The SharePoint Hive

Read More

Read More

​

This blog is post #3 in the Ten Days of Office series to celebrate the one-year anniversary since the release of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010. Tune in each weekday for new tips and tricks to get the most from your Office and SharePoint e experience.

 

On Wednesday, as part of the one-year anniversary celebration of Office 2010, my colleague Erik Jensen wrote a great post about one way that you can get the most out of Microsoft PowerPoint through the broadcast feature. Yesterday, Roby Kurian wrote about Outlook Social Connector, including how it can provide information from SharePoint My Sites. Today, I want to share one of the ways you can get the most out of the social capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 by promoting the use of My Sites within an organization.

 

 

There’s a lot of buzz today about social networking within an organization, and with good reason! According to Gartner, “It is no longer a question of if an enterprise should invest in social software, but when, from which provider and for what business purposes.” and by 2015, 40% of large enterprises will have a corporate "Facebook," for circulating both business and personal data.  (Gartner, Predicts 2011: When Social and Business Processes Collide, November 19, 2010) When done right, enterprise social networking can be a very valuable tool in helping employees find colleagues with the expertise they need to solve a problem or better serve customers. SharePoint has included My Sites since the 2003 version, and today in 2010 they are better than ever at helping people locate one another and the critical business information they share, enabling everyone to do their jobs more efficiently and feel more connected across the enterprise.

Now onto the good stuff! SharePoint My Sites is only as valuable as the information people contribute, which you can do easily by leveraging tools such as tagging, document and photo libraries and colleague connections. So in an already busy work environment, how do you ensure your employees understand the value of My Sites? Below are some tips for driving adoption in your organization.

• Identify a select group of early adopters who can spread the word about My Sites among their colleagues. Showcase them through email, a newsletter or an Intranet feature story, citing personal examples of how My Sites has improved their everyday work life. Also, reach out to the avid consumer social network users in your organization to become early adopters and promoters of safe, secure social networking inside the organization.
• Use My Sites as a marketing tool inside organizations. For example, smaller teams within a larger organization can boost their profile by making sure their My Sites are completely utilized. Each team member can list expertise, share documents, tag material and update newsfeeds, making them easier to find in an organization. In fact, simply saving your documents to your My Site will make it much easier for people to find out what you know and benefit from your work. It is much easier to find files by looking up people in SharePoint.
• Make My Sites your own. Custom skins that live on top of SharePoint allow organizations to brand My Sites, helping drive interest and loyalty.  The theme might be for your department, role, or a corporate HR-sponsored initiative—whatever is most relevant for your business.
• Incorporate filling out My Sites as part of an employee orientation. This helps quickly drive adoption and ensures employees know how to properly utilize the tool.  Many of your new employees will already be familiar with these tools as consumers and successful job seekers.
• Encourage high-profile executive involvement. When your executives share, they set the tone for everyone. Using the built-in blog on a My Site is a great way for executives to share trip reports, reflections on the business, and career development tips. This knowledge is shared more visibly and persistently than in email and encourages other employees to share their experiences as well.

We use My Sites widely across Microsoft, and from personal experience, it has helped me engage colleagues more quickly, locate expertise and find the information I need to not only do my job better, but be more efficient. When I can find the right contact for a customer by doing a people search, take advantage of colleagues’ presentation by finding it on their My Sites, or stay in touch with a colleague through their personal updates, SharePoint is enabling me to benefit from the power of social computing in the enterprise.  That makes me more productive, effective and connected in today’s fast-paced world of business.

Christian Finn

 

Read More

Learn real world tips for configuring SharePoint claims based security from Altaf Gilani and Mark Massad. In this episode, we discuss how to implement claims based security in SharePoint, including lessons learned and general guidance. Altaf and Mark also give some valuable instrumentation and debugging tips that can save you hours of time. They also discuss implementing claims augmentation to add additional custom claims.

…(read more)
Read More

Many great job candidates have poor resumes that are merely a laundry list of job tasks that do little to distinguish them from their competition. The average recruiter or hiring manager spends less than 15 seconds reviewing a resume. Most people’s resumes fail to “wow” the reader and quickly end up in the “no” pile.

Writing a resume can feel like an overwhelming task. It can seem like a Herculean effort to consolidate so much important information about a career into a one or two page document. But it doesn’t have to be that way! In ‘Happy About My Resume’, Barbara Safani offers 50 tips for creating compelling copy and presenting it in a powerful way to grab the hiring authority’s attention and get them to pick up the phone to call you in for an interview. Safani provides practical and easy-to-follow advice as well as numerous samples that show each of her tips in action.

The book will help readers learn how to quickly create a resume that is professional, gets them noticed, minimizes the amount of time they spend in a job search, and maximizes their earning power. The book is for anyone who wants to proactively manage their career and improve the quality of their current resume or create a resume from scratch.

List Price: $ 19.95
Price: $ 16.62

Dig into Microsoft® Project 2002—and discover how you can really put your project management skills to work! This supremely organized reference packs hundreds of timesaving solutions, troubleshooting tips, and handy workarounds in concise, fast-answer format. It’s all muscle and no fluff. Find the best and fastest ways to perform everyday tasks, and challenge yourself to new levels of Microsoft Project mastery!• Ace the essentials—from defining project scope to analyzing and reporting results• Orchestrate tasks, resources, time, and costs• Enable team members to collaborate and stay on track through the Web• Manage multiple projects and subprojects• Track progress, monitor variances, save a slipping schedule!• Exchange or link project information with other Microsoft Office programs • Master the tools for leading enterprise-wide initiatives to success• Build custom solutions with macros and Microsoft Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA)CD-ROM FEATURES:• Intuitive HTML interface• Extensive collection of Microsoft add-ins and third-party utilities, demos, and trials• Complete eBook—easy to browse and print!• Sample chapters from other Microsoft Press® INSIDE OUT books• Web links to Microsoft Office Tools on the Web, online troubleshooters, and product support• Interactive tutorials• Microsoft Visio® auto-demos• 60-day trial version of Microsoft Project Standard edition

List Price: $ 44.99
Price: $ 54.99

Read More

SharePoint Retreat London 2011, Saturday, March 05, 2011 London held by Andrew Woodward (@AndrewWoody) & Wes Hackett.  A brilliant day, if you get a chance to go to 1 of these you should.  Met some good SP people and got great tips & pointers.  The bonus was I won a Type Mock Isolator licence.

Andrew gave a clear example that we worked on throughout the day, enjoyed the unit testing with nUnit.  I’m not totally sold on the TypeMoch as I feel like I’m testing the SharePoint API but it does increase code coverage.    

More Info:
http://spretreatlondon11.eventbrite.com/
Paul Hunt (@cimares) has done 3 great posts on the SPRetreat event.  Paul has transcribed the sessions extremely well and with good examples delivered in a step by step approach.

Read More

A few content management and site editing tips for power users on this bacon flavoured unicorn morning. The theme here is keep it clean!

• Write “friendly” email addresses
• Remember it’s human beings reading your content. So seeing something like “If you have questions please send an email to Corporate.Comm@mycompany.com” breaks up the readiblity. Instead just do the simple steps of writing the content in plain English and going back, highlighting the name and insert a link (note: you might have to prefix the link with mailto:first.last@yourcompany.com). It makes for a friendlier looking page and hides the ugliness that are sometimes in email addresses.
• Use friendly column and list names
• This is a big pet peeve of mine. When you first create a column or list with spaces the internal name is changed. The display name might be “My Amazing List of Animals with Large Testicles” but the internal (and link) name becomes “My_x00x20_Amazing_x00x20_List_x00x20_of_x00x20_Animals_x00x20_with_x00x20_Large_x00x20_Testicles”. What’s worse is if you create a publishing page named “This Website is Fueled By a Dolphin’s Spleen”. Not only is it incorrect grammar, but the apostrophe wreaks havoc on both the internal name for the list (with lots of crazy hex codes) as well as the hyperlink (where everything is uuencoded). Instead create the list with a distinct and compact name then go back and change it to whatever you want. The end result is a better formed name that you can both script and access in code easier.
• Keep your Views Clean
• When you add a column to a list or create a new list the default is to add it to the default view. Do everyone a favour and don’t check this box! The default view of a list should be something similar to the Title field and nothing else. Keep it clean. If you want to set a defalt view that’s different, go back and create one with all the fields and filtering and sorting columns you want and set it as default. It’s a good idea to keep the original AllItems.aspx (note the lack of space in the filename!) easy and unfiltered. It’s also a good idea to keep your column count down in views. Don’t let every column be added by default and don’t add every column just because you can. Create separate views for distinct responsibilities and try to keep the number of columns down to a single screen to prevent horizontal scrolling.
• Simple Navigation
• The Quick Launch is a great tool for navigating around your site but don’t use the default of adding all lists to it. Uncheck that box and keep navigation simple. Create custom groupings that make sense so if you don’t have a site with “Documents and Lists” but “Reports and Notices” makes more sense then do it. Also hide internal lists from the Quick Launch. For example, if most users don’t need to see all the lookup tables you might have on a site don’t show them. You can use audience filtering on the Quick Launch if you want to hide admin items from non-admin users so consider that as an option.

Enjoy!

Read More

Theoretical & practical guidance from a range of expert sources, with tips & success factors to understand, implement & harness Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies & other WSS organizational tools.

List Price: $ 19.95
Price: $ 16.58