34 posts by cwoodill
January 3, 2013

Saving Site Templates in SharePoint 2013

Written by Posted in SharePoint, Technology Comments 0

One of the key features in SharePoint is the ability to create customized sites and to save these as “Site Templates”.  You can take a site that you have spent hours configuring to a specific customize format including creating document

Read more

The new SharePoint 2013 app model allows for some great opportunities to integrate externally hosted and/or developed apps that can be used to surface or send data into your SharePoint intranet, extranet or public facing web site. However, this model

Read more

One of the key features in SharePoint 2013 is the ability to add in third party applications through the SharePoint App Store.  Adding an app is easy – just go under settings and click on Add an App.  On the

Read more

There are by default four search scopes in SharePoint 2013: This Site (the default) People (searches personal sites and skills) Conversations Everything For search results of “This Site”, the search results page is actually in the site collection itself.  For

Read more

November 16, 2012

Access 2013 and SharePoint 2013 – First Impressions

Written by Posted in SharePoint Comments 0

Many of us in the Microsoft community started our career with Access.  I started my career building Access applications in Access 2.0 and have used various versions since then to deliver small business applications.  IT departments generally LOATHE access databases

Read more

I have a term set of every ICD-10 code, which is a taxonomy for categorizing diseases.  It is organized in a hierarchical term set and contains approximately 10,000 terms.  I created a site and turned on managed navigation and pointed

Read more

As with most Microsoft products, every time there is a new version the hardware requirements to run the new software increases to keep up with evolutions in hardware and to provide more resources to the new features within the product. 

Read more

In SharePoint 2010, there is a little know feature that enables self-service site creation by end-users.  It’s turned OFF by default but in can be activated through the Central Admin:   When this is turned on, anyone with Contributor or

Read more

November 4, 2012

Office 2013 Preview Migrations Still Down!

Written by Posted in SharePoint Comments 1

On November 1st, I blogged about my existing SharePoint 2013 sites being down for maintenance – presumably to migrate them to the new RTM bits.  At that time, this was the error message:   Well apparently, Microsoft didn’t hit their

Read more

November 3, 2012

New Storyboard Tool in Visual Studio 2012

Written by Posted in SharePoint, Technology Comments 0

I just installed Visual Studio 2012, and was pleasantly surprised to find a new storyboard tool based on PowerPoint! When you run the tool, you get regular PowerPoint with a set of shapes preconfigured to work together that represent common

Read more

One of the key limitations in SharePoint 2010 is flexibility in the navigation structure to span multiple site collections.  This isn’t possible without significant custom development in SharePoint 2010 and is one of the more exciting features in SharePoint 2013.

Read more

In hooking up the SharePoint 2013 navigation to the term store, I found a few bugs at least in the current early preview version (I’m using the Office 2013 cloud version, let me know if you find the same behavior

Read more

One of the cool new features in SharePoint 2013 is the ability to use the Term Store to drive navigation.  In my previous post, I created a Term Set called Diseases.  Let’s use this to now drive the navigation for

Read more

The SharePoint 2013 term store is a “farm” level repository of hierarchical term sets and terms used by SharePoint for both metadata and navigation. If you are using the Office 2013 preview environment, by default the term store administrator is

Read more

September 25, 2012

Creating a Custom Page Layout in SharePoint 2013

Written by Posted in SharePoint Comments 14

In my last article, I documented how to create a Master Page in SharePoint 2013.  Master Pages define the global chrome elements of your web site.  This article explains how to create custom page layouts in SharePoint 2013.  For more

Read more

September 22, 2012

Creating a New Master Page in SharePoint 2013

Written by Posted in SharePoint Comments 10

This article explains how to create a Master Page in SharePoint 2013 from an existing HTML page with associated graphics, scripts, CSS files, etc.  This article is targeted primarily at designers who want to start customizing their SharePoint 2013 site

Read more

We have a client that is hosting their site on Microsoft Azure.  It is a basic content managed site with a SQL Azure backend.  When our client got their monthly hosting bill, we discovered a significant transfer cost that couldn’t

Read more

In the new SharePoint 2013 preview environment (sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site and you can create your own environment) you get a very nice “Central Admin” type tool for managing all your site collections.  By default, you

Read more

July 30, 2012

SharePoint 2013 New Features

Written by Posted in SharePoint, Technology Comments 0

The SharePoint 2013 preview has been announced and there are some interesting new features, although from my perspective, this is less a revolution than SharePoint 2010 was based on what has been announced so far. Here are some of the

Read more

Maturing Enterprise Content Management has become a critical success factor in managing information in global organizations.  In many cases, we see organizations who have implemented traditional ECM solutions such as LiveLink, Documentum, Filenet, etc. five to ten years ago.  Many

Read more

In my visits with customers, I have noticed a new “sprawl” phenomenon – multiple SharePoint farms. In most cases, you only need a single SharePoint farm.  There are some good reasons why you might need a second one (for example,

Read more

One of my colleagues sent me a couple good articles on SharePoint Governance specifically related to manufacturing companies. http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240036242/Microsoft-SharePoint-best-practices-begin-with-governance-experts-say http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/news/2240035866/More-manufacturers-turning-to-Microsoft-SharePoint-collaboration Some good insights and we would agree with most of the suggestions in these articles.  I especially like this comment:

Read more

We have just published a new white paper entitled, “An Introduction to SharePoint Governance”. The following topics are covered in the white paper: Introduction What is Governance? Governance and SharePoint: An Example Why Governance? Reduced Risk of Failure A SharePoint

Read more

When intranets started, they were almost exclusively defined as being for “internal staff”.  They were typically hosted within the internal network and no one from the outside world would be able to access anything within the intranet.  The same was

Read more

There are many “off the shelf” SharePoint training programs.  These include online courses, computer based training and in classroom training sessions. When we do training, we target the following audiences: IT Staff Developers Site Owners (those with Design or Full

Read more

Microsoft’s current Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) is a SharePoint cloud offering mainly targeted to small businesses who want an instant SharePoint collaboration environment without the need to host on premise.  It costs $10 / user / month at a

Read more

April 26, 2011

What is Metadata?

Metadata is information that describes, classifies or identifies a piece of information.  Metadata is typically described as a set of attributes that help to describe or classify an object.  For example, here are just some of the metadata attributes for

Read more

We have many customers who are upgrading from SharePoint 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010.  Their existing SharePoint implementations vary from full blown intranets, local collaboration sites, or application portals.  We find many cases where one line of business implemented

Read more

SharePoint 2010 provides a container approach to partitioning information, security boundaries and infrastructure:     When you design your SharePoint governance strategy, you can apply decisions on how the platform is divided at each layer in the model.  For example,

Read more

In most cases, SharePoint users are authenticated and authorized through Active Directory.   Within SharePoint, there are several alternatives to authorizing users: Creating a SharePoint group and mapping roles such as Contributor, Designer, Reader, etc. to the group.  Members of the

Read more

One of the key facilitation techniques we engage in with all our customers is to start with “pain points”.  As part of every planning engagement, we start with a group session with a broad variety of stakeholders.  Using one of

Read more

When we engage organizations in SharePoint Governance Strategy projects, we’re working with the organization to help define their overall approach to implementing, rolling out and operation of their SharePoint platform.  The typical deliverable is a large document that provides the

Read more

Navantis Implementation planning

Planning creates the following benefits: Stakeholder buy-in Alignment to business objectives Operational sustainability Ability to measure success Prioritization of spend Adoption It also reduces traditional project risks: Expectations not being met Uncontrolled growth Re-work Project failure Before you invest significant

Read more

Sharepoint governance

Like many IT projects, SharePoint projects experience significant failure rates or do not achieve their desired objectives. One of the key reasons for challenges with rollout is the failure to establish a formal governance program for SharePoint. This may lead

Read more