SharePoint Managed Metadata Overview
Guest Author: Sharon Richardson SharePoint.Sharon SharePoint has always had some form of metadata capabilities. However the latest version includes the first attempt at managing metadata. This post is a brief introduction and overview. First a quick (and very basic) primer on what is metadata. It is simply data about data – the stuff that describes a document (or any digital artefact). The title, author and date modified are all metadata properties. You can define your own properties such as category (what’s it about) or status (public, confidential). Metadata typically comes ...
Making Sense of SharePoint’s Workflow and BPM Capabilities
Guest Author: Ahmed Hafeez Edgewater Technology Workflow and BPM often get lumped together but it is important to understand the difference between them if you are to pick the right tool for your enterprise. While it is generally agreed that workflow is for modeling simple sequential processes and BPM solutions are more capable of handling complex tasks the distinction between the two needs to be further sharpened. According to David McCoy of Gartner BPM can be defined as “… a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to ...
The SharePoint Maturity Model, Version 1.0
Guest Author: Sadie Van Buren A Matter of Degree As SharePoint gains in popularity and adoption worldwide, an increasing number of resources are available to help organizations understand and navigate the different aspects of this platform. What’s missing is a cohesive way to analyze and understand the system as a whole. Yet many experts have observed that, although SharePoint implementations vary from organization to organization, there is a typical progression of implementation, upward through each functional area and across the areas together. I created the SharePoint Maturity Model to apply a holistic view ...
SharePoint Community Events Need You: How You Can Get Involved – Part 1
Guest Author: Christian Buckley http://buckleyplanet.net One of the best things about the SharePoint community is that people really want to get involved and share their experiences. At a recent SharePoint Saturday event in Boston, I had a great conversation with a developer who had been through a couple deployments, and asked how he could best share his experiences and add to the vast best practice knowledgebase that is the SharePoint community. At the most recent SharePointPalooza event, held in beautiful downtown Seattle, I met several local end users who shared their perspectives on productivity solutions, ...
How clear is your product documentation? Not as clear as it could be.
I went to "Family Morning" at my 5 year old daughter's school yesterday. I walked around the room, looking at the work she has done, reading the story she is working on and getting to know her new friends. Then I saw the chart that showed her how to pack up and it stopped me dead in my tracks. This is the ULTIMATE user's guide poster. It is 2 feet by 3 feet. There is nothing challenging about it. Each step is self explanatory, down to having a little picture to clarify the step. I almost started screaming out loud! This ...
How clear is your message? Not very, I’m afraid.
Look at the picture above and tell me what this company sells. 99 times out of 100 people will say "Fish", and they will be correct. I think about this a lot. I speak at many SharePoint events around the world, seeing the same SharePoint vendors, many who I have come to consider colleagues. The problem is, I still can't tell you what their product is. I know the name of their company. I know the people who work for the company. But if you paid me $1,000,000.00, I couldn't tell you the name of their product and what it does. Why ...
The SharePoint Community Needs You To Be Social: How You Can Get Involved – Part 2
Guest Author: Christian Buckley http://buckleyplanet.net This is the second article in my series on ways that you can get more involved and better connected to the SharePoint community, focusing on ways that you can plug into the social media aspects of the community. SharePoint people are highly connected people. This is by far the most social of the industries I’ve worked in. We blog, we tweet, we read, we gather, we help each other solve business problems, we want to see the community... [Read more]
The SharePoint Maturity Model, Version 1.0
Guest Author: Sadie Van Buren A Matter of Degree As SharePoint gains in popularity and adoption worldwide, an increasing number of resources are available to help organizations understand and navigate the different aspects of this platform. What’s missing is a cohesive way to analyze and understand the system as a whole. Yet many experts have observed that, although SharePoint implementations vary from organization to organization, there is a typical progression of implementation, upward... [Read more]
MindManager Template for SharePoint Taxonomies
Guest Author: Chris Poteet www.siolon.com I remember the first time I was shown the MindManager tool specifically for documenting enteprise-grade taxonomies. For too long tools like Excel had ruled the day, but tools like Excel and Word are too linear and not visual enough for complex taxonomies. Mindjet MindManager has since become my tool of choice for creating and document SharePoint information architectures/taxonomies. I have created a template for SharePoint that you can... [Read more]
QOTD: SharePoint Document Library
Author: Eric Alexander, Moderator, Stump the Panel The Question of the Day from Stump the Panel came in regarding document libraries in SharePoint: Wendy writes: I have a document library that I created to share files with clients that are too large to e-mail. It will never be used for long-term storage, and I don’t want the files in it to get forgotten and take up valuable storage space, so I would like to set up some kind of workflow that will automatically delete a folder and all... [Read more]
SharePoint: Integrate ASP.net controls with Forms – Part 5: Force Selection within Drop Down List
Guest Author: Matt Bramer http://mattbramer.blogspot.com So Close! You may have noticed the Drop Down control has a bug. When you visit the page, an item is already selected but the EditForm isn’t displayed for that item. The best I can tell is the value for the Drop Down is set before the EditForm is ready to accept a connection. Don’t worry though; we can fix it with just a few tweaks to the control. First we must select/click/highlight (pick your pleasure) the Drop Down List... [Read more]
SharePoint 2010 Starter Master Page
Guest Author: Kyle Schaeffer KyleSchaeffer.com I’ve been working a lot lately with the SharePoint 2010 product, and I have to say that my first impression as a designer has been really positive. Microsoft has embraced many of the things we’ve been asking for (including a DOCTYPE declaration!), and you’ll find that creating themes and branding the SharePoint 2010 product is easier than ever before. As with SharePoint 2007, templates are a great way to get started... [Read more]
SharePoint Community Events Need You: How You Can Get Involved – Part 1
Guest Author: Christian Buckley http://buckleyplanet.net One of the best things about the SharePoint community is that people really want to get involved and share their experiences. At a recent SharePoint Saturday event in Boston, I had a great conversation with a developer who had been through a couple deployments, and asked how he could best share his experiences and add to the vast best practice knowledgebase that is the SharePoint community. At the most recent SharePointPalooza event,... [Read more]
Why Community? Some just don’t get it…
More and more my presentations are gearing towards talking about community. My latest one, “Building a SharePoint Community”, is a step-by-step walk through of how EndUserSharePoint.com became a central community around SharePoint End Users and what people can do to develop their own communities. The dilemma is this: Marketing people get it right away… I mean almost IMMEDIATELY. However, I’m having difficulty convincing sales people of the value of becoming part of a community.... [Read more]
Get More Columns in SharePoint Lookup Lists
Guest Author: Olaf Didszun SERVICEPORTALS IT-Systeme GmbH Last week we posted a Question of the Day from Stump the Panel regarding lookup lists in SharePoint. Olaf has sent over this article to help us get more columns from a lookup list. Thanks, Olaf. We have two lists in our site. The first is called Projects and contains only information about the project and the project manager. The second list is called Project Documents and should contain several documents. This library also... [Read more]
How clear is your product documentation? Not as clear as it could be.
I went to “Family Morning” at my 5 year old daughter’s school yesterday. I walked around the room, looking at the work she has done, reading the story she is working on and getting to know her new friends. Then I saw the chart that showed her how to pack up and it stopped me dead in my tracks. This is the ULTIMATE user’s guide poster. It is 2 feet by 3 feet. There is nothing challenging about it. Each step is self explanatory, down to having a little picture to clarify the... [Read more]
WP Tabify: Transform a SharePoint Web Part Zone into Tabs
Guest Author: Kyle Schaeffer KyleSchaeffer.com I do quite a bit of design and implementation on the SharePoint platform. Today, I created a very handy little script that I think might be something worth sharing. I don’t often post anything so specific on my blog, but I found this to be extremely useful, and I hope you do too. What is it? This all started with a great idea from the mind of Matthew Koon. If you’re not familiar with SharePoint, one thing you can do in the platform... [Read more]
How clear is your message? Not very, I’m afraid.
Look at the picture above and tell me what this company sells. 99 times out of 100 people will say “Fish”, and they will be correct. I think about this a lot. I speak at many SharePoint events around the world, seeing the same SharePoint vendors, many who I have come to consider colleagues. The problem is, I still can’t tell you what their product is. I know the name of their company. I know the people who work for the company. But if you paid me $1,000,000.00, I couldn’t... [Read more]
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