SharePoint
SharePoint Health Checks

It’s a sad but well-known fact of IT life: many organizations feel they can’t afford or justify keeping a full-time dedicated SharePoint administrator on staff. So either the job gets added to some unfortunate soul’s already full roster of duties, or worse, nobody handles on-premises SharePoint administration duties at all – leaving the platform to fend for itself.

It took innovative thinking to successfully negotiate that contract for new equipment; the documents are signed and sealed and the equipment installed. Job well done. But it isn’t over yet. Because although today all the salient facts are at your

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Navantis Support

Microsoft has recently released a bulletin and fix for what they have deemed a critical vulnerability affecting the Office suite of products (which includes SharePoint and its companion Office Web Apps). The vulnerability affects both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 where

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Having just returned from the mind-blowing SharePoint Conference 2014 at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, I wanted to get my thoughts and impressions down while they were still relatively fresh. A LOT went down these past 5 days, and

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Navantis Managed Services

Managing contracts is one of the most challenging tasks in any size organization today and one that has the potential to expose your company to risk along with significant financial loss through penalties incurred or bonuses not being realized. Most

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Mobile Solutions

You have heard the saying ‘we’re only human’?  It’s a phrase we use to remind ourselves that we are prone to making mistakes.  In your business, your team members do not intentionally enter incorrect data or lose information but it

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SharePoint Support

There is a widely-held opinion that SharePoint’s 2013 Records Management out-of-box functionality is not robust enough to manage records at an enterprise level. This blog explodes that myth and exposes the top challenges that can make or break your SharePoint

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November 6, 2013

Got SharePoint? Need Help?

Written by Posted in CRM, Hot Topics, SharePoint, Strategy Comments 1
SharePoint Support

In a SharePoint environment, on average, a quarter of the cost is associated with facilities, another 40% is allocated to labor, and the ROI is still questionable for many organizations. It should also be considered that experienced SharePoint resources are

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At Navantis we see hundreds of SharePoint environments. Some we build, some we rescue and a lot of which we manage. Our clients run their business on SharePoint. It’s their communications portal, their frontend interface to applications, their internal or

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Last week I underwent an intensive immersion in all things Yammer in a two day session provided by Microsoft and Yammer folks in Chicago, and I left with a newfound enthusiasm for the Yammer platform and its potential for adoption

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A large number of organizations rely on public folders for day to day business and they cannot get away from them. This becomes an issue for those organizations in that they are limited in their ability to migrate or upgrade

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August 9, 2013

Using Best Bets in SharePoint

Written by Posted in Hot Topics, SharePoint, Technology Comments 0

One of SharePoint’s most valuable functions is its Search Capability.  Not only does it leverage the content that it crawls within your organization’s database, but it is also able to track the frequency each keyword is used in the Search

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This is the first blog in a series of posts related to “Migration” and “Upgrading” to the latest SharePoint 2013 Platform. Many of our Enterprise customers are hearing a lot of good things about the new features and functionalities. They

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Are you a project manager who is continually calling Accounting to ask for information on your jobs? Do you ask questions like: What are my commitments? How am I doing compared to my budget? What is the Net Profit on

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The clock is ticking for those enterprises who still have SharePoint 2003 deployments, and the distant drumming begins for those who have any investment in the SharePoint 2007 platform. Microsoft’s support of both of these products have recent or upcoming

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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

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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

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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

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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

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November 16, 2012

Access 2013 and SharePoint 2013 – First Impressions

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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

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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

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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. 

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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:

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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