Up until recently SharePoint was being used within an organization for internal purposes, Intranets, team sites, and file share servers. It had a somewhat difficult licensing model for public facing sites so you didn’t see as much SharePoint in the public facing world. That, however, is changing with SharePoint 2010. The licensing model is completely different and allows you to run both internal and external facing sites on the same server. Now, more than ever you will see some amazing public SharePoint sites. Here’s a good place to start http://www.topsharepoint.com/

With the vast amount of information available on the Internet these days, it can be head spinning to try and find useful information in a timely fashion. One of my challenges is having a problem right now and needing a solution – but having to sift through the Internet like a gold miner in the 1800’s trying to find gold and coming up empty handed. There was a great poll on one of the SharePoint forums this week asking people which SharePoint Web sites they liked the most for finding solutions to problems. Here’s what they came up with.

1. SharePoint Products and Technologies on MSDN (TechNet)
2. SharePoint Overflow
3. Experts Exchange
4. SharePoint Web Services Forum on Codeplex
5. SharePoint Products and Technologies on Yahoo
6. SharePoint Experts on LinkedIn
7. SPoint Forums

So, thanks to a good friend, and subscriber of my blog, I received a late night text asking why my blog had no cotent. If you happened to see the blog on March 12 on SharePoint Popups, that blog was not intended to publish.

This past week I taught an awesome class in Seattle and had a very diverse group of students. I have to say it was one of the best classes I’ve taught in a long time, simply due to this student diversity. I had several students who had used SharePoint for 2+ years, some who were relatively new to SharePoint, and a few who had never seen the technology what-so-ever. What I enjoyed about the class were the types of questions and the way in which the students were looking to solve real world problems.

Due to all of the questions I came up with about a dozen blogs I cannot wait to get to. So what I had done was create the blog titles and not add any content. Hence a blog accidentally published with no content. But, not to worry. As soon as I have a few minutes I am writing the following blogs.

SharePoint Popups
SharePoint Cheat Sheet
What Can Excel Services Do (and Not Do)
Connecting SharePoint to Word
Top 10 SharePoint List Tweaks
The Publishing Feature of SharePoint
Serious SharePoint Implementation Mistakes
Help Desk Case Study
Content Query Web Part
SharePoint Productivity Hub
InfoPath Training Labs
Sharee’s Favorite Links

I have been addicted to SharePoint for project management for the last year or so, but have had to use a 3rd party tool in order to synchronize my projects with SharePoint. I’ve just discovered that Project 2010 is going to come with that capability. Check out the details here.

Site Administrators have the largest burden when it comes to SharePoint. They are responsible for managing permissions, creating lists and libraries, and maintaining metadata. Most site administrators have never done any of these things before and may not even know what some of these things mean. Luckily there are so many resources available. The Learning Group, based in Seattle offers a SharePoint Business Managers course to help site administrators get the training they need. The class is also offered in Albuquerque and El Paso.

Sometimes, however, you need a little practice either before you take a class, or after you take a class to refresh the information you learned. Microsoft offers a brief online version of this training you can run from your desktop. Explore Office SharePoint Server 2007 with training from Microsoft experts, right from your desktop. Download a simple file to get the grand tour of the latest features and changes, including automated workflows to track approval cycles, business dashboards showing how well you are performing on your goals, and syncing documents to Outlook. The training, which includes articles, videos, and interactive tutorials, will lead you step-by-step through the rich features of Office SharePoint Server.

If you are a regular blog follower you are aware of my emphasis on design whenever I talk about SharePoint. I tell most of my clients you will either design your environment before you deploy or after, but you will design it. I recommend the design process take place in the beginning stages, as it is usually easier, more effective, and will give a good impression of the technology. There is a cultural shift in thinking that takes place when migrating from a file share system to SharePoint. Using metadata and views instead of folders is just one example of that.

What I have found is that even with my emphasis on design, many people still do not understand designing the taxonomy (aka the data). There are many different ways you can tackle designing your data. You can utilize technologies such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) or you can use more simple techniques such as card sorting. While I have documented many UML diagrams, for SharePoint I prefer the more simplistic method of card sorting. I have several articles regarding card sorting in previous blogs.

So, here is an example of a basic card sorting exercise I did with a group of employees this week. Helping them design their intranet and team sites for finance, sales, and human resources. See my blog article on definitions of sites for a clear understanding of intranets and team sites. In this example we used post-it notes as our index cards. I had the HR dept create their list of items, but I had people from the Finance and Sales departments organize the data for HR. This allowed the people in HR to see how outsiders would look for the information. I think this is a valuable lesson as the number one issue people have is not being able to locate their data.

If you try to organize all of the data yourself, you are sometimes too close to the data. You may understand all of the department specific terminology, where people outside the department can say “I don’t understand what that means”. In addition, the way you might organize something within a department may not translate outside the department.

While the exercise can take time, what it provides is several benefits. First, you are involving end users in the design process. This is a huge benefit as they are the consumers of your data and will help you see things from their perspective. Second, you get buy in from the users to the new technology. This may be the biggest obstacle you have to overcome. People want to help. By asking a few people outside of your department to help you organize your data you will usually end up with a more effective way of creating your Web site. Finally, these end users that you recruit can become a champion of the new technology and help other users adapt to the change. 

Finance                              Sales                                HR

  

There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding intranets, team sites, extranets, and workspaces in SharePoint. I have seen so many intranet sites designed that are really a blend of an intranet and a team site. What that means is that there is information on the intranet that is not available to everyone in the company. In order to facilitate this, the intranet has to have broken permissions.

Probably one of my biggest challenges in SharePoint has been inheriting sites with broken permissions. In my opinion, permissions should be inherited if at all possible. When you break permissions ask yourself “does this content really belong here”. So to try and make things more clear I am providing my idea of how to distinguish your different sites. For people who are new to SharePoint 2007 they are not familiar with the concept of keeping the “editable” data in one location and the “view only” version in another location. If you do not architect your sites this way, you would have to break permissions within your intranet in order for individuals to have the ability to edit documents in that location.

Internet – A site about the company for the entire public.
Intranet – A site about the company for all employees.
Extranet – A site about the company for a client/vendor/etc.
Team Site – A site about a department or division for the department or division.
Workspace – A site about various topics for various groups of people.

If you follow these definitions then you should have a better ability to create your sites accordingly. For example, when most companies say they want to develop an intranet I say so you want team sites. Initially they are a little confused and they repeat their request “we want to create an intranet”, to which I reply “so you want team sites”. The point of this conversation is that to properly design an intranet you need team sites. You should keep all of your department specific data in your team sites and publish what you need to the intranet. You will typically have less information on the intranet for a particular dept then you will in the team site.

Workspaces, however, are unique by definition. I would expect to find unique permissions within workspaces as they as their purpose is to allow people from multiple departments to collaborate. My primary purpose of this post is to caution you when you are breaking permissions in a site, pause for a second and try to determine where the “editable” version of the data really belongs. I will write a follow up blog about architecting these sites and publishing.

SharePoint provides support for mobile devices by providing for List Views designated for mobile devices, automatic page redirect if the site is accessed by a mobile device, and the ability to render column data in a format suitable for mobile devices.  By default Windows SharePoint Services ships with a “Mobility Redirect” feature that creates a default.aspx page in the /m folder of each site.  Some users required access to the SharePoint site using the latest mobile device. You can ensure that those users access the site without having to use a custom mobile application by using the stsadm.exe command line tool.
        Stsadm –o activatefeature –name MobilityRedirect –URL <http://URL>The following devices can be used to access the mobile pages:

• Pocket Internet Explorer in Microsoft Windows Mobile for Pocket PC and Smartphone
• The Nocki WAP 2.0 browser (xHTML only)
• Motorola Mobile Information Browser 2.2 or later
• Operwave UP browser 6.2 or 7.0

To provide support for any new devices you should modify the WSS browser definition file at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirutalDirectories\80\App_Browsers\compat.browser.

For additional information on mobile pages check out these resources:

• Custom Mobility Pages for SharePoint
• Microsoft article on Mobile Pages
• Redirect using Property Profile (Active Directory) and SharePoint Lists
• Customizing the Home Page for Mobile Devices

So this is one of my “in the trenches” blogs. I’ve been setting up a new server to run WSS 3.0, which I’ve done a dozen times. I have several SharePoint 2007 servers I am currently running, and WSS is a prerequisite, so this shouldn’t have been an all weekend project. But, for some reason, this particular install was not cooperating. I performed the same steps in the same order, except in this case I did not install SQL Server. In most of my installations I installed SQL Server since I would be using MOSS. So I installed Windows Server 2003 with IIS, the .NET Framework 2.0 and 3.0 and then tried installing WSS, but kept receiving the following error message:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
This product requires ASP.NET v2.0 to be set to ‘Allow’ in the list of Internet Information Services (IIS) Web Server Extensions. If it is not available in the list, reinstall ASP.Net v2.0.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

When I checked IIS, sure enough it was not listed in the Web Server Extensions. I tried adding it manually, but that did not fix the problem. So I went back to some old notes I had when troubleshooting issues with .NET 2.0 and found this command line and fixed everything. 

aspnet_regiis -i

You have to run it from the \Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\ directory.

I wrote a post on installing the Adobe iFilter for .pdf files several months back, but one of my colleagues said he could not get it to work with the 64-bit server. Since my little home network is not a 64-bit server I had no ability to try and solve the issue. Finally my colleague was able to get the installation working and has posted the instructions on his blog. The instructions are great and he also has some troubleshooting tips. I know it took him quite some time to figure it out, so hopefully we can learn from all of his experience.