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 ...
Combine Documents and Website Links in One SharePoint Library
Today’s question from Stump the Panel “I am new to sharepoint and am trying to set up a research library for our branch. I have created 8 bookshelves for my library using the Document Libraries. I would like to combine different document types (.pdf .doc and .xls) for a particular subject area (e.g. homelessness) and links to websites with relevant subject area information on the same ‘bookshelf’ of my library. I know that I can put in links in a Links List Library but I would... [Read more]
The SharePoint50: Top Microsoft Executives
This week we continue rolling out The SharePoint50 Project by announcing the names of the Top Executives at Microsoft who people listen to when considering purchasing SharePoint. I would venture to guess that you will know some of these through of the visibility they have because of their position at Microsoft, but some you won’t. Take you best guess before clicking through to read the bios. We’ve been asked to publish the criteria by which each of the SharePoint50 was selected. I’ll... [Read more]
Introduction to My Sites in SharePoint 2007
I was flipping through SlideShare.net this morning and did a search for SharePoint. The first one that came up had over 50,000+ views! What could be THAT interesting in SharePoint, enough to convince 50,000 people to view it? My Sites by Robert Wurhman. I’ve embedded the presentation below. It’s essential that we get a clear picture of the purpose of My Sites as we move forward into a more socially oriented SharePoint. I’m interested in your feedback… is this subject worth... [Read more]
Real Life Example with SPServices: Telephone List Gadget
Author: Marc D. Anderson http://mdasblog.wordpress.com Kevin Carbonaro posted a neat little gadget example to the SPServices Discussions today, and I thought it was slick enough that it deserved a blog post. The pundits out there may look at this and say “Well, he should have done it with…” or “That’s not best practice because…”. Hey, even I wrote back to Kevin and said that I would probably have done this with a Data View Web Part (DVWP) instead.... [Read more]
SharePoint 2010 Search Locations in Windows 7
Guest Author: Agnes Molnar http://aghy.dotneteers.net SharePoint 2010 has very powerful search capabilities, especially with the integrated FAST Search Server. But in this part of my series I don’t want to show you the server-side search capabilities but some client side gotchas instead. SharePoint 2010 Search in Windows 7 Windows 7 is the first operation system with the capability to use external search providers as federated search locations – and yes, this federated location... [Read more]
Susan Lennon on Resources for Producing a SharePoint Saturday Event
I caught up with Susan Lennon at SharePoint Saturday in Boston. During our conversation, I discovered that the SharePoint Saturday Coordination Team (Susan, Eric Harlan and Michael Lotter) have resources for people considering producing a SharePoint Saturday in their area. This 5 minute video is of Susan talking about the steps and processes you’ll need to go through to get your event setup. In addition to what you see here, there are other sites where event producers add their imput from their... [Read more]
SharePoint Saturday UK: Post Mortem
I just spent a remarkable weekend at SharePoint Saturday UK in Birmingham, England. The event was hosted by Tony Pounder, Brett Lonsdale and Mark Macrae. It was outstanding on several fronts. It was the first SharePoint Saturday in the UK. Some people didn’t think it would work that well because it’s assumed that Europeans would not want to give up their Saturday, a Ryder Cup Saturday at that, to come and hear about SharePoint. With over 400 people registered, that theory was put to rest... [Read more]
SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better Together – Part 4
Guest Author: Wictor Wilén http://www.wictorwilen.se/ Welcome back to the fourth episode of the SharePoint 2010 and Visio 2010: Better together series. Last time we finished looking at workflows by enhancing the workflow with a visual representation of the workflow process. This visualization was made by Visio Services. Visio Services is a server side rendering engine for Visio that runs as a Service Application in SharePoint. Service Applications were introduced to SharePoint... [Read more]
It’s Not the Stats that Count
Guest Author: Derek E. Weeks Global 360 Inc. 886 people recently took our survey to answer how businesses are using SharePoint today. When the survey report was released earlier this week, it received lots of interest across the SharePoint community. People were quick to pull out statistics from the survey and apply their own spin to them. For example: When we told people that 8% of companies had already deployed SharePoint 2010, some were quick to sound the alarm that SharePoint... [Read more]
SharePoint: Integrate ASP.net controls with Forms – Part 1: Use a SP Datasource to push values to a drop-down menu control
Note from Mark Miller: When I first saw this article from Matt I said “Slow down there, cowboy. We don’t do .NET development here, remember?” Then I looked it over and realized what he is doing is within Sharepoint Designer. Don’t let the title scare you off. Give it a try and tell him what you think. — Mark Guest Author: Matt Bramer I’d like to start this post of with giving credit where credit is due: ASP.NET Controls Filter the Data View. Finding this post... [Read more]
The SharePoint50: Top SharePoint Solution Providers
This week we continue rolling out The SharePoint50 Project by announcing the names of the top SharePoint Solution Providers when people are considering purchasing SharePoint. If you haven’t been following the series up to this point, Global 360 and KnowledgeLake commissioned a study to see who the top 50 influencers are when it comes to making a purchasing decision regarding SharePoint. Last week we rollout out the System Integrators and Consultants. Your can read an overview of the project... [Read more]
Explaining SharePoint Security Through An Analogy
Guest Author: Chris Poteet www.siolon.com While explaining certain SharePoint concepts to clients there are few as perplexing to a client as the SharePoint security model. The idea of role and group based security is foreign to someone who doesn’t think about it most of the day. This forced me to come up with some kind of analogy to make it easier to grasp and implement. I started thinking and realized that SharePoint security is analogous to a shipping box. If you think about a shipping... [Read more]
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