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.

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.

Is the world destined to be littered with a whole mess of ill-fitting, barely usable SharePoint 2010 sites in a couple of years?

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.

So what's new in SharePoint 2010 anyway? Microsoft has a library of documentation on this topic, but I thought to pull out the obvious winners. So here is my refined list of new features in SharePoint 2010 that did not exist in 2007. My list will focus on sites, communities, content, search, insights, composites, and office 2010 integration.

Sites:

Line-Of-Business Integration with read/write capabilities.

Enterprise Management Operations offers Web Analytics that provides you with traffic reports, search reports, and inventory reports.

Mobile Connectivity in SharePoint 2010 makes it easy to work on the go with full-fidelity viewing and providing editing capabilities.

A more robust user experience with the aid of the contextual Ribbon and Microsoft Silverlight.

Office Web Applications allow you to view and edit Office documents directly in the browser.

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. 

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

Of all the moments that make you anxious for the moving process to come to an end, my least favorite might be those that include the following sentiment:  “Why in the world didn’t we just throw/give that away?”  Every occasion in which I opened a box and that thought came to mind corresponded to a case of unnecessary effort, unjustified cost, and unwanted frustration.  Avoiding similar moments for business users should be a goal of content migration.