sync, consider using SharePoint to allow real time access to view and update data on those systems from a central location with which your users are already familiar.

Another solution in the Composites area includes using InfoPath Forms Designer and SharePoint Designer to build business forms and workflows without the need to write code. These tools are efficient and are steeped in SharePoint integration. In fact, many developers have leveraged InfoPath and SharePoint Designer to deploy codeless solutions to save time and money on a development effort.

In conclusion, I hope it is apparent to you that Microsoft did not choose six feature areas that they hoped to address with SharePoint and then start writing components that they thought would fit nicely into those areas. On the contrary, SharePoint has evolved over a period of time (about a decade) in response to incremental feedback for functionality enhancements requested by Microsoft customers and partners. In the end, SharePoint offers a wide array of features that had to be categorized somehow so that the product could be introduced more succinctly. That is where the feature areas, or pillars, come in. So it is impossible to understand what the pillars mean without diving into the specific feature areas, but the specific functions are better explained when grouped by feature area. Hopefully I have given you a good taste of the specific functions by feature area. Although the format will be different, I will continue to dive deeper into specific SharePoint functions in future posts.

SharePoint Pillar: Insights

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:16:00 +0000

The fifth “Pillar of SharePoint” is what is now known as “Insights.” Microsoft touts three benefits on the Insights Capabilities Page: help ALL your people be decision makers, improve your company’s effectiveness and make IT more efficient. Videos are provided that show you how to use a decomposition tree to perform root cause analysis and how to use a dashboard to aggregate content from multiple data sources.

The key thing here is that Business Intelligence is available at every level of an organization through SharePoint and SQL Server. From the shop floor, to the tacticians and strategists, every employee can have a dashboard that will help him or her make the proper decisions – at a cost much lower than traditional business intelligence platforms.

Some of the Business Intelligence components in SharePoint 2010 Enterprise include: PerformancePoint Services, Excel Services and a Chart Web Part. Using these components, employees can see information that is relevant to them when they need it, in the form of charts, scorecards, drill-down reports and more. The information can literally come from any place within the organization, but is displayed in one place in a familiar environment. Contact us to learn more about how you can leverage the SharePoint platform to gain Insights at your organization.

SharePoint Pillar: Search

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:21:00 +0000

I continue the “Pillars of SharePoint” series with an exploration of the Search feature. In my opinion, search is one of the most underappreciated and underutilized features of SharePoint. Given the proper care and attention, SharePoint Search can greatly improve productivity in an organization. Know that if you are only using SharePoint Foundation, you have limited search functionality. For a comparison of which search features are available in each edition of SharePoint 2010, refer to the editions comparison page for search.

Rather than duplicating all of the content that is available on the Microsoft product page, I want to emphasize a few that I think will make a positive impact on efficiency in an organization. By eliminating duplicate search results, adding visual cues (e.g. thumbnail previews of PowerPoint presentations) and adding filters for refining search results by various categories, Microsoft has made it much easier to find the information that you are looking for quickly. Add some of your favorite features from Bing and Google, such as “Did you mean…?” and related queries, and you have a first class search experience on your portal.

As a search administrator, you have the ability to tune the results based on reports. You may create a vocabulary that maps your business terminology to common search phrases, tweak the relevance of search results and even target certain search results for particular groups of people. An administrator may also supply “best bets” so that a particular search result always appears at the top of the list when a certain keyword is used. With the addition of FAST search, SharePoint 2010 provides a powerful search tool for connecting your people with the information and peers for which they are searching.

SharePoint Pillar: Content

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:06:00 +0000

In this third post on the “Pillars of SharePoint,” I will focus on the Content feature area. Note that Microsoft does not include managing web page content in this category – that is the Sites feature area. Content is about managing the business documents and information that are part of your daily business activities and decision making, plus the records that you keep for compliance reasons. SharePoint has long had document libraries for managing documents – including the ability to manage permissions and check documents in and out. Document retention policies and records management are really not new either. However, Microsoft has made improvements to the user interface to make these features more intuitive.

In working with documents, you now have the ability to select multiple documents at a time from a document library and perform certain actions on them. The fluent ribbon design on the web page works nicely with the multi-select functionality to greatly reduce the number of clicks required for manipulating documents and other information. Also, with just a few clicks you can mark a document as a record – which means that no further changes can be made to it. This is helpful for organizations with regulatory compliance requirements. Retention policies dictate when documents are allowed to be archived or disposed of.

New in SharePoint 2010 is the concept of Document Sets. Document sets allow you to group together a number of documents that belong together so they may be acted upon as if they are one. Microsoft mentions on the product feature page that this would be useful for “speeding up common processes like RFP responses.” I think it would also be useful for maintaining documents for large project teams, the annual budgeting process, the internal quoting process and so forth. By creating a document set, I can create a version or snapshot of my entire set of documents at a given time. I may also send the entire set through a workflow process for approval. What is nice about these sets, too, is that the documents may still be treated individually as well as collectively. Considering the improvements in classifying documents that we explored in a previous post, grouping those similar documents into a set will most certainly result in streamlined workflows and error reduction.

SharePoint Pillar: Communities

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:34:00 +0000

In this post of the “Pillars of SharePoint” series, I aim to help you make sense of SharePoint’s Communities feature area. SharePoint is often referred to as the “Facebook for the enterprise” to the dismay of some. The idea of calling it that is to relate the features of SharePoint in terms that people understand by comparing it to a product they may have used already. Facebook is actually a novel concept – even though the application of the concept may leave a little to be desired (courtesy of loose governance controls and the often fallible human nature). Be that as it may, what a great platform for describing yourself, sharing experiences, finding similar interests among acquaintances and reaching out (if you so choose) to encourage those that are in your circle of influence! That may be the most rosy description of Facebook ever! Seems like a good time to relate it to SharePoint…

Microsoft’s product page for SharePoint’s Communities feature touts two things: My Profile and Tags. My Profile is useful for learning about your co-workers, including: “biographies, job titles, location, contact information, interests and skills, and previous projects.” That does not sound so bad, does it? In fact, it sounds very useful to me. In an age where conducting business is plastered in time constraints, travel and a remote workforce, it is important to be as efficient as possible when connecting people, skills and projects. SharePoint has made that a reality. It has essentially combined your company’s employee directory, with your skills inventory and employee resumes. Not to mention that you can receive automatic updates when any of this information changes, such as contact information, job titles and responsibilities. And to answer the obvious question: yes, you can choose which alerts you wish to receive. In fact, your SharePoint administrator can disable alerts that you consider unimportant so that your users cannot subscribe to them. That is an example of SharePoint providing controls to assist in your governance process.

One of my favorite features of SharePoint Server 2010 is the Tags feature. To me it is so valuable to be able to mark a document for future reference, but to be able to share those marked documents with my colleagues and for them to be able to share documents with me is invaluable. This can always be accomplished with email, of course, but tagging is so much more efficient in terms of bandwidth, organization and search. Tagging essentially allows people in the organization to classify documents using words and phrases that are meaningful to them and/or their workgroups, or using predefined words and phrases established by a SharePoint administrator. In addition to tagging, one may comment on documents and other artifacts.

I should also mention that Office Web Applications, which plug right in to SharePoint, give you the ability to perform multi-person, real-time editing of the exact same document! And then there are the long-time Communities features of SharePoint, such as: blogs, wikis, discussion boards, meeting workspaces, slide libraries and so forth. So as you can see, calling SharePoint “Facebook for the enterprise” is underselling it. In my opinion, SharePoint is now the collaborative enterprise standard to which all other similar products will be compared.

SharePoint Pillar: Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 13:43:00 +0000

The first feature area I want to explore in my Introducing the Six Pillars of SharePoint series is the Sites feature area. In SharePoint Foundation 2010, Microsoft has provided some rudimentary capabilities for maintaining content in SharePoint – for intranets, extranets and public web sites. SharePoint Designer 2010 (available as a free download) adds some functionality in terms of designing, creating and managing pages. However, if you want a more feature rich web content management system, you may want to consider purchasing SharePoint Server 2010 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.

Some of the additional features you receive in the Standard and Enterprise editions include:

A mature publishing infrastructure
Ability to customize page layouts
Additional workflows for content approval
More user-friendly controls for your content editors
Ability to publish content to additional SharePoint farm(s)
Ability to target content to specific audiences

Some would argue that SharePoint is not a full-fledged web content management system, but I disagree with that sentiment. It is true that a fair amount of customization may need to be done to suit your needs, but for some companies what is provided out of the box is sufficient. It is by design that Microsoft allows you to customize the publishing features. In fact, I have never worked with a pure content management system that did not require a degree of customization. With SharePoint, you get content management and then some. You may indeed find that the content management in SharePoint is not for you. It is ok to use SharePoint for its other capabilities while not taking advantage of the Sites features.

I do want to address one thing regarding the look and feel of SharePoint. Many companies speak of “branding” their pages so they will “not look like SharePoint.” This stems from the idea that SharePoint has a typical look and feel that is simplistic and overused. Many companies choose to keep the out of the box look and feel. In addition, many SharePoint experts have public sites that retain the default look and feel. I would like to suggest that if the default look and feel does not work for you, then do not use it. That may mean you purchase a template from one of the many providers that create templates for SharePoint. But what you should not do is try to make your design fit inside of the SharePoint framework. In other words, start from scratch rather than trying to modify one of the default templates. Take a page that you created and add SharePoint controls to it. You will find it is more flexible than you imagined once you get the hang of it.

Another thing to consider is that SharePoint is a platform that is service oriented. So if you have an existing intranet – maybe even one that resides on a different platform – you can take advantage of RSS feeds, web services and so forth to pull content from SharePoint’s repository for display on your existing site. This is often used as a transitional solution where a company wants to move to the SharePoint platform for content management but is not ready to roll out the user interface to the masses just yet, however, it is also acceptable as a long term solution in certain cases.

Introducing the Six Pillars of SharePoint

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:49:00 +0000

The six pillars of SharePoint (also known as the SharePoint “feature pie” or “feature wheel”) were first introduced in SharePoint 2007. Back then, Microsoft touted collaboration, portal, search, content management, business forms and business intelligence all centered around SharePoint’s “platform services.” Beginning in SharePoint 2010, the feature areas, or “pillars”, have been rebranded in an attempt to better relate to our business psyche. The new pillars are: sites, communities, content, search, insights and composites. While the new terminology does seem to have less of a technical bent to it, I would not necessarily say that it is self-explanatory. Over the next six posts I will explain that terminology in more detail.

It is worth mentioning that SharePoint SharePoint 2010 comes in multiple editions: Foundation, Standard and Enterprise. SharePoint Foundation 2010 is included when you buy the Windows Server operating system, but the other two editions require a one-time software license fee and a user access license for each user. Some organizations will only require the Foundation edition to satisfy their needs. Others will need some of the features of the higher end editions. Many organizations will not use all of the feature areas and that is fine. The key is to use SharePoint where and how it is beneficial to you.

I like the new name given to the Foundation edition. When I think of pillars, I think of vertical columns that are used for support in a physical structure. While the pillars must definitely be strong to support a roof, for example, they are useless unless they are erected on a solid foundation. The Foundation edition will give you a start in all six of the feature areas. However, your needs may quickly outgrow the features provided by the Foundation edition. You have options at that point: you may write your own programs that run on top of the Foundation server to fill in the gaps, purchase third-party components that run on the Foundation server, or upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise edition to take advantage of the components Microsoft has pre-written. The first option may depend on whether you have a development staff available to you. The last option may depend on your budget.

As you will see in the next post, Microsoft does not assume that purchasing SharePoint Enterprise 2010 will satisfy all of your organizational needs. In fact, even the Enterprise edition is customizable. That is because every organization is unique and has unique business requirements. The Enterprise edition definitely provides the building blocks to help you meet some information and collaboration challenges more efficiently. In my next post, I will explain the “Sites” feature area in more detail.

SharePoint 2010: Let the blogging begin!

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 19:43:00 +0000

The biggest challenge for blogging about SharePoint 2010 has literally been narrowing down the list of excellent topics. I considered breaking down the new SharePoint feature wheel (Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, Composites) into business dialect – one feature at a time. I also considered going through the new and improved Central Administration area (teaser below) to showcase the new functionality and improved navigation.

I want to demonstrate the improvements in user experience for end users, but I also want to show how SharePoint Designer 2010, InfoPath 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 have streamlined the development process. If blogging were my full time job, I would not be able to write about all the things I want regarding SharePoint 2010 in a timely manner. However, I have got to start somewhere. One of the nice things about blogging, in contrast to writing a book, is that I can jump around from topic to topic and not have to follow an outline. I will probably do just that. So prepare yourself for the deluge of SharePoint 2010 blog posts that will ensue. As we say in southern Indiana: “It’s gonna be real good!”

SharePoint 2010 Released to Manufacturing

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:06:00 +0000

Several days ago, SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 were released to manufacturing. The bits became available for download on MSDN and TechNet late last week. The products will be generally available on or after May 12 – which coincides with the official announcement of the release out of Redmond, WA. We will be watching the announcement live at 10:00 a.m. Central Time with the Evansville SharePoint Users Group at the Oaklyn Library at the corner of Lynch and Oak Hill in Evansville.

So it is decision time for most people now. Often, many companies tend to play it safe and not be early adopters. With SharePoint 2010, the trend seems to be changing. Microsoft attributes that to two things: an abundance of new features that the SharePoint community has been seeking and a highly successful beta testing campaign. Those who have been involved with the beta tests (us included) really like what they see. In his article titled “Chomping at the SharePoint Bit,” Jeffrey Schwartz writes of this phenomenon in the April 2010 issue of Redmond Partner Channel magazine.

The decision to go/no-go, however, is not as simple for some as it is for others. SharePoint 2010 will require a little more horsepower on your servers and is only available in 64-bit. If you are currently running SharePoint and/or SQL Server in a 32-bit environment, this will require a little more thoughtful planning. Keller Schroeder is among a select group of Microsoft Partners known as SharePoint Deployment Planning Services providers. If you are weighing the pros and cons of upgrading to SharePoint 2010 – or if you are looking at implementing it from scratch – contact us to learn more about how we can help.

The SharePoint 2010 Client Object Model

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 19:19:00 +0000

Last Thursday I presented "SharePoint 2010 Development" at the Western Kentucky .NET Users Group at Murray State University. The group is a nice cross-section of students, faculty and area professionals. We had a lot of ground to cover and there were many great questions. I want to thank the group for their hospitality and encourage anyone in the area to check them out. Find out more at http://www.wkdnug.org.

One of the topics of particular interest was the new Client Object Model in SharePoint 2010. I demonstrated how to write a WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) desktop application against a SharePoint announcement list using the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. The attached Visual Studio 2010 solution is a quick-and-dirty approach to updating an announcements list. Feel free to try for yourself after updating the server name in the program code, but keep in mind this is bare-minimum and not production-ready. Watch this blog for more posts about the Client Object Model. I am going to walk you through extending this solution to allow you to choose your server and list dynamically.

Download Presentation from WKDNUG

Download Sample WPF Solution

Important 2010 Launch Dates

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:01:00 +0000

Arpan Shah of the SharePoint Product Team announced that May 12 is the official launch date for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 -- with Release to Manufacturing set for April. Excitement continues to swell and the number of potential early adopters seems to be on the rise. Woody Windischman breaks the launch down succinctly in his blog with some key points to consider regarding SharePoint Designer.

Microsoft previously announced that the launch date for Visual Studio 2010 will be April 12. Having worked with the beta, my opinion is that this is going to be the most significant Visual Studio release yet -- especially if you are a SharePoint Developer.

Keep an eye on our blog to see what this means for you. 2010 is going to be an exciting year for SharePoint!

How to Set Up a Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 Beta

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Mulherin) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:44:00 +0000

In case you have not had the chance to set up a development environment for SharePoint 2010 Beta, I have jotted down some notes following my experience.

I had two options for creating my development environment:.

1. Install SharePoint on a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008
2. Install SharePoint on my Windows 7 machine

I chose option #2 so I did not have to build the Windows Server 2008. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate on a Dell Latitude with 8GB RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It is important to understand that Option #2 is for development purposes only and it cannot be used in production.

1) Read all these steps before implementing Step 2.

2) Read the entire set of instructions from Microsoft’s site on “Setting up the Development Environment for SharePoint Server. You can find Microsoft’s instructions at this web address:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(office.14).aspx

3) Before running the SharePoint configuration wizard be aware that there are a couple of hot fixes that you will need to successfully install prior to running the wizard. They are SQL Server 2008 hot fixes and can be located at http://support.microsoft.com/hotfix/KBHotfix.aspx?kbnum=970315&kbln=en-us. You will need to request these hot fixes be sent to you via email.

4) After installing the hot fixes, I ran into an error running the wizard. To get around this error you will need to install the Microsoft Geneva Framework v1.0 at this location:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=118c3588-9070-426a-b655-6cec0a92c10b&displaylang=en

5) Run the Configuration Wizard.

Done! You now have a SharePoint installation to develop SharePoint solutions. Keep an eye on our blog for developing future SharePoint solutions.

I hope this saves you some time. Good luck!

Slide Deck from SharePoint Saturday Indianapolis 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Rob Wilson, MCT, SharePoint MCTS/MCITP/MCPD) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:33:00 +0000

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on "Streamlining Business Processes with InfoPath and SharePoint Workflows" at SharePoint Saturday in Indianapolis over the weekend. What a great turnout! Here are the slides from my session. I hope you found the presentation to be of value.

Thanks to all the organizers, sponsors and presenters. It was an outstanding event!

We will be looking at InfoPath forms in more detail at some upcoming meetings of the Evansville SharePoint Users Group.