• Display User Data Fields for a SharePoint List – Laura Rogers @WonderLaura

  “You have all of this data in SharePoint, and you have all of this information about the site users, such as their department names, phone numbers, and much more. Instead of asking for site users to fill out all of their pertinent information every time they fill out a list item, form or survey in SharePoint, wouldn’t it be nice to just use the information that is already there? “

  tags: sharepoint SQL_Reporting

• 15 Considerations for SharePoint Online Office 365

  “What should you (the consultant or the client) consider BEFORE making a decision on implementing SharePoint On-Premises or SharePoint Online (Office 365) “

  tags: sharepoint online Office365

• SharePoint Online Feature Availability Matrix

  SharePoint Online provides several kinds of user licenses. The user license you have determines which developer features you have rights to use.

  Use the list below to determine which developer features you have rights to access.

  tags: sharepoint online Office365

• What’s New for BCS in SharePoint Online

  Beginning with the service update in November 2011, Microsoft SharePoint Online provides the ability to use Microsoft Business Connectivity Services (BCS) in SharePoint Online applications.

  tags: sharepoint online Office365 bcs

• What’s New in SharePoint Online: November 2011 Update

  ​Our first update to SharePoint Online (SPO) since the launch of Office 365 (O365) became generally available on June 28, 2011 is now complete worldwide. We thought it would be a good time to share information about the new features and fixes available as part of this service update. On a broad level, this update enables greater reach to both people and external data, while at the same time increasing the number of supported devices and Web browsers. We also added some self-management recovery capabilities. But there’s a lot more, too.

  tags: sharepoint online Office365

• 5 Tips on Effectively Planning for SharePoint 2010 Migration

  tags: migration planning SharePoint

• Stunning data-driven dashboards in SharePoint without writing a single line of code | Collabion Charts for SharePoint

  Collabion Charts for SharePoint provides a quick and easy way to create insightful dashboards in SharePoint,

  tags: sharepoint dashboards

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

 

• Build and publish web databases – SharePoint Server – Office.com

  tags: SharePoint2010 databases SharePoint

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

 

Setting some context

Like on almost everything in life, there are different opinions on using site collection quota.

In his blog post “Controlling Sites Sizes with Quotas” Michal Pisarek proposes to use Site Collection Quotas and they should be one of the first things to be considered in your SharePoint Governance plan.
I do agree with him, but I also firmly disagree.

Why don’t I agree with the obsessive (IT) need to implement Site Collection Quota?

During a workshop I was delivering to the business key stakeholders for a SharePoint project (it was a workshop to gather business requirement for a SharePoint implementation) the topic of quotas presented itself. Without telling or asking anything about quota, the business representatives came up with this question. Technically it is not a question because the is no question mark in the sentence, it was more like a proposal or even a requirement.

“If our Enterprise IT strategy directs us to use SharePoint and use this tool to share files between countries and continents then we don’t need (read want) quotas.”
(They were at this moment not able to share information on file shares easily between different countries since file share servers are hosted in the office or country where the files were primarily stored)

Now, from an IT perspective this is a NO-GO because IT wants to (draconic) keep control on disk space consumption and storage capacity planning.

So my response to that was (I was also surprised of this statement, but understood exactly what they meant) asking them on how they can assure that only relevant information will be stored in their sites.
That old, outdated content will be removed. You know, people tend to start cleaning up disk space when they run out of it. And how can we make sure they will not have (too much) duplicates in their sites. And that’s for me the part where governance enters the discussion.

So what is a possible solution?

My solution is not just 1 solution. It is a combination of different solutions that can fulfill the business requirement (the need for “unlimited” disk space and freedom just like they now have on their file share) is not to use Site Collection Quota (or use a very big quota) and define content types (something you should always do on your SharePoint sites)

After defining the content types, you can configure retention policies on these content type. Just to make sure that legal documents don’t get deleted, after 2 years. And you probably don’t need to have your minutes of meetings available for 7 years in the production environment.

An extra step (and maybe a highly recommended one, although  I’m lacking real life experience with this as we speak (Jan 2012)) is that this retention policy actually moves files out of the SharePoint SQL database into another system. Like a tape or a BLOB. There are tools available on the market where you can do storage optimization and create rules that will move documents (or versions of documents) to a BLOB. So you offload these document from the underlying SQL database to alternate tiers of storage like a SAN. This will benefit the sizes and numbers of content database, but it is also a good thing for search and indexing. If you can keep the relevant content in your content databases lower, by off loading these files to BLOB, the overall performance of your database will not decrease (or decrease less) compared to when you keep all these files in the database.

Delivering Business value or loosing control over disk space capacity?

My point of view is that these solutions provide value to business users. Even though IT people will most probably freak out on the thought about not defining a quota, when you define the technical governance correctly and have the proper tools (like Docave Storage Manager from AvePoint  and Storagepoint from Metalogix) you’ll be able to provide a trustworthy solution.
Defining and configuring site collection quota requires less effort then defining  enterprise wide content types, retention policies combined with offloading the SQL server.
But I think it is worth it.

 

BIWUG is hosting an interesting evening on SharePoint 2010 Multilingual User Interface.

I also heard from the president of the BIWUG  that the #SharePint will be organized with actually pints :-)
So no #ShareCola or #ShareMinutemaid but actually real Belgian beer, hence a real #SharePint!

Doing a SharePoint project in a multilingual environment can be tricky. In this BIWUG session we will focus on how the new MUI (Multilingual User Interface) allows for multilingual collaboration scenarios.  We will show you how MUI and the SharePoint variations framework relate to each other.  Next to showing the out of the box features we will do a deep dive for developers explaining how to use the MUI framework in SharePoint custom solutions. The session will wrap up with some best practices and pitfalls as well as a round the table discussion to exchange ideas. 

<Update>

I heard there are some books that need a new owners. #bookGivaAway with special thanks to WROX.

</Update>

Agenda:

18:00-18:30 – Welcome and snacks

18:30-19:30 – SharePoint MUI – Part I  (Speakers: Andy Van Steenbergen & Joris Poelmans)
19:30-19:45 – Break
19:45:20:45 – SharePoint MUI – Part II  (Speakers: Andy Van Steenbergen & Joris Poelmans)
20:45 – … SharePint!

I hope to meet and greet you all there.
You can use the link here under to register.

 

On Thursday October 27th BIWUG organizes an evening full with great information. I’ll be a part of that, speaking about SharePoint Governance. Or we can also call it Governance for SharePoint. I’ll also participate in the second part of the evening where we’ll talk about the past, the present and the future of BIWUG. Oh yes, for the record, the third part of that evening will also involve some me, but in the form of attending and trying to get a good conversation and meeting great people at the #SharePint.

During this session I want to give the attendees a different view on Governance. Most probably (and hopefully) a view they didn’t thought at before. Yes, I’m talking about the softer side of a SharePoint deployment.

This is the sessions abstract : Stop thinking about features features features when talking about governance. When designing governance for a SharePoint implementation, a lot (not to say all) energy and words go out to technical stuff, SLA’s and not to the things that define the business value. And the business value is not only a perfect technically tuned and performant SharePoint farm (if that even exists).

This evening will start at 18:00 in the offices of Microsoft (Leonardo Davincilaan 3 , 1935 Zaventem).
If you are interested in this session and haven’t subscribed yet, it can get tough to get in. 74 people already registered for this session and it’s sold out.

 

Business case:
We have a document library with files. These files all have specific files level permission. A user can only see files (s)he is allowed to see, and the permission level changes during a workflow. When the document get the status finished, a workflow will remove the contribute right for the contributors and set a read permission for these users. There are also about 30 metadata columns. Some of these columns are just status fields used in a workflow, other ones (about 22) are actual properties of this document.
The library is used to collaborate on files that have a limited time span. When the documents are finished and the responsible people have approved them, they need to be move to a archive.

There are 2 easy ways to do this. (I only discuss solutions without having access to a console on the server to execute STSADM command, nor use solutions that required Visual Studio). Besides these 2 options, you could also execute an STSADM –export of write custom code.

1. Create a template from your library with content
2. Create a template from your library without content and move the content using explorer view.

Method one has some restrictions and side-effects. First, the content of the library cannot be more than 10 MB. This limit is in most cases very restrictive, and therefore not the best solution. Also, you can do this only once, since every year the content will change, and you might not want the have a document library template in your template gallery for every year.
You can change the maximum value (10 MB limit) via “stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size –propertyvalue xxxxxx” (xxx being the size in bytes). But hen again, (power)users don’t have acess to the console, so I don’t consider this an option.
We would also have an issue with the item level security since item level security is not maintained in a template.

The second solution is in my opinion a better, more flexible and stable solution.

1. Create a template from your library using this procedure:

Settings > Document library Settings > Save document library as template
Under the Permissions and Management > Save document library as template

Fill in File name, a Template name and a description for your template, and don’t select Include content. The Template name is the name that will appear when your want to create a document library.

That’s all for the creation of a document library template. This template will now be available when you create a new library or list and appears in the List Template Gallery at http://mySharePointSiteURL/_catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx

1. Create a library based on the new template

The next step is to create a new library based on the template we you created in step 1

In the Quick Launch, click on View All Site Content (or click on Site Actions/View all Site content). This will direct you to the /_layouts/viewlsts.aspx page and shows and overview of all Libraries and lists in your site.

Click create and select the templatename (the one you created in step 1).
Fill in the Name and description and other information.
Once this library is created, validate that all columns exist. (via Document Library settings)

Open the newly created library in Windows Explorer View and open the document library with the source in Explorer view

Then select the documents that you want to move, (using Shift or CTRL and click the documents) and drag them to the destination library.

That’s it.

 

14 Microsoft User Groups combine their efforts to organize this unique networking and knowledge sharing event. Microsoft Community Day will take place on Thursday 23th June 2011 in Utopolis, Mechelen, where we will
bring together over 350 IT Pro’s and developers. Of course, some other people will also join the party, like the “functionals” ;-)

My session will cover this topic: “SharePoint Governance: Stop thinking about  features features features when talking about governance. When designing governance for a SharePoint implementation, a lot (not to say all) energy and words go out to technical stuff, SLA’s  and not to the things that define the business value. And the business value is not only a perfect technically tuned and performant SharePoint farm(if that even exists). ”

Feel free to join me at 16:00.

Communityday 2011

 

I was working on a workflow that assigns a unique approval number to an approved item. Despite the fact I made this workflow using Nintex, it is possible to create this workflow with SharePoint Designer (using the calculate function)

Requirements:
We have a list, where users can fill in a request to increase the quota of their site. The governance has decided that the IT department is responsible for the capacity, hence they need to be the approver of this request.
When a request has been approved, it should receive a unique approval number. The rest of the process is not relevant for this blog post.

Solution:
By using a combination of the ‘created date’ and the list item ID we can create a unique number. It was not required to use sequential number (was even preferred not to do this)

Setup:
In the custom list there are a lot of columns, but these are the once I have used to calculate a unique value for the approval number

Workflow variables:

ApprovalCalc : Text
ApprovalNumber: Number

Actions

In Nintex I created a Math Operation. It is configured to do “(Listlookup Current Item Approvalpart1) + (Listlookup Current Item ID)”.
This will result in having a number that is formed by  the number of days of the creation date (based on December 31 1899 being value 1) added with the itemID.
This value will be stored in the ApprovalCalc variable.
Then we have a build dynamic string action that build a string “STS- {WorkflowVariable:ApprovalCalc} and stored this value in the ApprovalNumber variable. (IT people wanted to have a prefix STS-).
The next action updates a list item called Approval_Number with the value of the ApprovalNumber variable and then other actions like sending emails and creating tasks is executed.

 

I wrote a post about how to use the workflow status in another workflow or in a view.
When I was changing views on a custom workflow that was created by Nintex I ran into issues.  I wanted to display all items were the workflow was not Approved. So as a logical next step, I would just need to change my view and filter on the status (filter on “is not equal 16″).  But this didn’t work. It showed all items, even the ones that were approved.

I then edited the list in Datasheet and found out that Nintex is using other numbers then SharePoint (or the Workflow Foundation) does.

Apparently Nintex uses these status indicators: