SharePoint Joel's SharePoint Land

BYOD and SharePoint Survey Results Webinar: What Every Organization Needs to Know

Joel Oleson — Wed, 30 May 2012 14:44:43 GMT

Thursday, June 7^th, 2012 at 11:00am ET/ 8:00am PT

Today's mobile devices are indispensable productivity tools, but the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend has also created challenges that affect every organization.

Colligo has partnered with Osterman Research to survey 1000s of organizations on the challenges and trends surrounding BYOD, and the results are in. Which issues are they facing? How are they dealing with them? How do you measure up, and how can you be better prepared?

Join Michael Osterman, principle of Osterman Research, as he shares his findings and provides insights into what they mean to your organization. Joining Michael is Ben Henderson, Colligo's Technical Solution Specialist, to discuss strategies for securely integrating mobile devices into an enterprise SharePoint environment.

In this webinar, you'll learn:

How your organization rates on BYOD policies and practices
Strategies and techniques for putting IT in control of BYOD
Security, management, and compliance issues for cloud-based file transfer systems
SharePoint requirements and apps for secure mobile enterprise access

Mobile devices are here to stay. Learn how to minimize the risk by implementing strategies and tools that protect your organization. Register for this important webinar today.

Register Now!

Post sponsored by Colligo

April CU Update Unavailable - See Workaround for Inbound Email

Joel Oleson — Wed, 30 May 2012 04:22:09 GMT

While Microsoft has been pretty quiet working on a reissue of the April CU, the community came up with a decent work around. I simply want to bring some visibility to it.

Stepping back, I see this as good news as the incoming email issue which obviously wouldn't be impacting everyone, since not everyone uses inbound email. As well, many will be using quotas which will exclude more.

Francois Souyri outlines a very well written explanation in his post "Found an issue [WITH FIX] with SP2010 April 2012 CU : incoming emails not going to SharePoint"

April CU Issue:

"Incoming emails to SharePoint are all configured properly and emails are being received in the server's SMTP Drop folder but they stay there and are not picked up by SharePoint."

Looking at the ULS logs you'll find this "E-mail cannot be delivered because site is over quota or locked for editing." That's the regression.

Workaround/Fix

Essentially it's looking for a quota and it's blocked from inbound email unless there is a quota configured. That's the fix. Simply configure a simple quota and you're good.

If you're looking for a work around for the lazy approval with Nintex workflows you'll get more description from the same post above.

Kudos to Francois for pointing out this workaround and helping to share the solution with the community

Note: As of 5/29/12 as of this writing, the April CU has been taken down due to technical issues. It's nice to better understand the issue and find a decent workaround. Thanks again Francois.

NewsGator Reveals New Social Case Studies

Joel Oleson — Fri, 25 May 2012 23:40:07 GMT

NewsGator has released some interesting social case studies. I have received permission to include some snippets from these case studies. - Joel

NewsGator Case Study: Microsoft Student Partners

Outstanding Student Technologists Deliver Invaluable Innovation for Microsoft with NewsGator Social Sites

Challenge>> Giving promising tech-minded students a fertile online environment for connection and collaboration.

Strategy >> Using NewsGator Social Sites 2010 to enhance a portal that harnesses the power of social computing for serious learning – much as some of the world's most successful companies are doing.

Results>> Students around the world are discovering likeminded peers, making connections, forming online communities, sharing content, developing mobile computing applications, teaming up for elite student competitions, and mentoring one another to achieve the richest possible MSP experience.

Tech savvy students around the world flock to Microsoft to immerse themselves in the company's innovations, jumpstart their careers and get their hands on the latest gear. It's a great deal for these "Microsoft Student Partners" and a fantastic mechanism for Microsoft to garner insight from the brightest minds of the coming workforce. Microsoft Student Partners, or MSPs, are college and university students selected from a large pool of applicants for hot prospects for successful technology careers. Microsoft gives them the inside scoop on new product development, and those students in turn host campus activities to spread the word about emerging Microsoft technologies.

As these students came on board, they grappled with a way to connect across continents in order to accomplish the task at hand. Many of them simply wishing that they could operate in the same way they do on their own personal social networks.

…

Students Light Up the Portal

User count soared after launch of the portal, growing by 186% in just four months. MSPs had created nearly 40 active communities focused on geographic regions, various Microsoft technologies, the MSP program itself, the Imagine Cup Student Technology Competition, and projects to create apps for the Windows Phone.

Students log into the portal from www.microsoftstudentpartners.com. After clicking on the "@Social" menu, they can:

See their personal newsfeed with colleagues' status updates, comments on those updates, and files their friends have posted.
Search for communities, within communities or for individuals.
Filter by any dimension, including community, colleague, self, status and the most popular updates.
Post an update, ask a question or send a private message.
Float an idea, and Idea Stream will keep track of all ideas, comments, votes, and approval statuses.

"Students from around the world were suddenly connecting, sharing and collaborating around the clock," says Fleming. "We didn't have to teach them. They grew up in this environment and intuitively know what to do with it and how to maximize its value."

Download the free full case Social study of Microsoft Student Portal Program

NewsGator Case Study: Weston Solutions, Inc.

What does it take to be #1 in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge?

Case Study Highlights

Organization: Weston Solutions, Inc.

Industry: Environmental Solutions/Sustainable and Clean Energy

Situational Analysis: Desire to become a leader in world-class collaboration

Solution: Social Sites 2010

Result: WESTON was voted #1 by the Worldwide Intranet Challenge

Weston Solutions, Inc. (WESTON®) is a global leader in environmental solutions, sustainable development, design/build construction, green buildings, and clean energy. Dedicated to making a difference in the world, the company's 1,800 people reach out from 60 offices around the globe to build strong stakeholder relationships and provide solutions that work. WESTON has been responding to its clients' toughest problems for more than 50 years.

Bob Hackett, VP of Information Services explained, "As a leading environment redevelopment company, we have been called upon to support emergency response efforts during and after 9-11, the Challenger disaster, and more recently Hurricane Katrina, the Joplin Tornadoes, and flooding of the Missouri River." The nature of WESTON's business requires the company to bring together a wide variety of stakeholders for each of their highly complex projects, all needing to communicate and stay up-to-date on project updates and milestones.

Challenge

Every 3 to 5 years, WESTON goes through a "visioning" process in which they tap into employee-owner knowledge and expertise through town hall meetings. Together they explore where the industry is going and how they can maintain their leadership position and remain agile amidst any changes or developments. Based on a wealth of industry knowledge and experience, along with significant brainstorming, WESTON creates focus growth areas where they feel they will be successful. During this visioning process, WESTON builds teams, develops capstones, and work together to incorporate the vision into the culture of the organization.

…

To encourage participation, WESTON created its own community templates and brought communities to life with an interactive and intuitive format, as well as including interactive activities on the overview pages. The company also reviewed its governance policy on a regular basis to make sure stakeholders were being fair and adhering to corporate privacy policies.

As mentioned earlier, WESTON used an external benchmarking agency, Worldwide Intranet Challenge, to measure the overall improvement of the portal in three key areas: 1) ease of finding information; 2) ease of finding documents; and 3) ability to connect with people. WESTON's Portal received the highest scores possible from the benchmarking agency, earning them a #1 position, thanks in part to the collaboration with NewsGator and use of NewsGator Social Sites. WESTON attributes much of this success to the timing of its launch. Aligning the launch of the Portal in conjunction with the new Vision kick-off was a critical factor.

WESTON's intranet had impressive improvement in the following categories, all exceeding the goal of 25%:

Ease of finding information - 331% increase
Content on the intranet is up-to-date - 154% increase
The intranet has a consistent page layout - 136% increase
Look and feel - 78% increase
I like the intranet Home Page - 71% increase

Download the free full case study of Weston Solutions

Also check out the upcoming NewsGator webinar:

Why Social at Stockland, Why Right Now?June 6th @ 10 am EST (GMT +10 Hours)

This post is sponsored content by NewsGator. I hope you find it useful -Joel

SharePoint April 2012 CU: This hotfix package is no longer available due to a technical problem

Joel Oleson — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:29:54 GMT

Do NOT Install the April 2012 SharePoint CU, an update or re-release is underway. It surprised me a little bit when I was browsing facebook and I happened onto the update in the SharePoint Updates FB group, and saw a post that said. Do not install the April 2012 CU, as a rerelease is underway. I didn't recognize the name of the person posting the update, so I clicked on their name. He was a Microsoft PFE. So I tweeted the recommendation not to install the April 2012 SharePoint CU (both Foundation & Server). The group is a pretty obscure group with only 236 members: https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/sharepointupdates/ and not something I check regularly. No update from the MS SharePoint team blog.

This morning the Facebook message has been deleted, but both the SharePoint 2010 Foundation and SharePoint Server CU articles reflect that the bits have been taken down. Last night I tweeted that you shouldn't install it based on a MS PFE facebook update, and Todd Klindt pointed out that the KB had been updated. Thanks Todd. I guess that's the message we get. They have taken them down for a technical issue. Beeeeeeep. Your bits will be returned to their regular station after they fix a little issue. Do not look at the man behind the curtain. If you haven't installed it yet. Don't. If you were testing it and getting ready to apply it. Stop testing it an update is on its way. I'm sure MS is really putting a lot of effort in a really quick turn around. Now none of this changes the fact that you should really only be installing these CUs unless they apply to something you need, especially now. Early in the product cycle there were some really critical things being fixed. SharePoint is pretty solid these days, so really the recommendation which hasn't changed is to only install the CU if you were being impacted by something and need it.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 April 2012 CU

http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598321

SharePoint Server 2010 April 2012 CU

http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598151

"Article ID: 2598151 - Last Review: May 24, 2012 - Revision: 3.0

Description of the SharePoint Server 2010 cumulative update package (SharePoint server-package): April 24, 2012

Notice:

This hotfix package is no longer available due to a technical problem."

So I believe the product team wants the message to get out, but doesn't want a bad taste out there. Don't freak out. If you haven't installed it, just don't. If you have, no worries the issue was something that they thought was an important enough regression that they wanted to fix and re-release. No big deal. You will be able to install the update over the top, once it comes out. On twitter there is speculation about incoming email quota as the related regression. I'm not sure what it is. The twittersphere is not lit up from problems, so I wouldn't complain. Let's just let MS do the right thing and let this one get chalked up as they are doing this in our best interest, and it's better that they handle it this way.SharePoint Foundation 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598321
SharePoint Server 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598151SharePoint Foundation 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598321
SharePoint Server 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598151SharePoint Foundation 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598321
SharePoint Server 2010: http://support.microsoft.com/KB/2598151

Product Review: MetaVis Information Manager – Simplify SharePoint Content Management

Joel Oleson — Fri, 25 May 2012 02:38:25 GMT

Overview

The promise of SharePoint is that document management is a major improvement over file shares and other content management platforms. It provides rich metadata for search, filtering, views, and much more. But the reality is that while SharePoint is an incredible platform for displaying data, doing that initial classification is a real chore. The burden is often on having the original author add the metadata. As a result, this process was often overlooked.

Most migrations (regardless of document source) perpetuate this problem. It's copy and paste (or run some copy process) and essentially dump the data into SharePoint document libraries without thought for adding whatever metadata might have existed in the source. Even from one library to another in SharePoint, care is often neglected to preserve the rich metadata.

MetaVis Technologies offers an answer to this problem with MetaVis Information Manager, a software solution that gives USERS versus SharePoint administrators more power to classify and manage content. Now users can bulk upload, bulk classify, add metadata or reclassify, add updated or new values across multiple fields, and approve/reject in bulk. With Information Manager you can enable authors to manage the hundreds or thousands of documents they are responsible for.

Information Manager is installed as a SharePoint site collection feature and shows up as a separate tab in the SharePoint ribbon:

Figure 1: MetaVis Information Manager Tab Integration into the Ribbon

After an administrator has installed the Information Manager feature on the server, any site collection administrator can activate it or have it activated as part of the provisioning process allowing content managers or site collection administrators to leverage a number of content management features right from the ribbon.

The Use Cases

There are a number of use cases for Information Manager:

Getting files into the system with the right metadata (bulk Upload).
Moving files around libraries, sites and site collection with the metadata in tact --or adjusted as necessary (Copy).
Re-classifying/ tagging files -- changing content types, tags, document properties, etc.. (Classify/ClassifyAll).
Bulk Approval of files or list items (Approve/Reject).

Bulk Upload

The out-of-the-box multi-file upload interface in SharePoint is limited to 50MB and 100 files, which can really add a lot of time to getting your data uploaded. By default, most of the critically important metadata on the files will fail to be captured into SharePoint, as new dates are added for core file attributes. To get files into SharePoint using Information Manager, you have the Bulk Upload feature. It allows you to bulk upload files from the file system, whether on a file share or from the desktop and map core properties to new or existing content types and columns. This feature enables to you to automatically add metadata, based on folder structures and hierarchies that you would otherwise have to manually add, risking errors.

Figure 2: MetaVis Information Manager - Bulk Upload

Bulk Copy

With Information Manager you can do a bulk copy and preserve metadata across sites. This requires that the feature be on across both site collections, but allows the content types and metadata to be preserved. Wow! What a pain that's been in the past. The bulk copy operation allows one to select the files they are interested in moving, then select the columns and map the content types across. Preserving metadata or adding additional metadata, based on one attribute and mapping it to another, enables scenarios that otherwise are very time consuming. Whether the need is consolidation or splitting up, moving or copying sites or content, this process can keep the data that's most important.

Figure 4: MetaVis Information Manager: Classify - Content Type Mapping Column Mapping

Classify/ClassifyAll

Now that you've got your data in the system, you likely have on-going tasks for document owners to add additional metadata or change it. Maybe you've added a new content type or need to move a number files to a new content type. Maybe you need to add new keywords to a number of files or add new properties altogether. In addition, it's important to note that any investment in creating these new mappings can be saved as classification templates for future use.

Figure 3: MetaVis Information Manager - Bulk Classify

Approve/Reject

Another feature of Information Manager is the ability to mass approve or reject documents. If you are someone who has to review a lot of documents, then this feature is for you. It's also meant to ease the process of reviewing documents with a number of related assets (like images and other related documents). Review everything, then select them all and approve or reject as a group.

My Thoughts on My Experience with Information

Personally, I have managed sites with a lot of documents and have felt the pain, wherein if I decided to use version control, I was worried about people not checking in documents. One of the features I know I'd use is the ability to check in documents in mass. Also, some of the biggest pains with SharePoint are what happens when you start consolidating sites. Migration is a big pain. Having these tools built right into the ribbon for copying and moving content including the bulk upload option enables users to focus on the tasks of managing documents and lists the way they need to do it. What they don't have to think about are complicated migration tools.

So what's the downside?

There's not much downside really. Information Manager provides functionality to users which is on top of the functionality they already have. My only note of caution is that Information Manager includes an ActiveX brower plugin for the bulk upload feature. The plugin is what enables Information Manager to capture to the file system's NTFS properties such as created and modified, security etc for the documents to be uploaded and since most organizations are already using Internet Explorer for SharePoint (and because SharePoint's own bulk upload function uses an ActiveX Control as well) this shouldn't be an issue. If this is a major concern for you, you can look at MetaVis's client tools for bulk uploading documents. I personally was hoping for something cross browser in this space.

Another potential concern is that users may not understand the power they have. Functions such as bulk uploading, re-classifying and moving documents have often been filled by roles in IT. But these are really functions best suited to content managers and information managers who deal with these types of activities on a day to day basis. What's important to point out here though is Information Manager is integrated with SharePoint's permissions model. So you can slowly introduce features of the tool to users to get them up to speed without over loading them. You can also restrict features from some users, ensuring that your best content managers have the functionality they need to do their job (and only the functionality they need).

Conclusion

MetaVis Information Manager can help simplify arduous tasks of information management and make life easier. Those tasked with managing SharePoint files and adding the filters to display SharePoint data will find that the ROI of discovery and search in SharePoint is based on good metadata in your SharePoint environment.

You can get a free trial of MetaVis Information Manager (Embedded SharePoint 2010 Ribbon Control for multi file upload, classify, and copy) and try it for yourself.

This product review is an unbiased review and a paid service by Joel Oleson. How did I do?

SharePoint Conference Registration Now Open – Get Early Bird $400 Off Discount!

Joel Oleson — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:04:25 GMT

Not sure everyone got this email, so I wanted to share it with all my readers. This is THE conference of the year. See you there! This is a direct copy and paste from the email, and I have not changed the links.

November 12-15, 2012 · Las Vegas, NV

Register now to give yourself a competitive edge and get the inside scoop about 'SharePoint 15' while learning how to better use SharePoint 2010. Get informed with the best in the field: Engineers who built the product, Microsoft Certified Masters, and MVPs. Gain invaluable knowledge to increase your productivity and stay ahead of the game through hundreds of focused breakout sessions, hands-on lab environments, and instructor-led lab scenarios.

With over 65,000 customer organizations, more companies have chosen SharePoint as their primary collaboration tool than all other vendors combined. Register now to learn from the best in the industry and be a part of the unique experience only available at SharePoint Conference 2012!

See you in Vegas.

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