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by Matthew McBride

Now that we have successfully created a Site Sponsor, let’s
log into our site as that Sponsor and invite a new user from the ACME
Corporation.  Here are the new options that
the new Sponsor sees when clicking “Site Actions:”

After completing the registration, we can review it under
the “Invitations” area of the Extranet Management menu.  Notice the “Sent By” and “Security Definition”
areas:

From here, the Sponsor can do things like create new user
(via invitation or manually), grant and remove access, change a user’s
password, etc.  Notice that we see an
additional user than the one we just invited. 
This is due to the “Administrative Security Definition.”  The other user (Tony) is also a member of the
ACME Members and ACME Managers Roles, so our new Sponsor can also manage him.

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When you provision a new SharePoint publishing site, one of the first options you’ll see on the default welcome page is to use the Variations feature to manage multi-lingual sites and pages. My name is Josh Stickler and I’m the Program Manager responsible for Variations. In this post, I’ll provide a brief overview of the Variations feature and highlight main improvements in SharePoint 2010.

If there are additional areas that are of particular interest to you, please post in the comments section and I will try to address as many as I can. I’d really appreciate getting any and all feedback. Thanks!

What is the Variations feature?

Variations is a SharePoint feature that facilitates the management and maintenance of content that can be served to multiple audiences. These audiences can vary in terms of different languages, countries, or regions, but they can also represent different brands or devices.

How does Variations work?

For each channel you wish to serve content, you can specify a Variations label. Labels are instantiated as SharePoint publishing sites and the full set of labels in a site collection is referred to as the Variations Hierarchy. I refer to SharePoint publishing sites created and managed by the Variations feature as “variation sites.”

Using variations, target variation sites reflect one source variation site in terms of pages and site structure. When setting up variations, specify one variation site as the source; all other variation sites are targets. By default, pages published on the source variation site are copied to all target variation sites as draft versions and sites created on the source are created (not copied – this is an important distinction) on all target variation sites. You can only have one source variation site per Variation Hierarchy and you can only have one Variation Hierarchy per site collection.

What’s new in SharePoint 2010?

The concept and core architecture of Variations, in which pages and site structure are replicated across multiple variation sites in a site collection remains the same as in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007; however, we have made significant improvements to better meet the needs of enterprise customers serving content across multiple channels.

These improvements can be divided into four categories:

• Server Citizenship
• Content Distribution
• Editing Experience
• Reliability

Server Citizenship

Variations operations now execute in the background via timer jobs. For the end user, this means that you no longer have to wait at a progress screen for operations to complete.  For the system administrator, this means that the cost of resource-intensive operations like Create Hierarchies can be better managed.

You can adjust the frequency with which Variations operations run in Central Administration. Next, I’ll explain the difference between the “Create” and “Propagate” timer jobs in the context of improvements we’ve made to the Variations content distribution models.

Site and Page Propagation

MOSS 2007 featured two models for distributing pages across your Variations Hierarchy:

1. Automatic Creation: If “Automatic Creation” is enabled on the Variation settings page (it is enabled by default), then publishing a page on the source variation site will cause that page to be copied to all target variation sites.

2. Manual Creation: If “Automatic Creation” is disabled, then the “Create Variations” Ribbon button is the only way to copy a new page to a specific, individual target variation site.

We’ve received feedback that there are often cases in which changes need to be published locally to the source variation site without being propagated to all targets. For instance, if the source variation site has a typo in English, the correction may not be relevant to a target site in German, so if the correction is published in the source page, it can be unnecessarily confusing to copy this changed English version to all target sites.

In SharePoint 2010, we introduce a third, “hybrid” content distribution model:

3. On-Demand Page Propagation

A setting has been added (configurable through the Object Model) to disable Automatic Page Propagation. When the setting is enabled, publishing or approving a page on the source variation site will not cause that page to be copied to any target variation sites. The "Automatic Creation" setting will be ignored for pages. "Update Variation" and "Create Variation” are the means by which a user can distribute content across the Variation hierarchy on-demand.

I’ll go into more detail on content distribution models in a future post. But so as not to keep you in suspense on how to configure on-demand page propagation, here are the PowerShell commands:

Enable On-Demand Page Propagation:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
$site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://yourserver/sites/abc")
$folder = $site.RootWeb.Lists["Relationships List"].RootFolder
$folder.Properties.Add("DisableAutomaticPropagation", "True")
$folder.Update();

Disable On-Demand Page Propagation:

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
$site = new-object Microsoft.SharePoint.SPSite("http://yourserver/sites/abc")
$folder = $site.RootWeb.Lists["Relationships List"].RootFolder
$folder.Properties.Remove("DisableAutomaticPropagation")
$folder.Update();

We’ve also made improvements for target variation site content owners to better understand what has changed on the source variation site when new draft versions appear on a target variation site.

Editing Experience

To make efficient use of their time and effort, target variation content editors need an easy and informative way to determine what content is new when pages are propagated from the source variation.

A new “View Changes” button compares the most recent source version propagated to the target with the most recent source version published on the target.  Changes are highlighted in a pop-up report to enable content processing directly in the rich-text editor.

Highlighted report

Corresponding location in the Rich Text Editor

This button is available on a target variation page after it has been published once and a new draft version has been copied from the source variation site via one of the Variations timer jobs. I will go into more detail on this new feature in an upcoming blog post dedicated to explaining View Changes with screenshots, a sample workflow, and an example scenario.

Reliability

One of our main goals for Variations in SharePoint 2010 is to make the feature more reliable so enterprise customers can entrust management and distribution of content across multiple channels to Variations.

Now that Create Hierarchies runs in the timer service, we support pausing and resuming this operation during timer service recycles to support long-running operations in large deployments. This also means that the process is not affected by Application Pool recycles. We’ve also made the relationships list, which tracks all target pages linked to a source page, more robust. We now track variations pages using GUIDs for better performance and scale.

Thanks for reading. Check back soon for upcoming blog posts on what’s new in Variations and other exciting developments in Enterprise Content Management.

Regards,

Josh Stickler

Program Manager

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The “Site Content and Structure” reports are a great way of finding files which are pending approval or checked out but I just realised you can create your own reports.

If you have never seen these reports before:

Go to site settings –> Site Administration –> Content and structure

But you can create you own reports by going to “View all site content”

Under lists –> Content and Structure Reports

Here you can see all the reports available from C & S as well as the CAML that makes these reports.

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One thing you probably do not want with your public facing site, is for the search engine to waste it’s time crawling your search pages.
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I recently did a project where my client needed several calendars provisioned via a Feature Receiver when a particular type of Site Collection was created; they had one primary calendar and they wanted all the other calendars to be overlaid onto the primary one using SharePoint 2010’s Calendar overlay capabilities. Here’s a quick summary of [...]
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As most people know by now, Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 was released to the public today. There’s already been a lot of hype over some of the new capabilities such as the site recycle bin and some folks have documented/demonstrated some of the new PowerShell cmdlets that are available to manage this new [...]
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After months of planning and hard work, Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products is live and available for download. Service Pack 1 provides additional functionality and specific fixes, such as the ability to recover site collections and sites from the Recycle Bin, granular management and insight into storage using StorMan.aspx (Storage Space Allocation), and many others.

The SharePoint documentation team has published new and updated articles that were available as of June 28. For more information about these articles, as well as to learn what’s new in this service pack, download the Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 white paper.

The following SharePoint team blog post provides more information about the contents of the service pack, such as its contents, how to download it, and FAQs: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=984. 

You can also visit the Updates for SharePoint 2010 Products Resource Center (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff800847.aspx) to get detailed information about installing the service pack.

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Just in case you didn’t get the memo SharePoint is the fastest selling server product in the history of Microsoft according to BillG. (doesn’t that also make it the fastest selling server product, period?)
In a blog conversation I had with the honorable Cliff Reeves he noted a very interesting site: http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/sharepoint%20server%202007.do It’s all UK focused, but the data surely reflects a global trend. SharePoint is hot and people who know SharePoint are hotter. A quick search of any of the major US based job sites would tell you SharePoint is high demand and the pay is very good. I’m confident this microcosm of hotness will fair well in a possibly existing or pending economic downturn.
In my dealings with customers and partners one thing is clear. There’s not enough SharePoint people to go around. Especially here at Microsoft. Sometimes warm-bodies are good enough especially if they can mumble share and point together in a sentence. The bottom line, if you are in a unappreciated technical field and looking for a more rewarding career consider SharePoint. If you are looking to ramp up on SharePoint quickly there are some good partner and Microsoft training resources. You can find a list of Microsoft training resources here and you can search for SharePoint and Training and get a pretty good list of partner opportunities. If you are completely new to SharePoint I would highly recommend you get some information worker focused training under your belt before diving into administration or development. This will go a long a way towards ensuring a well-rounded SharePoint skill-set….(read more)
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