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Blog entries related to Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365 solutions such as Power BI, Microsoft Flow, Power Apps and Microsoft Teams
While many people have enjoyed the “You Might be a Redneck If” jokes by Jeff Foxworthy, few people are aware of the applicability to the IT community. As a professional IT consultant for C5 Insight, I have saved a number of clients from unfortunate situations caused by their previous, not-so-qualified consulting partners.
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Successful user adoption, or the mental acceptance and use of something new, can be achieved in any organization. There are a number of methods that can be used to implement new systems, including "big bang" (single rollout) or "phased adoption" (gradual rollout). Regardless of the method you use to rollout user adoption in your organization, there are a few important items that must be factored into your plan.
Over the time I’ve been using SharePoint, I’ve been taking notes on the tools and that make my job a little bit easier. Lately I’ve focused on collecting a ton of tips for working with branding in SharePoint2010. To help other people working with branding in SharePoint, I thought I should share some of my information.
On a recent client engagement, we had a somewhat common requirement that we had solved several times before. It was part of a multi-month complete extranet solution with extensive branding and user interface design/layout. The site's overall feel from a UI and design perspective was intuitive, sleek and quite honestly, beautiful. Although the particular requirement wasn't overly complex or new to our team, we decided to solve this using an approach we had never tried before to maintain the sleek look and feel of the site.
There isn’t a day that goes by, where I come across some type of challenge, situation, issue, or piece of new learning that isn’t worth sharing with others. This article encourages you to blog, explains why it's important, and provides ideas on how to make it a natural part of your day.
In our day-to-day client work, one topic we are very passionate about is user adoption. We talk about this topic both internally and externally on a daily basis. After all, we should never forget for whom we are solving problems and building solutions. Put another way - if a car manufacturer builds 1,000 cars and no one buys them, then what was the point?
If you’re like a lot of other folks, you’ve taken advantage of the Managed Metadata functionality in SharePoint. You’ve created your taxonomy group, specified your term sets, and created some terms. Then you’ve created your managed metadata column in your site collection, and pointed it to your specified term set. You’ve then uploaded a lot of documents and specified terms for the metadata column, everyone is “happy happy happy”.
But then you need to rename one of your terms currently called “Information Technology Department” to just “Information Technology”. No sweat, you go into the Term Store tool, rename the term. Done right? To your surprise, when you look at properties of various documents tagged with your term, they haven’t been renamed. Hmm … what gives?
Does your business hinge on the government?
If you’re in healthcare, manufacturing, energy and education, the answer is definitely and in any other industry, the answer is probably so! Regardless, the government and its respective actions are initiating new laws and regulations that could not only impact but dramatically adjust a business operation. While the news may carry a story for the world to see, chances are that your business may just take some notes in an old notebook and hope to keep up with the story.
As a company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) services, we’re big advocates of using your CRM system to track and approve sales commissions. But sometimes it can be impractical to do this. This is particularly true in complex organizations, small organizations or fast-growing organizations where you need the flexibility to quickly adapt your commission model to a changing situation in the marketplace. Long-term, everyone should aim to handle commissions in their CRM system, but what do these organizations do in the short-term?
The good news is that SharePoint is an excellent tool for giving you all of the flexibility you need, while still having an efficient process for setting, tracking and distributing commissions. Here’s how it can work for you.
I was working with PowerShell to update a managed metadata field that accepted multiple values in a publishing page library today and it was more difficult than it seemed like it should have been, so I’m posting here what actually worked for me. It turned out to be much simpler than I was trying to make it.
On a recent project, I hit an issue with databases that was interesting. We were restoring a lot of databases over to a development environment from production, as well as the managed metadata database. I had gone through the whole deal, backed up the database in the old server, restored it to the development SQL server, etc. There was an issue with the Managed Metadata service that required to have service application re-created. This lead to a situation where the service application database was unprovisioned, but not deleted.
If you ever move a calendar from one place to another, either as part of a site move or a list move, you will be greeted by the fact that your calendar overlays no longer work because the URLs to the overlaying calendars are hardcoded into the list view. I am trying to set up an automated restore from production to development, so having lots of broken calendars isn’t great. Fortunately, all you have to do is run a few lines of PowerShell to fix this.
I don’t believe Microsoft Expression ever had a huge following from web developers and graphics designers, but it served a purpose. Whether you liked it, hated or loved it, Microsoft has done what it does best again.
In case you haven’t visited their website lately, you will notice some major changes with Expression. Basically, they are rolling the Expression products into Visual Studio 2012 and beyond, forgoing the standalone tools. For the time being, they made Expression Web 4, Expression Design 4 and Expression Encoder 4 free for download. That may not be a big deal to some, but I think it could prove useful to some.
Microsoft Excel is an amazing tool both in terms of the diversity of functions that it can provide and in the depth of data analytics and business intelligence that it makes available to people at every level of an organization. But too often businesses find that they are using it to solve problems that are much more complex that Excel was intended to solve - and paying a price in terms of employee productivity and costly decisions made using bad data.
So how do you know you've taken your Excel application too far? And what do you do about it?
So you’re going about your business in SharePoint, say when you want to publish an article page. You open the page and click on Publish, and the Schedule option isn’t there! Ack! Oh the humanity! If you’re uploading a document, the schedule items appear on the edit properties (editform.aspx) dialog.
You may be asking, what scheduling option? Well, it’s the option for being able to publish pages at a future date and time and is activated at the document library level. If you have a publishing site, this feature should already be activated on the Pages library. But it can be enabled on any site/library under the right conditions. This is very likely a simple fix. Let’s review the items to check.
Calendar Overlays was definitely a welcome new feature when SharePoint 2010 was released. They provide decent basic functionality for being to have a nice view of multiple calendars at once (up to 10 calendars). Suppose you are in a situation where you want to do some calendar overlays, but you only want to show a filtered set of calendar entries on the calendar overlay view? This turns out to be much easier than it might sound. Now you could write a simple workflow that runs on the child list and copies the list item on the child calendar to the parent calendar, but that’s not really an overlay is it?
As I said, this is actually extremely easy to configure. It feels like it should be illegal to be this easy, so enjoy the moment! So what do we need to do? Here are the overview steps:
Last week, C5 Insight attended the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. It was a very full and eventful week, which was the primary reason I did not blog each evening on the daily events as I have in the past. My goal for this blog post is to summarize the overall conference highlights and some of the features that we see as very promising in SharePoint 2013.
While the contacts list is usually filled out for contacts that are outside the company, there are times when you would use a contacts list to store internal and external resources. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to re-type your internal contacts’ information that are already in the system? Now you can with a little InfoPath customization on the contacts list.
Several days ago I wrote a post in response to the successful South Carolina cyber-attack (that earlier post can be found here). Although the security benefits alone are enough to justify starting the move to the cloud, there are numerous other cost-saving and productivity improving reasons for state and local governments to consider making the move.
As I work with various clients with different skill levels with SharePoint, I have on more than one occasion needed to compile a list of training resources. Microsoft (and others) provide a good number of resources so I thought I would try and compile a list in one place. These resources can be a mix of delivery methods including blogs, whitepapers, online videos, tutorials or courses. Let’s start with resources for end users, then move to the IT Pros, then to the developers. I started writing this for the purpose of training, but the lists quickly grew to include other resources, so I hope you find it a useful resource.
For the sake of this post, all resources will be for SharePoint 2010. But with the very soon to release SharePoint 2013, I will provide some information in another post. Stay tuned!
Earlier this week it was announced than an international hacker had successfully made off with over 3 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers from the state of South Carolina. State and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars trying to secure their data systems. In spite of this investment, a hacker was able to identify and exploit a weak spot in their armor. As public sector budgets are continuing to shrink, there is pressure to add more software applications to automate tasks and lower costs; increasing pressure to cut costs on security for these applications; and increasing pressure to extend the life of less secure and aging legacy computer applications. The result is that our government agencies are at increasing risk of successful cyber-terrorism through a greater number of applications, lower security standards, and aging applications that should be replaced.
How could South Carolina and other state and local governments cost-effectively protect vital citizen, business and government records? The answer comes from an emerging private-sector technology: cloud computing.
By now, most of you reading this have likely heard a little about SharePoint 2013, Microsoft's next version of its best-selling collaboration platform. In this short blog, we wanted to highlight some of our favorite features that will be in the next version of SharePoint.
If you're unsure what ULS logs are or what they're used for, please see my previous post where I cover the basics. On a recent project, I was adding a new server to a SharePoint 2010 farm. After the join was completed, I went to go review the ULS logs to ensure all looked well and no serious errors or other issues came up. To my surprise, it was empty! It turned out to be a simple fix, but here are some things to check when this happens:
While you shouldn’t have to, it might be necessary to either perform an IISRESET on the problem server, or even reboot to ensure new credentials take affect.
I recently had a client that wanted to change the default text that appears in all search boxes. By default it shows “Search this site…” and the client wanted it to be a little more customized to their environment. It turns out this is very simple to accomplish, and no code! We just need to edit 2 XML files.
Awhile back I ran into an issue where I had some site collection backups that failed to complete. No big deal, but this caused the locks on the site collection to remain in place, as I curiously found my administrator account with deny permissions on all sites in the site collection. This begs the question “What other site collections could be locked?” That becomes a real problem if you have a large number of site collections. Who wants to check each one in Central Administration one by one? Being the non-developer type, I turn to my trusty friend PowerShell.
First, what are we talking about specifically? In Central Administration, click Application Management, then under Site Collections, click Configure quotas and locks. Choose your web application/site collection, and view it’s status:
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
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This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.