Recent discussions on CapTech’s internal social media platform addressed a favorite challenge for technology professionals: how to describe what you do for a living to those without a lot of technical expertise.  To achieve that goal without boring your audience to tears, oversimplification is nearly inevitable.   Personally, I’ve found the threat of oversimplification even more daunting when I attempt to be a little bit specific about what I do by using not just an industry term, but a highly flexible industry term: portal.

Folders provide a single faceted, single point of failure that has limited users and caused inefficiency and risk across Enterprises for years. This is largely due to the nature of a folder. It provides a single source of storage with security options, but once you start nesting folders it creates a single path that may be forgotten or corrupted by improper naming or governance failings. Many organizations complain that their file shares are out of control, and while they may have begun with the best of intentions, the intended use was either not clearly identified or sustained and the end result looks something like the following. How will an organization know where their “real” content is located? 

An even better question is “What makes folders and file shares evil?” Key factors behind “Folder Fail” are as follows:

BI on SharePoint

Getting reports onto SharePoint is an important step in centralizing knowledge and increasing awareness of a company's available Business Intelligence. Unfortunately, people shy away from taking this step because it seems like something that would require a lot of time, effort and expense. This two part series will illustrate the process of putting BI on SharePoint, remove some of the mystery around it and hopefully encourage further investigation.  Part one will cover the setup and part two will illustrate working with SSRS reports within SharePoint.

Earlier this year Microsoft launched SharePoint Online, which is part of its Office 365 product offering.  As with an on-site deployment of SharePoint, you can create sites and lists, share documents, etc.  However, SharePoint Online simplifies it all by removing the need to deploy, configure, monitor, update or upgrade an installation on your premises. You can use the Online Services Administration Center to create new sites, install solutions, and provide access to specific users.

Small and medium-sized businesses can now take advantage of the same enterprise-grade technologies that are available to larger companies, without having to take on the operational and hardware infrastructure necessary to host SharePoint on-site.

A common mis-conception about using this product concerns custom development.  SharePoint Online does not change your ability to customize your environment so that it meets your business needs.

With the release of SharePoint 2010 SP1 Microsoft changed the supported data size limits for SharePoint content databases.

Prior to SP1 

You are probably familiar with the “fabulous 40” site templates that MOSS 2007 provides.

In SharePoint 2007, when you save a site as a template, these templates will be stored in “Site template gallery” list of the site collection. These templates are stored with .stp extension which are just cab files and can be extracted.

In SharePoint 2010, the site template gallery does not exist. So when you save a site as a template, it will be saved as a ‘WSP’ solution file in “Solutions gallery”. This is the gallery where sandboxed solutions are stored. Moreover, the template needs to be activated before it can be used.

Before you start using the templates, make sure to take backup of your site and test it in a demo environment first to protect your data while upgrading.

I’ve recently completed a white paper that details a methodology employed by CapTech to deliver a SharePoint 2010 collaboration portal for an international client.  Blending Agile and Waterfall practices, CapTech delivered successfully thanks to a variety of benefits afforded to the client and CapTech by the methodology (dubbed CT Hybrid).  The full white paper is attached to this post, but here’s a sneak preview of its Conclusion:

To read the previous entry in this blog series, click here.

So it's time to roll up the sleeves and make things happen: your move/migration is real.  And these boxes/files/images won't move themselves.

When I initially started down the rocky road to learning SharePoint branding, it began with SharePoint 2007. Back then the branding experience, from a designers perspective, was seriously lacking. SharePoint Designer 2007, albeit a forerunner for FrontPage, was somewhat helpful as I embarked on my journey. My first SharePoint branding project was an intranet for a client, and the firm I was working for at the time, gave me free reign on the overall design and layout of the site. When I conducted my research into how to change the look and feel of the site, I felt that customizing an out-of-the-box theme was too limiting. Sure I could have gone into the hive and copied an existing theme folder, and then customized it. However, this strategy didn't meet my requirements. I wanted more control over the design of the master page and page layout. In other words, I wanted to have this site not look like SharePoint at all. 

To read the previous entry in this blog series, click here.

You’ve strategized.  You’ve inventoried.  You’ve cleaned up.  It’s time to answer the pivotal question: how are we going to get this stuff from here to there?  If the move in question is from your college apartment to your parents’ basement, the family minivan might be all you need (and all you can afford).  But if you’re moving from a multi-floor penthouse in Manhattan to a beachfront palace in the Hamptons, the challenge is entirely different.  Similarly, the size, complexity, and available resources associated with a content migration effort will drive the approach definition process, which at its essence involves defining the degree to which the execution of the migration will be automated.