Geeky Girl

What's popular web part

2009-11-10T13:53:00Z

There are some new web content management features that allow you to track what content is being accessed by users in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010. This information can be accessed and analysed by the SharePoint administrators, but it can also be surfaced to the end users using the out of the box web analytics web part. This web part can be inserted as easily as any other web part. It will then display to users the most frequently accessed content from a list, site or library that you choose.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Ribbon UI

2009-11-04T12:37:00Z

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 includes the ribbon user interface, giving a much more consistent experience when used alongside Office. There are several advantages to the ribbon UI. One is that it makes it a lot clearer whether or not a user has certain capabilities. In MOSS 2007, if a user doesn’t have the permissions to edit a page, they won’t see the option to edit it. If they can’t see the edit option, they can’t be sure whether it’s because they’re not allowed to or because they just don’t know where the option is. In MSS 2010, they will see controls greyed out so it will be clear that they cannot use those features.

The ribbon is contextual. When you click on an item, new tabs appear related to that item so you see the relevant controls and options. You're not confused by controls that aren't relevant. The administrator can disable tabs of the ribbon, or remove the ribbon entirely where appropriate.

The ribbon is customisable and extensible, so Microsoft partners can add their own code and capabilities and use the standard UI to display them.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Tagging and Folksonomy

2009-11-03T12:16:00Z

With MOSS 2007, you can use metadata and official taxonomy to organise your documents. In Microsoft SharePoint Sever 2010, you still have all those capabilities, but you also get the ability to be less formal and have users define their own tags for SharePoint content. Users can quite simply type in new tags for documents and other content. There is also the facility for prompts and suggested tags, to help keep the terminology consistent. Administrators can track the tags that are being used and, if they so wish, promote particular tags from the folksonomy to the taxonomy.

So SharePoint 2010 offers the capabilities of being both structured and unstructured in its approach to content management.

If you are interested in a particular topic, you can subscribe to a tag and be alerted when new content is added. You can even use tags in order to find people who are experts on a subject using some of the new social networking capabilities.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Reusable no-code workflows

2009-11-02T14:54:00Z

There are several short-comings with designing workflows in the current version of SharePoint Designer (but there’s always Visual Studio and some excellent third-party tools to combat those short-comings). One of the problems with SharePoint Designer workflows for MOSS 2007 is that you can’t reuse them. If I were to design a workflow on a document library and wanted to use that exact same workflow on a different document library, I would have to start all over again.

With the new SharePoint Designer for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, you just choose the option to create a reusable workflow in your initial design. Then you can attach the same no-code workflow to any list, document library or content type where it’s appropriate. You can also take an existing reusable workflow, use it as a template and make any necessary changes. This should cut the time needed to design multiple workflows considerably.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

More theme customisation

2009-10-28T14:57:00Z

A lot of people, when they first get SharePoint, instantly want to make it not look like the out of the box SharePoint. In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, there are a lot more themes to choose from.

When you create a team site, there is a “getting started” web part with some useful links, including one for changing the site theme. Click on this link and you get taken to a long list of the out of the box themes, with a nice display to let you know what you’re getting. Below this in the settings page, is a section for customising the theme. If you want, you can use the out of the box theme except for one or two colours which you set yourself. Similarly, you can change the font of headings or body text with just the click of a button. You don’t have to go into SharePoint Designer or create new style sheets.

There is also a little preview button, so you can check what you’re getting before you make up your mind.

As well as this, it’s now much easier to change the logo associated with a site or site collection. When you edit a site, you get given the option to choose a logo. It takes just a few seconds to put a new logo on your site and its subsites.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Out of the box workflow customisation

2009-10-27T10:34:00Z

MOSS 2007 came with a few out of the box workflows to do tasks which are common in a huge range of organisations. One of these was the approval workflow, provided out of the box because the majority of companies have an approval procedure of some form. This is a very easy to use workflow that can be run on any content type allowing someone to approve or reject a document for publication. The problem was that no two companies do business in exactly the same way.

The out of the box approval workflow is very generic. Companies that wanted something slightly different would have to recreate the entire thing. With Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, you have the ability to use the out of the box workflows as a template and customise them to get the precise workflow needed for your company policies. These changes can be made quite simply in SharePoint Designer 2010 with no need for custom code.

You can now make the out of the box workflows adapt to your needs without any coding and without having to start from scratch.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

What's in a name?

2009-10-26T10:52:00Z

Microsoft are making some changes to the naming of things in SharePoint 2010, the most obvious being the dropping of the word “Office” from the main product name. A rather larger change of name is Windows SharePoint Services becoming SharePoint Foundation.

Confusing though this change may be, I think it’s a good one. I’ve seen a lot of people get confused over the differences between WSS and MOSS. Without seriously digging into the features, it’s hard to understand why they should pay for MOSS, rather than just go with the licenses for WSS they already have. The new name makes it clear from the outset that SharePoint Foundation is the foundation level for a SharePoint solution. It’s there to be built on top of by the main product.

As with WSS and MOSS, SharePoint Foundation will provide the basic functionality necessary for a SharePoint deployment and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 will build on top of it to provide rich and valuable solutions to business problems.

SharePoint Foundation provides the ground-level capabilities for sites, communities and content management. It also gives a small amount of features for search and composites. It may be enough to solve business problems for some companies but for others, the depth of features provided by Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 standard or enterprise will be required.

If you invest in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 when it comes out.

Multi-stage disposition

2009-10-26T09:10:00Z

I'm continuing my series of posts highlighting some of the new features in SharePoint 2010 by talking about one of the new document management features.

In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, it’s a lot easier to have document management policies that are broken into stages. In MOSS 2007, if you wanted to have a policy that had several different steps, you would have to write the custom workflows to handle it. With SharePoint 2010, when defining your policy, you just have to click to add new stages and set the policy rules for each one.

You can then use a combination of the out of the box policy actions and your own custom workflows. Simple!

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Document Sets

2009-10-22T07:35:00Z

I'm continuing my series of posts highlighting some of the (many) new features which are going to be coming in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

The content management capabilities of SharePoint have been extended, allowing you to group documents together as a document set. In MOSS 2007, there are quite a lot of useful document management features around metadata, policies, workflows and so on. In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, those features have been extended to also apply to groups of documents. So you can gather together, for example, a Word document, Excel spreadsheet and a PDF and define metadata on all three at once, have workflows act upon the entire set and define policies that work on the three files together.

Document sets can contain any type of file and all the usual document management features can be applied to the set as a whole, or to the individual files within the set. So you can have some metadata fields which apply to the whole set, but have others filled out for the specific documents within them. You can do the same with security, permissions and content management policies.

This makes it so much easier to group related documents together.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Content Ratings

2009-10-21T13:05:00Z

Continuing my series of posts about new features in Microsoft SharePoint 2010, I’d like to talk about content rating. This is a feature that was much demanded in MOSS 2007. So many people wanted it, that the code for content rating was included in the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 community kit.

Microsoft listened to the feedback about MOSS 2007 and have included this feature out of the box in SharePoint 2010. Now you can quickly and easily rate SharePoint content, discussions, documents and list items out of five and see the results of other people’s ratings displayed as a simple graphic.

It’s a simple click to provide your rating and now everyone can see what content is liked, as well as sorting and filtering by the average rating.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Phonetic Search

2009-10-20T08:32:00Z

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 builds on the already strong foundations of MOSS 2007. The capabilities and value of 2007 are carried forwards, but with additional functionality and value added on top. If I were to explain all the things you can do with SharePoint out of the box, I would probably be spending my entire waking life writing blog posts and still be typing this time next year.

So, instead, I’m going to highlight some of the new features that are available in SharePoint 2010 that make it a little different from the previous version. These features are chosen because I think they’re useful, cool, valuable, interesting or all of the above.

The first feature I’d like to highlight is phonetic search. How many times has someone introduced themselves to you and you’ve got the spelling of their name completely wrong? The English language is notoriously bad for having different collections of letters potentially spelling the same sound. (If you don’t believe this, look up the joke about fish being spelt ghoti).

You can now do people search in SharePoint based on the sound of someone’s name, not just the spelling. Gone are the days of typing in half a dozen spelling variations to try and find one person.

If you buy MOSS 2007 with Software Assurance now, you’ll get the upgrade rights to 2010 when it’s released. There’s no better time to buy!

Get Going Now

2009-10-20T08:30:00Z

With the SharePoint Conference this week, Microsoft has begun lifting the shroud of secrecy around the next version of SharePoint, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, due out in the first half of next year.

In light of this release of information, I’m expecting to get asked more and more, “Why should we buy SharePoint now? Shouldn’t we just wait until the new version?”

Good news! You can buy SharePoint now and get the new version. That’s what Software Assurance is for. Software Assurance is a licensing deal which entitles you to some or all of the following: spread payments, receiving training, using additional copies of certain software at home, discounts on Microsoft products, telephone and web support, error reporting tools, extended hotfix support, even free licenses for back up servers.

Along with all these benefits, you can also get upgrade rights to newer versions. If you buy Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 with Software Assurance, as well as getting all the other benefits (including free licenses for PerformancePoint Server), you will get the right to upgrade to 2010 when it comes out. So you can deploy SharePoint now and start feeling the benefits, without having to shell out loads of money for the next lot of licenses.

What are you waiting for?

A brief aside

2009-10-12T14:05:00Z

I’d like to take a brief break from discussion SharePoint and Office to talk about something else which means a lot to me.

Last month, the UK government offered a formal apology for the inhumane treatment of Alan Turing.

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician and one of the founders of modern computing. In university, even now, computer science students will learn about Turing machines in connection to the theory of what is computable. He first defined these machines in a mathematical paper in 1936, well before the age of PCs (the paper’s actually a very dull read, but I’ve got a nice book which annotates and explains the paper).

He’s perhaps most famous for his work cracking the Enigma code during World War Two. Along with many other talented mathematicians, he worked at Bletchley Park breaking German ciphers. He designed a machine, the bombe, which enabled the British to break the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. In many ways, this could be considered to be the first real computer.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he did some theoretical work on artificial intelligence. He proposed a theoretical experiment known as the Turing test to determine a standard for an intelligent machine. Despite all his work on this field, the quote I remember is one which he wrote in a letter, believing it would be used as a proof against his work:

Alan Turing believes machines think. Alan Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think.

In 1952, Turing was convicted for gross indecency. Basically, he was tried for being gay. As a result, he was chemically castrated, victimised and banned from his cryptography work. He committed suicide a couple of years later.

I think it’s a fantastic thing that Gordon Brown has issued his apology. I just wish the apology could have come 55 years earlier.

Alan Turing is one of my personal heroes and I have giving him a hug quite high on my list of things to do if I ever get a time machine.

The Housing Analogy

2009-10-07T11:54:00Z

I’d like to share an analogy for SharePoint. Just imagine you’ve bought a new house. That house is SharePoint.

The chances are, you will have had some help in the process from the likes of solicitors, estate agents, removals companies and so on. Those guys are the SharePoint partners. Their job is to help you find the house and get settled in.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe the house is exactly what you need. After all, SharePoint out of the box does provide a lot of features that can be used to solve business problems. But the chances are that you’ll want to do something. It could be as small a thing as a fresh coat of paint and some new curtains, or it could be a loft conversion, or it might be a whole new extension. Depending on how major the work is and what your skills are, you might try some DIY. Or it might be time to call in the partners again.

I’ve had people ask me why go with SharePoint they then need to do loads of customisation work. The answer is that it’s a lot quicker and easier (and generally cheaper) to do a bit of adaption to something that already exists than it is to start from scratch, in the same way that it’s easier to do a kitchen refurbishment to an existing house than it is to build your own home from nothing. Plus, you can move into a house and start getting the benefits of living there; the construction work can take place later as appropriate. You can deploy SharePoint and start getting some return on investment and add in the customised features at a later stage of the project.

We can take this metaphor a step further, because there is more than one type of house and more than one type of SharePoint. You could have a little terraced house, a spot in the suburbs or a large place in the country. You can have Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Standard, or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise.

In this economy though, not everyone can afford to buy a house of their own. What do they do? They rent. SharePoint Online.

How to: Create a read-only view

2009-10-06T13:06:00Z

I'm continuing my series of how to videos by showing how to create a read-only view. There are several reasons why you might wish to do this, the most common being that you want to have forms that cannot be altered after a process has been completed. This principle can be expanded to create multiple views, each associated with a different step of a process.