Maintenance Plan for SharePoint 2010 Best Practices documentented incorrectly..

While working with a large client we ran into issue with the documentation for SharePoint Maintenance Plans in this SharePoint 2010 Best Practices Document.  Andy Lin, a colleague and expert SQL DBA found the problem.  It appears when you set the fill factor to from inside the GUI in SQL 2012  to rebuild the index and change per page percentage settings in the maintenance plan to 80 percent it does the opposite and sets it to 20.

Microsoft provided a wrong setting in the SharePoint best practice document. 

Yes the Fill Factor changed to 80 percent in the  2010 document.  Free Space Per Page means opposite to Fill, should be 20 percent if you want Fill Factor to be 80 percent. See View T-SQL for the plan shows FILLFACTOR=80.

  It will be worse if we set a reverse value to 20 percent as shown below.

by Tony Di Leonardo via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

SharePoint 2013 : How to Start Workflow on a List Item using Workflow Instance Service

This article will take you through to the automation steps of another more common requirement i.e. “Starting a Workflow on any List Item Programmatically”.

In order to automate this task we can leverage Work Instance Service.

Assuming that you are following me all along the previous three articles of this series, and you are already aware of that we have a List with the name “Workflow Testing” in the Child Site which we had created in one of the earlier posts of this series.

We also got a Workflow Definition “Workflow on Orders in Parent Site” Copied to this Child Site and published in context of “Workflow Testing” List.

Now let see how we can start the workflow on any desired list item programmatically using “Workflow Instance Services”.

For this demo lets consider a target item “Test Item 3” in “Workflow Testing” List on which we need to start the workflow, as shown below:

In order to trigger the Workflow Start process, we have got a super simple UI with one HTML button “Start Workflow” as shown below:

Now next thing is to get into the code line by line to understand the logic behind this implementation:

1.Specify the Workflow Definition ID which needs to be started on the list item

2.Specify the List ID to which this workflow is associated

3.Instantiate the List Object by calling “getById” method

4.Instantiate the List Item Object by calling “getItemById” method

5.Instantiate Service Manager Object as earlier

6.Query all the available Subscriptions for the Workflow Definition based on Definition ID specified in Step 1 using Workflow Subscription Service

7.For a specific Subscription call “startWorkflowOnListItem” function of Workflow Subscription Service by passing following parameters to it:

1. Workflow Subscription Object
2. List Item ID
3. Initiation Parameters: This is applicable only when the Workflow is expecting any Initializing Parameters in the Workflow Definition, else we can pass an empty object to the function as shown below.

With this we are done with code development.

Now click on the HTML Button to test the code and if the code execution succeed you will get an Alert saying “Workflow Started” as shown below:

In order to test the implementation from UI, we need to browse the “Workflow Testing” list and look for the target item which is “Test Item 3” in our case.

Look for the Workflow Status column for this item to see if the Workflow status has been updated as shown below:

Click on the workflow status to see full history of workflow execution to ensure that all operations are executed as expected.

Hope you find it helpful.

by Prashant Bansal via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Get all SharePoint Document Library Files and Folders at a ServerRelativeUrl in One REST Call

Recently, I was building a directory tree view of a Document Library for a client. Yes, you can say this shouldn’t be necessary. We can just tag the documents with metadata and we won’t need folders at all. Unfortunately, that’s not always the way people want to work.

To build this, I started by calling the _api/Web/Lists/getbytitle('Document Library Name')/items endpoint. I figured I’d just get all the documents in the library and sort out the display from the array. I got this working pretty well and in my test environment with a few hundred documents, it worked great.

Then – boom. There was a little requirement I didn’t know about: quite a few of the Document Libraries where we wanted to use this had more than 5000 documents. I stupidly hadn’t thought of that possibility. In my experience, it’s pretty unusual to see Document Libraries with that many documents, though it definitely happens.

Why does 5000 documents matter? Well, as of SharePoint 2010, we went from being able to request as many items as we wanted to an item limit of 5000. I’ll admit it’s not usually a great idea to request that many items from the client, but sometimes we need to.

I had two choices:

• Add some paging logic to the call. This would mean that if there were more than 5000 items, I’d simply make Math.ceil(documentCount / 5000) calls to get them. In smaller Document Libraries, it would still be one call; as the number of documents went up, it would take more calls.
• Be smart about it. Just request the objects (files and folders) in the root of the Document Library, and then on-demand, only request what I needed as the user expanded each folder.

The former would have been a little easier, but with larger libraries those calls could get pretty slow. The latter idea was really the “enterprise” way to do it. The problem was that the _api/Web/Lists/getbytitle('Document Library Name')/items endpoint didn’t really give me the right info to do it well.

So I turned to a different endpoint: _api/Web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('folderRelativeUrl'). This is a newer endpoint and is designed for doing stuff like this. We can pass in the relative URL – maybe something like “/sites/SiteA/SubSiteA/LibraryName/TopFolder/SubFolderA/SubFolderB” – and get back just the files and folders for that relative path.

It takes two calls for this, though:

• _api/Web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('folderRelativeUrl')/Folders
• _api/Web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('folderRelativeUrl')/Files

That would work, but it seemed a bit inefficient. Wouldn’t it be better to get the files and folders at the same time?

Off I went to Bingle. Luckily, I found a post on SharePoint StackExchange pretty quickly from jkr asking the same thing: Get all Files and Folders in one call. Vadim Gremyachev replied with the trick.

_api/Web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('folderRelativeUrl')?$expand=Folders,Files

With this one call, we can get the info about the file and the folders together in one complex object.

Figure 1: Complex object returned from _api/Web/GetFileByServerRelativeUrl()/$expand=Files,Folders

As I said, this endpoint is perfect for building something like a directory tree.

There’s not a lot of good documentation for this endpoint (surprise!). You can find some examples of calls on the MSDN page Files and folders REST API reference, but no examples of the results. If you download the SharePoint 2013 REST Syntax (wall posters) you get some more clues.

The Files result provides results like those shown in Figure 2. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to control what fields you get back, as using $select has no effect.

Figure 2: Complex object returned from _api/Web/GetFileByServerRelativeUrl()/Files

The Folders result provides results like those shown in Figure 3. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to control what fields you get back here either, as using $select has no effect.

Figure 3: Complex object returned from _api/Web/GetFileByServerRelativeUrl()/Folders

Note that in the Folders results, there are also Files and Folders objects, so the idea of recursion is there, though the objects are deferred. Because each folder has a ServerRelativeUrl value, you can dig as deep as you need to.

If you know you only need to go a few layers deep, you can also do things like:

_api/Web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('folderRelativeUrl')?

$expand=Folders,Folders/Folders,Folders/Folders/Folders

or

_api/Web/GetFolderByServerRelativeUrl('folderRelativeUrl')?

$expand=Files,Folders/Files,Folders/Folders/Files

Both of these calls will get you three folders deep, which may be enough for some things you might want to do. I could also see using a call like these latter ones to get a bit ahead of your user to reduce the “chatter” on the line. That would make your array processing on the client side a little more complex, but could be worth it.

With some spiffy recursion in your framework of choice, you can build some very nice user interfaces with data like this. But that’s for another post…

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

Collab365 Summit platform is now open

Did you know there are only 13 days until the start of the Collab365 Summit?

It's come around at a blistering pace but I am really amazed at how much content we're going to be delivering. This 3-day, free, virtual conference takes place just 3 working days after Microsoft release SharePoint 2016! It couldn't be better timed for you to learn about what's new and get insider knowledge directly from Microsoft staff, MVPs and expert speakers.

I do have a couple of BIG announcements:

The Conference Platform is OPEN!

I'm really happy to annouce that the conference platform is now open! I strongly recommend that you test your log-in (with your Collab365 account) before the conference actually starts. If you haven't registered yet please do it here. Once inside the platform you can start building your own personal Session Plan!

Full Agenda | Live Show Agenda | My Agenda | Contact us

If you haven't heard - as part of the Summit, we're heading to Microsoft, Redmond to produce a 3-day 'Live Show'. Check out the awesome line up here! I am sure you'll agree that we've a really healthy mix of key Microsoft personnel and experts from the community all taking part.

Play 'Guess the Dev Keynote'

At the Summit we're having a bit of fun! We're keeping the Dev Keynote speaker completely secret and would like to see if you can guess who it is. To spice it up, Rencore (developers of SPCAF), have kindly donated a brand new Microsoft Band as a prize to the person that guesses correctly. The winner will be announced directly after the Keynote.

Link : Make your guess

PS. If you wondering, SharePoint legends Bill Baer and Mark Kashman will be delivering the Keynotes on Day 1 and Day 3.

Not Registered yet?

If you haven't registered yet, please do so using the link below.

REGISTER FOR THE SUMMIT

As always if you have any questions, suggestions or problems just pop an email over to Collab365@collaboris.com

by Mark Jones via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

SharePoint Community Newsletter - Week 15

Hello SharePointers and welcome to this SharePoint Community Newsletter! We will cover news about SharePoint 2016, Office 365 and Yammer as well as upcoming events.

 

***New SharePoint Pluralsight Course: SharePoint Environment Auditing***

For those of you who are subscribed to Pluralsight, there is a new course by longtime SharePoint-Community.net member and new Pluralsight author Jeff Collins. Looking to learn about SharePoint environment common issues from a consultant's perspective? In this course, you will learn to fix issues that are prevalent in most SharePoint environments you come across.

http://spvlad.com/242OYxj

 

*** SharePlus by Infragistics Review: Mobile SharePoint for the Enterprise*** 

Are you looking for a mobile SharePoint application to increase employee productivity on the road? SharePlus is a native mobile application that provides online and offline, read/write access to SharePoint content like libraries, lists, and social features. SharePlus offline capabilities allows you to continue working with your SharePoint content even while offline. Changes introduced while offline are synchronized automatically with the server when the devices goes back online

Read the review by Vlad Catrinescu:

http://spvlad.com/1VCDk7t

  *** Review of ROOT by MessageOps: A Feature-rich SharePoint Online Intranet Portal*** 

Want to build an intranet on SharePoint Online but don’t want to go through all the development and constantly keeping up with the updates Microsoft delivers that could break functionality? An Out of the Box SharePoint Online Intranet with continuous support might be for you! Check out this review of the ROOT SharePoint Online Intranet by Vlad Catrinescu

http://spvlad.com/236axaz

*** Connecting a Slack Channel to an Office 365 Group*** 

Learn how to connect a Slack Channel to an Office 365 with this step by step tutorial by  SharePoint Expert Paul Choquette.

http://spvlad.com/1qTwtcT

*** FREE Webinar: What do YOU get from SharePoint Hybrid? – May 5^th, 2016*** 

Every time you see a blog post about SharePoint 2016, you see the word hybrid. But what exactly is a hybrid infrastructure and what features does the business user get? In this webinar we will look at SharePoint Hybrid from a business user point of view to understand what features we get out of it. 

 http://spvlad.com/hybridWebinar

*** Collaboration Culture and Commitments with Expert Adam Levithan***

Read this great interview on Collaboration  with MVPs Christian Buckley and Adam Leviathan

http://spvlad.com/1WSGMdE

*** Understanding and Prioritizing Collaboration with MVP Richard Harbridge***

Read this great interview on Collaboration  with MVPs Christian Buckley and Richard Harbdige

http://spvlad.com/1SPunrb

by Vlad Catrinescu via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Check Out These 6 SharePoint Fest DC Sessions for Deep Insight into SharePoint 2016

SharePoint Fest has always been a conference chock-full of great presenters and valuable content. SharePoint Fest D.C. is coming just ahead of the May 4 release of SharePoint 2016, and there are many sessions geared toward helping enterprise stakeholders effectively prepare for the new platform.

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Be Free!

It’s Freedom Day in South Africa.  Apart from the political agenda the rest of the country celebrates, my wish for you is the following:

May you be free from people who lie and steal from you

May you be free from drama

May you be free from people who take advantage of you

May you be free from people who break your heart

May you be free from all the emotional chains that bind you and hold you back

May you be free from all the fears that cripple you

May you be free financially

May you be free to love whomever you choose and be loved back

May you be free to live the life you choose

May you be free to be successful in every way that matters to you

May you be free to just be!

 

Filed under: Thoughts on Life
by Veronique Palmer via Views from Veronique

Archiving Absence of Leave calendar in SharePoint 2013

In our Company we have Absence of Leave calendar, where all employees add their vacations, sick days, holidays etc. Over the years this calendar grow quite a bit, with over 10.000 entries. As you are aware, Microsoft recommendation for entry numbers is no more than 5.000. Recently we have experienced some strange behavior in this list, some entries were duplicated, views did not work as it should. All in all, it was time to archive this list and start with fresh one. 

First thing is to create new calendar. Because Absence calendar has various columns and views, the easiest way was to save current Absence calendar as template, and then to create Absence-new calendar from that template. So, first go to Absence calendar, open Calendar tab and choose List Settings:

Under Permissions and Management click Save list as template option:

Choose a File Name, Template Name and Template description, in my case I called it Absence-template. Leave Include Content box unchecked, we want to save empty list, and then click OK

Once we have created template, we can use it to create new calendar. Go to Site Contents, choose Add an App, in search field type absence, in order to find Absence-template, choose Absence-template and in Name field type Absence-new. Upon clicking on Create button new Calendar will be created.

Now we have old calendar named Absence and new calendar called Absence-new. Next step is to rename them, so Absence will become Absence-archive, and Absence-new will become Absence. Go to Absence calendar, open Calendar, choose List Settings, and under General Settings click List name, description and navigation:

Change calendar name to Absence-archive and in Navigation section remove this list from Quick launch:

Do the same steps to Absence-new calendar, change its name to Absence and display this calendar to Quick launch.

This is as far as we can go with GUI, from now on we are going to need PowerShell.

Let us summarize what we did so far; we have created template from old calendar allowing us to use this template in order to create new calendar with same columns and views. After that we renamed old calendar to Absence-archive and remove it from Quick launch, also we renamed new calendar to Absence and added it to Quick launch. You may think that this is all we must do, but you would be wrong. We did change calendar names but URLs to list remained the same. URL to list Absence-archive is:

http://ift.tt/1SzZUYO

and for Absence:

http://ift.tt/1VBC0BV

so we must change root folders for these calendars. Why to do this, you may wonder. I can think of three reasons; first one would be that some services and scripts are using data from this calendar, so if don't change root folder they will not collect data from active calendar. Second reason is that some users have bookmarked this calendar, and will keep on looking in old calendar. This could lead to some misunderstandings and communication problems. And third one is that there will always be someone asking why there is difference between calendar names and URLs, and if this question escalate, you will end up changing URLs. So why not do it right now?

Calendar URL can be changed on few different ways, but easiest way is through PowerShell. Open PowerShell management console and run this script:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell –erroraction SilentlyContinue

$libOriginalUrl = "/Lists/Absence";
$libNewUrl = "/Lists/Absence-archive";
$web = Get-SPWeb -Identity http://ift.tt/1VBC0BX

$lib = $web.GetList($web.Url + $libOriginalUrl)
$rootFolder = $lib.RootFolder;
$rootFolder.MoveTo($web.Url + $libNewUrl)

Run this script both for Absence and Absence-archive calendar, by changing $libOriginalUrl and $libNewUrl.

Once we changed URLs all is left to do is to add data to new Absence calendar. Because this is Absence calendar, there are events which are recurring, like religious holidays, or domestic holidays. Also there is need to add events which are still in progress, or better yet, which end date is still in the future. We can not ask employees to insert events again just because we archived calendar. 

To add active events to new calendar we need PowerShell script. This script get all events which end date is greater that now, and copy event fields to new calendar:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell –erroraction SilentlyContinue

$web = Get-SPWeb -Identity http://ift.tt/1VBC0BX
$sourcelibrary = $web.Lists["Absence-archive"]
$destlibrary = $web.Lists["Absence"]
$sourcefields = $sourcelibrary.Fields

$sourceitems = $sourcelibrary.GetItems() | Where-Object {$_["EndDate"] -gt (Get-Date)}
foreach ($item in $sourceitems) {
    $newdestitem = $destlibrary.AddItem()
    foreach ($field in $sourcefields) {
        if (($field.ReadOnlyField -ne $True) -and ($field.InternalName -ne "Attachments")) {
            $newdestitem[$($field.InternalName)] = $item[$($field.InternalName)]
            }       
        }
        $newdestitem.Update()
    }

Upon successfully updating of events, your new calendar is up and running. With PowerShell scripts whole process of archiving calendar can last just few minutes, depending of number of events we need to copy.

by Krsto Savic via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Getting the Reply Count for a SharePoint Discussion Using the REST API

The other day I was creating a custom UI for a SharePoint 2013 Discussion list. To me, the out-of-the-box UI in SharePoint 2013 is definitely a step forward from previous versions. It’s still pretty rudimentary, though, and my client wanted something “more like other forums”.

SharePoint’s Discussion lists are sort of like Document Sets, in that the original post is a Discussion Content Type which inherits from Folder and the replies are the Message Content Type, which inherits from Item. So there aren’t any Documents involved, but Discussions are once again glorified Folders.

Since I’m using KnockoutJS on this project, I can make the UI look like pretty much anything. One thing we wanted to display was a reply count per thread. This seemed easy enough, but it could get expensive to retrieve all of the replies just to count them for the UI. Unfortunately, there was no obvious column (like “Replies” maybe?) to give me the answer.

Trolling around SharePoint StackExchange, I ran across a post by my friend Rothrock entitled How to get ItemChildCount of DocumentSet (folder) using REST Api asking a pretty similar question, but in his case it was about Document Sets. There ought to be a field like ItemChildCount or something, but he couldn’t find it, either. We’re used to a field like that using SPServices and SOAP, but there didn’t seem to be anything analogous in REST.

Luckily, someone who goes by ECM4D answered Rothrock with this example. (There were typos, but this was the idea.)

/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('your_list')/items?
  $select=ID,Title,Folder/ItemCount
  &$expand=Folder/ItemCount
  &$filter=FSObjType eq 1

By expanding the Folder, we can get at an ItemCount easily, just as we’d like to expect. This is yet another example where the documentation for the REST services simple doesn’t go deep enough to help us. Because much of the documentation is example-based – and this isn’t in any of the examples – we’re out of luck.

I ended up with something pretty similar, and it works great. Note that the ItemCount includes *all* replies, which means replies to the original post as well as replies to replies. If you wanted just replies to the original post, you’d need some other method.

MyProject.Promises.Discussions = $.ajax({
  url: _spPageContextInfo.webAbsoluteUrl +
    "/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('Discussion')/items?" +
    "$select=ID,Title,FileRef,IsFeatured,Created,Author/Title,Folder/ItemCount" +
    "&$expand=Author,Folder",
  method: "GET",
  headers: {
    "Accept": "application/json; odata=verbose"
  }
});

This call – using jQuery’s $.ajax function – gets me the basic info about the Discussion items I need:

• ID and FileRef let me provide links for the user to use to go deeper into the threads
• Title is the Subject of the original post
• IsFeatured tells me if it’s a featured post so that I can highlight it in some way
• Created and Author tell me who started the thread and when
• Folder/ItemCount is that mysterious count of replies I was looking for

All pretty easy, really, once I found that thread on SharePoint StackExchange. One of the best ways to learn the ins and out of the REST endpoints is to troll those public forums. Be forewarned, though: you’re just as likely to find something that doesn’t work as something that does.

by Marc D Anderson via Marc D Anderson's Blog

DFFS now with built in check-out for list-items

I have previously show how you can use DFFS rules to require check out of list items before editing.

This worked reasonably well in most cases, but if you had a large form with lots of rules, the loading would take twice the time because all the DFFS rules would have to run before the check-out action could take place – and then the form was reloaded.

To overcome this, and also make the setup easier, I have now built support for requiring check-out of list items into DFFS. You find the settings in the Misc tab when editing the EditForm of a list item.

Please note that this is in BETA (v4.3.68), and I need your feedback to ensure it works as expected before releasing it in the production version.

You find the DFFS package in the DFFS_BETA folder in the download section.

Please post any findings in the forum

Alexander

by Alexander Bautz via SharePoint JavaScripts

SPONSORED: Review of ROOT by MessageOps: A Feature-rich SharePoint Online Intranet Portal

Product analysis by Vlad Catrinescu – requested by MessageOps, but thoughts are my own. MessageOps is a proud sponsor of SharePoint Community

 Nine out of the best Intranets Worldwide in 2016 run on SharePoint according to the trusted Nielsen Norman Group in their latest Best Intranets report. This proves that SharePoint is still one of the most popular Intranet and Document collaboration platforms in the world. With the latest version of SharePoint 2016 coming out, and some companies moving fully to the cloud in SharePoint Online, a lot of intranets are being rebuilt to modernize their Intranet platform. Another interesting statistic from the Nielsen Norman Group is that in 2016, this year’s winning team took an average of 1.3 years to create their sites. The time it takes to create a SharePoint Intranet together with the fact that Office 365 is getting updated every two weeks, and if you customize too much you need to make sure that updates do not break your custom development, made way for a lot of “Out of the Box” SharePoint Online Intranets.

In this blog post we will review ROOT, a pre-built, feature-rich SharePoint intranet portal on Office 365. Before starting the review, here are a few words about ROOT from the MessageOps site:

The ROOT SharePoint intranet portal centralizes access to important company information and apps right in Office 365. Ready-built, packed with features, and easily configurable, your company will engage employees, facilitate communication, foster collaboration, streamline processes, and organize your knowledge-base for quick, lasting productivity gains. Easily deployed and administered, ROOT intranet eliminates the complexity, cost and risk of a custom-built solution to bring immediate business value to your organization.

The ROOT Office 365 SharePoint Intranet lets your team communicate and collaborate no matter where they are or what devices they work on thanks to its completely device responsive, modern widget design. ROOT’s interdepartmental workflow designs bring immediate benefits to your organization by streamlining and automating workflow efficiency. ROOT’s enhanced people finder makes it easy for your team to find the people and skill sets they need to get answers quickly.

ROOT by MessageOps Review

For this review, the MessageOps team gave me access to one of their demo environments with some PreConfigured data. Else it would have been a very boring Intranet with only me insideJ. As you will see right away, ROOT is a widget based Intranet, meaning that all the data is presented as Widgets on the screen.

Let’s take a look at some of the available widgets and see what they do. The first widget below called “Users” is linked to the SharePoint Social and allows you to easily go to your coworkers profiles. You can also follow people and see who followed you. The next widget called “Events” which can be linked to a SharePoint Calendar in a subsite and show the upcoming events. Lastly, the third widget is a cool Birthday or Work Anniversary widget in which Birthdays / Work Anniversary automatically scroll.

The next set of widgets is even more interesting. The first one on the left is a Widget called “Recognition” which allows you to Praise persons for the help they gave you. The middle widget called “Departmental Requests” is really cool system that allows you to Streamlined Processes and have a support system directly in your Intranet. Based on the Department you select, you have different categories, and the SharePoint Administrator can set who gets the requests for each Category. The Issues are then stored and you can see the status in the “Issue Status” Tab. This is a really cool way to automate processes, and avoid tons of emails. It also helps new employees that don’t know who to email to get help. Lastly , the last widget allows you to set Objectives and Goals for your company, as well as visually show if they look good, ok or bad.

This next group of widgets is all about Social! We have widgets that allow us so showcase the company Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds on our Intranet, so our employees can follow the company as well as see what Marketing is up to on Social!

The next set of widgets are an Employee Suggestion Box, with the data coming from a SharePoint List on ideas to improve the processes in the company! We also have a Special offers widget, in which you can announce things like special offers for your clients or customers. Lastly, a Tip of the Day widget!

We also have a widget for the Quote of the day, which can be automatically updated, as well as the ability to include a Widget with information from an external RSS Feed! Last but not least, we can include a Bing Map Widget on which we can show different locations, for example Office Locations!

We have made the tour of most of the widgets in ROOT, however that’s not all it includes. ROOT also includes a feature I loved forPeople Search. It includes a modern looking Search Template allowing you to quickly browse employees by using the letters provided as filters, or to search for a Department or Skill. It’s using SharePoint’s powerful search engine in the back, but with an a lot better looking user interface!

Conclusion

In this review we have played with ROOT, an Out of the Box Intranet for SharePoint Online that allows you to create a modern looking widget based Intranet, as well as offer Process Automation Features that allow you to streamline and make employee requests a lot easier. Furthermore the People Search page allows you to easily find employees in the organizations as well as find who can help you on a certain product or skill.

I found most of the widgets answer to real business needs in the enterprise can be very useful for a company looking to deploy an Intranet without waiting a year for the project to be done. ROOT is perfect for companies that are only using SharePoint Online and using the SharePoint Social as their social engine. Since ROOT is really for SharePoint Online, there is no On-Premises version available if a company wants to do an On-Premises / Hybrid deployment with the same look on both systems.

If you’re looking for an Out of the box SharePoint Online Intranet that will offer features right away, make sure to check out ROOT by MessageOps by clicking on the logo below!

by Vlad Catrinescu via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community

Evaluate your SharePoint Search Topology

SharePoint Search is a great solution that can be used for indexing all kinds of content whether within SharePoint or external such as shared network drives. As SharePoint grows with content, it become important to monitor and check the search configuration to ensure it can handle everything.

Firstly a simple look at the SharePoint Search Service Application can often be enough, to check for errors or just to look at the core topology.

 

read more

by via SharePoint Pro

Review of ROOT by MessageOps: A Feature-rich SharePoint Online Intranet Portal

Nine out of the best Intranets Worldwide in 2016 run on SharePoint according to the trusted Nielsen Norman Group in their latest Best Intranets report. This proves that SharePoint is still one of the most popular Intranet and Document collaboration platforms in the world. With the latest version of SharePoint 2016 coming out, and some companies moving fully to the cloud in SharePoint Online, a lot of intranets are being rebuilt to modernize their Intranet platform. Another interesting statistic from the Nielsen Norman Group is that in 2016, this year’s winning team took an average of 1.3 years to create their sites. The time it takes to create a SharePoint Intranet together with the fact that Office 365 is getting updated every two weeks, and if you customize too much you need to make sure that updates do not break your custom development, made way for a lot of “Out of the Box” SharePoint Online Intranets.

In this blog post we will review ROOT, a pre-built, feature-rich SharePoint intranet portal on Office 365. Before starting the review, here are a few words about ROOT from the MessageOps site:

The ROOT SharePoint intranet portal centralizes access to important company information and apps right in Office 365. Ready-built, packed with features, and easily configurable, your company will engage employees, facilitate communication, foster collaboration, streamline processes, and organize your knowledge-base for quick, lasting productivity gains. Easily deployed and administered, ROOT intranet eliminates the complexity, cost and risk of a custom-built solution to bring immediate business value to your organization.

The ROOT Office 365 SharePoint Intranet lets your team communicate and collaborate no matter where they are or what devices they work on thanks to its completely device responsive, modern widget design. ROOT’s interdepartmental workflow designs bring immediate benefits to your organization by streamlining and automating workflow efficiency. ROOT’s enhanced people finder makes it easy for your team to find the people and skill sets they need to get answers quickly.

ROOT by MessageOps Review

For this review, the MessageOps team gave me access to one of their demo environments with some PreConfigured data. Else it would have been a very boring Intranet with only me insideJ. As you will see right away, ROOT is a widget based Intranet, meaning that all the data is presented as Widgets on the screen.

Let’s take a look at some of the available widgets and see what they do. The first widget below called “Users” is linked to the SharePoint Social and allows you to easily go to your coworkers profiles. You can also follow people and see who followed you. The next widget called “Events” which can be linked to a SharePoint Calendar in a subsite and show the upcoming events. Lastly, the third widget is a cool Birthday or Work Anniversary widget in which Birthdays / Work Anniversary automatically scroll.

The next set of widgets is even more interesting. The first one on the left is a Widget called “Recognition” which allows you to Praise persons for the help they gave you. The middle widget called “Departmental Requests” is really cool system that allows you to Streamlined Processes and have a support system directly in your Intranet. Based on the Department you select, you have different categories, and the SharePoint Administrator can set who gets the requests for each Category. The Issues are then stored and you can see the status in the “Issue Status” Tab. This is a really cool way to automate processes, and avoid tons of emails. It also helps new employees that don’t know who to email to get help. Lastly , the last widget allows you to set Objectives and Goals for your company, as well as visually show if they look good, ok or bad.

This next group of widgets is all about Social! We have widgets that allow us so showcase the company Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds on our Intranet, so our employees can follow the company as well as see what Marketing is up to on Social!

The next set of widgets are an Employee Suggestion Box, with the data coming from a SharePoint List on ideas to improve the processes in the company! We also have a Special offers widget, in which you can announce things like special offers for your clients or customers. Lastly, a Tip of the Day widget!

We also have a widget for the Quote of the day, which can be automatically updated, as well as the ability to include a Widget with information from an external RSS Feed! Last but not least, we can include a Bing Map Widget on which we can show different locations, for example Office Locations!

We have made the tour of most of the widgets in ROOT, however that’s not all it includes. ROOT also includes a feature I loved for People Search. It includes a modern looking Search Template allowing you to quickly browse employees by using the letters provided as filters, or to search for a Department or Skill. It’s using SharePoint’s powerful search engine in the back, but with an a lot better looking user interface!

Conclusion

In this review we have played with ROOT, an Out of the Box Intranet for SharePoint Online that allows you to create a modern looking widget based Intranet, as well as offer Process Automation Features that allow you to streamline and make employee requests a lot easier. Furthermore the People Search page allows you to easily find employees in the organizations as well as find who can help you on a certain product or skill.

I found most of the widgets answer to real business needs in the enterprise can be very useful for a company looking to deploy an Intranet without waiting a year for the project to be done. ROOT is perfect for companies that are only using SharePoint Online and using the SharePoint Social as their social engine. Since ROOT is really for SharePoint Online, there is no On-Premises version available if a company wants to do an On-Premises / Hybrid deployment with the same look on both systems.

If you’re looking for an Out of the box SharePoint Online Intranet that will offer features right away, make sure to check out ROOT by MessageOps by clicking on the logo below!

The post Review of ROOT by MessageOps: A Feature-rich SharePoint Online Intranet Portal appeared first on Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu.

by Vlad Catrinescu via Absolute SharePoint Blog by Vlad Catrinescu

PremierPoint Solutions President Discusses ExCM 2013 R2 and Its Major New Features

 Don Beehler, PremierPoint Solutions’ marketing director, recently interviewed President Jeff Cate about the company’s ExCM 2013 R2:

Question: An R2 is a major new release of a software product. Why did you conclude it was necessary to release a new version of your award-winning Extranet Collaboration Manager for SharePoint (ExCM)?

Answer: ExCM is deployed by hundreds of organizations around the world and is the most popular way to enable SharePoint to be used as an extranet. Even with the availability of the Cloud, people still like the security and control that an on-premises extranet provides. So, because we have a lot of active, committed customers, we wanted to make sure the software is kept up-to-date and provides the best user experience possible. That’s why we built R2.

Question: How long has this R2 for ExCM been in the works?

Answer: R2 was a nine-month project that involved hundreds of man hours of design, development, and testing. It includes major new components, and that is why it has been labeled as a second release of ExCM 2013.

Question: What are the major new features and why are they important?

Answer: ExCM has always had an incredibly deep set of security and management features such as password policies, domain policies, external user registration configuration, etc. But many of these features previously required manual configuration in SharePoint’s web.config files. With R2, these are all easily configured from Central Administration, which makes it much easier for the SharePoint Farm Administrator to take advantage of them.

The initial setup and configuration of a SharePoint-based extranet has involved a quite lengthy and tedious set of manual web.config file edits. We have always provided extensive documentation and excellent support services to assist customers with this, but a manual approach is less than ideal. So, in R2, we invested in the “plumbing” to automate the initial setup and configuration of Forms-Based Authentication (FBA) and the ASP.NET Membership Provider to make deploying a SharePoint-based on-premises extranet as painless as possible. A new Setup Wizard in Central Administration, along with an Extranet Global Configuration Timer Job, is the secret sauce for this.

There is a new Extranet Site Directory Web Part that can be placed on any extranet page to provide the external user with a hyper-linked list of extranet sites that they have access to. Of course, the web part takes advantage of SharePoint’s security trimming to make sure the user only sees links to appropriate sites.

Finally, we have added Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) as an out-of-the-box add-in for customers who desire a higher level of security for their extranets. MFA is starting to become a standard feature for web applications across the Internet, and it only makes sense that this capability should be available with ExCM.

Question: What can you tell us about the Forms-Based Authentication (FBA) setup wizard?

Answer: ExCM has always leveraged SharePoint’s built-in support for ASP.NET Forms-Based Authentication and the SQL Membership Provider. Unfortunately, until now, the way you enabled FBA on a SharePoint web application was to follow Microsoft’s guidance on editing the web.config files by hand. This approach works, but is error prone due to the complexity of SharePoint’s web.config files and the amount of modification needed.

The new Extranet Setup Wizard handles all of this work automatically for the SharePoint Farm Administrator. It does the following work that previously had to be done manually:

- Create the Extranet Directory database and set proper permissions on it
- Create the correct web.config file modifications to enable FBA and connect to the new Extranet Directory database
- Queue up the modifications for the Extranet Global Configuration Timer Job, which will automatically run and apply the modifications to every web front-end server in the farm, regardless of the number of servers in the farm.

With the new Extranet Setup Wizard it is entirely possible to have your extranet web application up and running within 15 minutes, rather than several hours or even days when doing it manually.

Question: Which features now have graphical user interfaces (GUIs)?

Answer: In Central Administration we have added GUIs for configuring these popular features:

- Create Extranet Account Managers
- Set Password Policies
- Set Account and Password Expiration Policies
- Configure Global Registration Settings
- Configure Global Domain Settings
- Configure People Picker Restrictions

Question: What does the R2 mean for current ExCM 2013 customers?

Answer: Current ExCM 2013 customers can upgrade to R2 for free if they have a current support contract with us. We have tested the in-place upgrade process extensively and feel confident that our documentation about how to go about it is thorough and accurate.

Answer: What else would you like for people to know about ExCM R2?

Just like with all previous versions of ExCM, R2 can be deployed on SharePoint Foundation or SharePoint Server. For organizations that have SharePoint Server already deployed and licensed for their internal users, Microsoft allows unlimited free licenses for external users (non-employees). To deploy an extranet in the farm is as simple as creating a new web application, installing ExCM and running the Extranet Setup Wizard.

If your organization is relatively small and does not have an on-premises SharePoint deployment yet, a single server SharePoint Foundation deployment can be very inexpensive (you would only need a single license for Windows Server and ExCM). It would give you an incredibly feature-rich extranet capability that you have complete control over. This could easily be done on your own hardware, or you could do it on an Amazon or Azure virtual machine.

by noreply@blogger.com (PremierPoint Solutions) via SharePoint Solutions Blog