SharePoint Book Reviews

Is SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning on your mind?  Not sure where to start? In the Microsoft TechNet topic entitled Plan site creation and maintenance (SharePoint Server 2010), Microsoft is quick to point out that before you deploy and make sites available to users, you will need to answer questions such as:

Do you want to tightly control site creation or to allow many users to create sites?
At which level in the site hierarchy should additional sites be created?
How do you find and remove unused sites in your environment?

Once you’ve reviewed Microsoft’s TechNet topics regarding Governance in SharePoint 2010, let me recommend that you take a look at our Site Provisioning and Governance Assistant for SharePoint 2010 product…

Last weekend I was poking around my music collection on my server and noticed a bunch of artists and albums not showing up in my library (I use Zune to listen to my music and copy it to my phone). Diving in I noticed one folder was full of M4A files… arg! Damn iTunes format… I don’t want Apple or Microsoft format, I want standard plain old MP3! Using the following PowerShell command, I found there were a ton of these types of files on my server: 1: Get-ChildItem “\RIVERCITY-NAS1Music” -recurse -include *…

Body: In SharePoint Designer workflows that are manually started, the initiation form is the page that has the “Start” button to kick off the workflow.  In this 11 minute video, I show how to create an approval workflow that can be manually triggered. 
I walk you through:
Setting up the workflow so that after the approval process, the content approval status of the document automatically gets updated…

Here are 10 criteria that you should be watching out for and Vendors should be paying attention to…  Otherwise it’s… 3 strikes and you’re out!
1.       Their site looks like it was built in FrontPage 98
2.       When you ask the vendor if they are deployed in the Sandbox or packaged in a server solution and you ask… “What’s a solution?” or “What’s a sandbox”
3…

As part of another ongoing effort I am hoping to share and highlight useful templates/Governance documents and samples that are available to the public. To achieve this I have started a SharePoint Governance Policies, Plans, and Documents listing and have listed over 35 documents and provided 15 starter examples/samples…

A funny thing happened today caused by the fact that my location in the OS is set to the UK and not the US.

I have a RSS feed set up for TechNet Magazine articles and, because of that location setting, when I click on the link to one of the articles (in this case to the one on SharePoint 2010 Government from the May 2012 issue) I get the article in the normal US English but with a UK (actually /en-gb) URL instead of the usual US (en-us) URL…

Hello again everyone.
In March I have published an article in IDM magazine (australia) about upgrading sharepoint and what is the difference between that and migration, and the pros and cons of each one. I even gave tips to successfull upgrademigration projects. If you want to read it, I have now republished it in my company’s site:
http://www…

Last month, I started to focus on specific industries and how SharePoint provides value to each of them. The focus of the first blog in this series was how SharePoint is used in Education sector. This week’s blog is going to focus on the Energy sector and how a properly leveraged SharePoint instance can greatly […

Body: Like last week, this week’s netcast is bursting at the seams with SharePoint goodness. I cover a Kerberos "gotcha" that got me last week. Then I talk about why you should slipstream your own installs instead of being a lazy bum and using the SP1 installer on MSDN. I talk about why you shouldn’t use SQL authentication between SharePoint and SQL…

The Apple TV is the only kind of device I would be allowed to put anywhere near the TV. It’s small and it looks good so it satisfies the style expert who also lives in this house. It’s black too which is also essential to fit to the black TV which until now was the only thing on top of the white surface of the unit it’s on…

Body: Last month was the International SharePoint Conference in London. I was honored to be invited to be a speaker at the conference. The format of the conference was great. Not only were there different tracks, but within each track, there were continuous solutions being built from one session to the next…

What makes SharePoint so appealing to Associations and Societies? It is well known that associations, and for this case societies, have a tight budget and limited staff, so looking from the planning and implementation point of view, staying within the approved budget and timeline, developing a successful CMS solution first time is vital…

I’ve always thought the word kill comes on a little strong, but at the same time… I think it gets the point across.  I’ve been very big into mobile lately and SharePoint’s default mobile WAP interface is driving me crazy.  About 5 months ago I wrote about some of my experiences: SharePoint For Mobile – Yes we can!
It’s also not the first time I’ve said “SharePoint Defaults have Faults…

Abstract: ​Integrate a picture library slide show into a SharePoint blog post.
Category: SharePoint Online; SharePoint 2010; Team Sites
Published: 5/8/2012 9:07 AM
# Comments:

Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend and present at the SharePoint Saturday Belgium edition. The Belgium Information Worker Usergroup (BIWUG), who organized the event, deserves a big round of applause; they hosted around 200 enthusiastic SharePoint people on a free and fun event. Of course a big thanks also goes to the numerous sponsors: Xylos (for making their great infrastructure available), AvePoint, Beyond-it, Metalogix, K2, Microsoft, Spikes, Ventigrate, Aurelium, Axceler, CTG, Idera, RealDolmen, Webtrends, and Wrox…

Microsoft is now open about the fact that they will be revealing the details of SharePoint 15 at the SharePoint Conference.
Key points to Note:
Inside scoop of 15 at the invent
Product team access
Dates: Nov 12-15
Registration opens mid May 2012
The Hash Tag will be #SPC12
Conference website and more details at http://www…

Body: Have you ever published changes in a workflow in SharePoint Designer and wish you hadn’t? There is a little known way to go in and restore a previous version of your workflow. This uses the same versioning capability that lists and libraries have. By default, every time you publish changes to a workflow, they are saved as a new version…

This week I delivered a SharePoint session at Microsoft Windays 2012 Conference in Rovinj, Croatia. The session was on SharePoint 2010 – Installation and maintenance – best practices. If you are a novice SharePoint admin this could be good staring material for your SharePoint project.
SharePoint 2010 – Installation and maintenance – best practices
View more presentations from Toni Frankola…

Forward: this has nothing to do with SharePoint I’m using Entity Framework 4.1+ and the cool Code First capability on a current project. For those unaware, Entity Framework (EF) is an code representation of your database. Code First (CF) is an approach where you define classes & relationships between them and let EF do the work of creating the DB and data model…

Do you have other articles or resources? For a long time I would respond with a brief collection of random links (whatever I could think of first) and would send them off to people who asked this question. In the spirit of trying to remember/keep a listing of many of the contributions I have made a new section of my blog called “Writing and Resources” is now available…

Body: Tonight’s netcast was a long one. After taking last week off I had a lot to cover this week. I started off by telling everyone about the new, and even longer Kerberos white paper. Then, for something completely different, I talk about the improvements a CU made to the User Profile Service. I also talk about a bug I encountered with FAST server and how I fixed it…

If you’re like me, you stay away from installing SharePoint on your client OS (Windows 7) and just put it on your server OS and run within a VM. However there are times you want to pop into Visual Studio without firing up a VM and exploring the code. Of course you can do that, but it gets tricky when you want to build or run unit tests…

I received a number of RSS feeds for several new (and a few revised) KB Articles for both the 2007 and the 2010 SharePoint products.

While adding them to the relative WSS FAQ sites, I noticed a few things.

1. Two of the KB articles for SharePoint Server 2010 hot fixes had already been withdrawn (= the link didn’t work and then a search on the title from the RSS feed gave a link to a KB article number that was not available)…

What do you think of when you hear the word SharePoint? Usually the answer to this question is: Collaboration. Which is correct! However, SharePoint is so much more than a group/team of people collaborating on their intranet. Today, I want to take a few minutes to describe how an organization can expose their line of […

Overview
You’ve been there, you’re looking for good analytics, but every tool you seem to run only tells you what it can find in the IIS logs. You are interested in the content and users together not just by itself. It’s not that hard to find out who your top users are, you want to know if they are doing good things or malicious things…

I received a number of RSS feeds for several new (and a few revised) KB Articles for both the 2007 and the 2010 SharePoint products.

While adding them to the relative WSS FAQ sites, I noticed a few things.

1. Two of the KB articles for SharePoint Server 2010 hot fixes had already been withdrawn (= the link didn’t work and then a search on the title from the RSS feed gave a link to a KB article number that was not available)…

Overview
You’ve been there, you’re looking for good analytics, but every tool you seem to run only tells you what it can find in the IIS logs. You are interested in the content and users together not just by itself. It’s not that hard to find out who your top users are, you want to know if they are doing good things or malicious things…

If you’re like me, you stay away from installing SharePoint on your client OS (Windows 7) and just put it on your server OS and run within a VM. However there are times you want to pop into Visual Studio without firing up a VM and exploring the code. Of course you can do that, but it gets tricky when you want to build or run unit tests…

What do you think of when you hear the word SharePoint? Usually the answer to this question is: Collaboration. Which is correct! However, SharePoint is so much more than a group/team of people collaborating on their intranet. Today, I want to take a few minutes to describe how an organization can expose their line of […

Since the release of SharePoint Server 2010, the maintenance of the User Profile Service Application (UPA) Sync DB has been extremely problematic. I’m not talking about “standard” database maintenance tasks here, you know those routine tasks you should be performing on your environment but that seldom are implemented by those running operational service …

This is a short post meant to highlight minor updates to the User Adoption Activities Listing and the Intranet Component Listing. I am trying to get into the habit of doing more frequent updates (rather than big ones every couple months).

The following have been added to the User Adoption Activities Listing:

Best In Class Showcase
For Charity Campaign
SharePoint Olympics
Submit Success Story

The following have been added to the Intranet Component Listing:

A Day In The Life Of… (Employee Spotlight)
Upcoming Holidays

Have you seen ones I don’t have listed? Let me know!
Eventually I intend to do a more comprehensive write up (and screen shots) on each one…

Where do I start? The users demand support for multi lingual. First step I see is to start supporting the language packs… but which ones? You need to figure it out. You may not be best served by simply installing all of them. What would happen if MS decided to stop supporting one of them? I’ve found a few places that make me sound smart when I recommend languages to support… It doesn’t have to be a guessing game…

Body: In tonight’s netcast I talk more about the SQL 2012 version of SSRS. Then I talk about a new white paper that describes how to use SQL 2012′s AlwaysOn technology with SharePoint 2010. I also give my take on the new SharePoint Browser compatibility document that was recently released. Finally I tie it all up with some great little PowerShell nuggets I’ve found in the last week…

For this web design inspiration jolt, I decided to continue our series of industry specific showcase with a collection of 50 beautiful and innovative technology related companies with websites built on SharePoint.
To see the complete list and to discover more technology related companies with websites built on SharePoint platform click here…

When I was in Germany in the 80′s I was used to writing off from my taxes the money I spent on my own computers (starting in ca 1982 with the Osborne 1) and software/computer books.
 
So when I came to Finland in 1989 when it came to do my taxes I asked around; found everyone saying that it was virtually impossible to get private computing costs deleted from taxes; but decided to do so anyway – hanging the deductions on the fact that my title was "Internal Consultant" – and got them through…

Tomorrow night (Thursday, April 12, 2012) I’ll be presenting a developer topic to the local Jacksonville, FL SharePoint User’s Group. The talk will be at the Deercreek Country Club… anyone up for a round? Developing with SharePoint Server 2010 Metadata The Managed Metadata Service application in SharePoint 2010 allows users to create and utilize taxonomies in various ways…

People in the US have it easy as far as computing goes.
 
They have the cheapest computers and if there’s a price on a web site for a book; a Kindle book; an iTunes app or music/video; or software, then that’s the price you pay.
 
You also get without thinking about it links to English language versions of software (think for instance adding Google Chrome to a PC) and if you are updating a piece of software that you already have then you get English language screens to help you through the upgrade process (and you know at the end of the process you will still have an English language piece of software)…

Today, I want to focus on SharePoint in academic organizations. How does SharePoint help educational institutions? How do on demand educational tools align to empower them? The usual educational staff and teacher complaints stem from frustration with the time it takes to get access to needed data. More often than not, too many systems need […

We continue our SharePoint branding inspiration series of posts on color schemes going through some excellent examples of red-based SharePoint websites.
Red color is well known to be used in design world to grab attention and mostly to urge visitor to take action. It symbolizes power, love and passion…

As many of you know, I run the SharePoint team at a large non-profit by day. After hours, I organize SharePoint Saturday Utah, an annual event that brings more than 20 SharePoint experts and hundreds of attendees together for a full day of SharePoint educational sessions. If you’ve ever managed an event or project involving multiple parties and moving parts, you know that email is a horribly inefficient tool for collaboration…

Body: There is a quick and easy way that information about the logged in user can be obtained from within an InfoPath form. You may have read my blog and other blogs before, with the user profile service web service instructions. In this post, I’m not going to be using the user profile service. This means that what I’m about to show you can be utilized with any version of SharePoint, whether you have a user profile service (enterprise) or not…

One of the most important and crucial steps when designing a website is the color scheme selection. It is well established that colors express mood, engage the visitors, generate interest and produce a first impression that in turn would make your visitors roam your website for a longer time. I can safely say that your website success can be influenced by the color scheme you pick…

SharePoint Solutions is pleased to announce the release of the first two videos of a new free SharePoint training video series: SharePoint 101 – What Makes SharePoint Work. The free video series is the latest addition to our free SharePoint training video library, and introduces the viewer to key foundational SharePoint concepts and strategies, with a view towards helping organizations derive the most value from their SharePoint implementations…

When you want to show the items created in the last 7 days in a specific SharePoint view you need to keep two things in mind: Make sure that you remove spaces from the filter value – otherwise you will get “Filter value is not in a supported date format” – so “[Today]-7” works but “[Today] – 7” will not work Apparently the “[Today]” parameter is MUI aware – so when you creating a formula with Dutch as language you have to use [Vandaag] (For more about MUI check out Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part I as well as Multilingual User Interface (MUI) in SharePoint 2010 – Part II) Technorati Tags: sharepoint,MUI,views,microsoft

In the past I’ve complained about the Salesforce SOAP API for reading/writing your CRM databases. Last year Salesforce added a new API, one founded on RESTful principals, for developers to work with. I wish it was implemented as an OData service, but I guess the Salesforce guys are stuck behind the times…

If you have office365 or other hosted sharepoint solutions, you may find that the managed metadata column is not available to use – it shows an error that “the required feature is not enabled for this column type”.There are two possible reasons. The first – you don’t have a hosted site that supports managed metadata…

The iPad invasion is here, ready or not. Used for an increasingly wide range of business applications, iPads can be found at every level, from executives to assistants, board members to sales teams. With workplace use skyrocketing, these devices – whether corporate-sanctioned or personally-owned – present security, compliance, and legal challenges that cannot be ignored…

In MS Project 2003 you had a separate button – Analyze Timescaled Data in Excel, for those of you who are looking for this functionality in MS Project 2010 – take a look at the new Visual Reports feature in 2010. Tags van Technorati: Excel,MSProject,Microsoft

Last November Microsoft rolled out an update to SharePoint Online, part of Office 365, that enabled users to leverage BCS connections to consume and work with data that doesn’t live inside SharePoint Online. Unlike an on-premise deployment, the only BCS option available to users is to create external content types that connect to WCF services using the declarative only approach…