Archive for category: SharePoint

SharePoint platform has been around for 10 years and is gaining more traction with the release of SharePoint 2010 version. To-date, SharePoint has gained viral adoption within businesses and is being used for both practical and some impractical solutions. SharePoint has grown from just being a portal system to a complete platform on which business solutions can be built.

SharePoint 2010 offers several features and enhancements that allow the creation of business solutions on top of the SharePoint platform; with all the capabilities and features of SharePoint 2010 platform – partnering with the right implementation team is vital to making the most of the platform.

The Six Pillars of SharePoint 2010

Capabilities of Sharepoint are normally depicted in the Sharepoint wheel with six pillars.  The 6 pillars of SharePoint have changed quite a bit between the 2007 and 2010 versions.  The difference between the 2007 pillars and 2010 pillars clearly indicates that the focus has changed from technical capabilities to business capabilities. This also shows that Sharepoint 2010 has evolved into a solution platform rather than a portal and collaboration enabler.

Sites

SharePoint 2010 allows the creation of any type of site in just a few clicks.  The sites can range from a simple team site to a partner extranet or even a public facing website.

Communities

SharePoint 2010 provides great collaboration tools that allow users to share ideas, find information, and locate people from within a managed environment.

Content

Enterprise Content Management features of SharePoint allows users to create and manage content with relative ease.  SharePoint’s integration

with Microsoft Office provides a familiar user experience for creating content. Web content management features of Sharepoint 2010 facilities creation of content-rich internet sites.

Search

SharePoint 2010 provides a personalized, efficient and effective

search capability that enables users to find the information they require easily.

Insights

SharePoint 2010 has powerful business intelligence features such as interactive dashboards, scorecards, and KPIs that provide access to business information and tools for better decision making.

Composites

SharePoint 2010 provides building blocks that enable non-technical users to create interesting business solutions. The new Business Connectivity Services feature simplifies data integration from disparate enterprise systems.

Partner Tools & Solutions

Microsoft Sharepoint Partners like IOTAP has developed several tools to augment the SharePoint platform capabilities. These tools complement out-of-the-box features of the SharePoint platform and add value to end users.

Partners and independent vendors around the world have developed complete business solutions that run on SharePoint platform. Some of these solutions include project management applications, HR applications, Scanning, Legal Records and Social applications. These solutions utilize the core capabilities of Sharepoint platform and add business-oriented functionality.

Conclusion

Sharepoint 2010 core capabilities along partner tools provide a robust platform for business solutions. An experienced SharePoint 2010 implementation partner like will be able to guide you to better leverage the capabilities SharePoint platform and also select the correct mix of partner tools to meet your business solution requirements.

Many organizations are planning to either upgrade their existing SharePoint installations or deploy SharePoint to replace their outdated file servers.  Each company’s SharePoint requirements and use cases vary.  What does it take to build a successful SharePoint Project Team?

The first step in building the right project team is to understand your SharePoint requirements and to define a strategy and plan for the deployment.  Partnering with a SharePoint Deployment Planning Services (SDPS) provider is a key part in laying the foundation for a successful SharePoint deployment.  SDPS offers customers with Microsoft Software assurance a free one-, three-, five-, ten- or fifteen-day SharePoint Upgrade Planning Service based on the customer’s  Software Assurance (SA) benefit level.

SharePoint upgrade scope varies widely based on several key criteria:

• The number of sites
• The number of users
• The depth of content
• Security requirements
• The complexity of business process workflows
• The level of customization performed in SharePoint
• SharePoint versions
• Third party web parts and features used
• Amount of integration with other business applications
• The infrastructure complexity (single server vs. large farm)
• Deploying SharePoint on-premise or hosted or using SharePoint Online Internet deployment using Web Content Management Service (WCMS), a Portal and Collaboration Solution, or both

Each one of these criteria impacts the type of resources required to build a successful SharePoint Project Team.  A typical SharePoint project team will consist of:

• Project Manager – provides leadership and structure.  Communicates with stakeholders on the plan, Sharepoint Implementation Methodology, and status of the deployment.
• SharePoint Architect – an experienced SharePoint Architect is critical when planning and deploying SharePoint installations.  The SharePoint Architect provides both functional and technical expertise in building the blueprints for SharePoint deployment.
• SharePoint Consultant(s) – experienced with various SharePoint migration tools and methods required to ensure seamless migrations of large, complex, and content-rich deployments.
• SharePoint Developer(s) – the number of SharePoint Developers required will depend on the number of customizations performed in SharePoint, the number of custom web parts required, etc.
• Sharepoint Administrator(s) – Takes care of the infrastructure requirements and handles the installation and configuration.
• SharePoint Branding Specialist(s) – skilled user interface designers who can design and build custom SharePoint skins to match your company’s branding.
• Business Process Analyst(s) – to gain the most benefit from SharePoint, it is important to understand the business processes which SharePoint’s collaboration and workflows will enable.

The decision on whether to perform the deployment in-house vs. outsourcing is driven by the availability of the various resources with appropriate skills and SharePoint experience within the company.  A thorough understanding of the platform capabilities is required to fully leverage the benefits of SharePoint, especially when migrating from file-based servers.  When performing a Sharepoint Upgrade, it is important to have a team experienced with proper migration methods & tools to ensure that access to critical business data contained in SharePoint environment is not disrupted.  After deployment, SharePoint environments often grow beyond the ability of the in-house resources to support.  Consider outsourcing the SharePoint administration and maintenance to experienced SharePoint partners.

In summary, when building a SharePoint project team, assess your SharePoint deployment requirements to identify the scope and diversity of skill sets required.  Ensure the team has a focus on SharePoint and is capable of performing the different roles required.  There is no substitute for experience and a proven track record for deploying SharePoint for new installations or upgrades, whether on-premise or online. If your team doesn’t have the required skills it is better to work with an experienced partner.

SharePoint 2010 provides a set of social features to enable better collaboration.  One of the social features allows users to tag documents, pages, links, etc. within a SharePoint site.  To enable this, there are two UI buttons available as part of the SharePoint ribbon:  “I Like It” and “Tags & Notes”.

During a SharePoint 2010 implementation for a GEO imaging company in Norway, the client wanted the tagging buttons to be less prominent.  Our SharePoint Branding Team was able to achieve this with a tweak to the master page.

Steps to Reduce the Size of Social Tagging Buttons in SharePoint 2010:

Original tag ribbon Control:
SharePoint:DelegateControl ControlId=”GlobalSiteLink3” Scope=”Farm” runat=”server”/>

Updated tag ribbon Control:
SharePoint:DelegateControl ControlId=”GlobalSiteLink3-mini” Scope=”Farm” runat=”server”/>

Large Social Buttons:

Small Social Buttons:

To know more about IOTAP Sharepoint branding services visit Sharepoint Branding page.
To know more about IOTAP Sharepoint 2010 service visit Sharepoint 2010 page.

“I have created the alert in my moss site and I received the First Initial Alert Notification Mail After that I have not received Any emails from the Library if any changes on it”.

I have done the following steps for fixing this issue.

1. Confirm the account running the SharePoint Timer service is the account which has the administrator Full Control permission over the site and the full permission over the content database. If Not provide the permission in the site and the content DB of the site.

2. Confirm your site has the correct default zone URL and the URL is working perfectly(because in my case, I have changed my default zone URL from to http://iotap.com/ in the central Admin after that the SharePoint not able to recognize the new URL due to host header and not added in the hostname  in the host file)

3. Then Run the following stsadm Commands.
   3a. stsadm.exe -o setproperty -url http://iotap.com/ -pn alerts-enabled -pv true
   3b. stsadm.exe -o setproperty -url http://iotap.com/ -pn job-immediate-alerts

Now the Alert in moss should work.

During our custom Sharepoint solution implementation for large Bank in APAC region, we were setting up separate environments for UAT and production. We were planning to set up temporary user accounts  for the UAT environment when the client came up with an interesting question

Can the CALs used by the temporary accounts be reused after deleting the accounts?

After rummaging through Microsoft Licensing literature we found out that User CALs can be reassigned. Here are the exact terms:

You may:

• Permanently reassign your device CAL from one device to another, or your user CAL from one user to another, or
• Temporarily reassign your device CAL to a loaner device while the first device is out of service, or your user CAL to a temporary worker while the user is absent.