Elaborate Intranet Styling a Thing of the Past?

So while playing around on SharePoint 2013 the first thing that hit me was the myriad of intricate little floating buttons, layers and the like.  It looks pretty cool, although it will take time for users to get around the interface initially. I think the inline editing and “Metro” (whoops can’t call it that anymore) styling is a great step forward, but I wonder what it will do to the creativity of the myriad of SharePoint designers our there?

So for websites, this will not apply, but I see more and more Intranets going to the route of Windows 8 blocks which works really well and is super usable, but how much can you do / tweak?

Not only do I think that stock standard interface will be slightly trickier to modify (due to all the inline trinkets), but also think the move to big buttons, blocks and more usability will curb creativity in certain circles.

Having said that, the designers will refocus and find their niche, but in the interim I think it will also allow a lot of “pretenders” to enter the fray as the “Metro” (whoops I said it again) design is a lot simpler to conceptualize and implement.

Is the block type styling here to stay or will Windows 9 move all of us in a different direction?

Time will tell.

Getting Started: SEO for SharePoint

I completed a bit of research on SEO for SharePoint lately.  The results were pretty much expected considering my experience in the field. 

As early as 2004 I was involved in a project on MCMS 2002 where we needed to build a metadata panel into the authoring experience.  The metadata panel gave the author the ability to enter metadata which, upon save, was written in the <meta/> tags for the HTML page.  Credit for this brainchild has to go to Brian Fernandes, my mentor as a young developer.

So in MOSS 2007, MCMS2002 and SPS2003 effectively merged.  I was pretty excited about this and I was expecting some additions to the CMS functionality also.  A number of changes were made, but something that was fundamentally missing was the ability to prepare pages for SEO via the interface.

Waldek Mastykarz one of the names that popped up most in my research has a number of great articles on the topic.  To assist with the terrible naming in MOSS 2007 he created Imtech SharePoint SEO Slugs.  Have a look at the description here – Imtech SharePoint SEO Slugs.’  Waldek wrote a number of other articles that discussing SEO for MOSS 2007 and I recommend reading his blog if you’re still using the 2007 version of the product.

Another great link is Waldek’s starter guide for SharePoint 2007 and Google SEO – Google SEO Starter Guide for MOSS 2007.

Let’s move to SEO for SharePoint 2010 shall we?

Before jumping into how to get started with SEO for SharePoint 2010 I thought it would be pertinent to understand the core principles of SEO (agnostic of platform). 

What is SEO?

I used the following article as a great reference – http://chasesagum.com/15core-principles-seo.  Thank you Chase Sagam.  The highlight of this post is point number 10 – Remarkable Content is King.  Enough said.

What tools are available?

In terms of tools, you have to start at the Free SEO Toolkit.  This toolkit plugs directly into IIS and helps with things like broken pages, page load times, incorrect markup and more.  This tool is meant to be used in an on-going basis to review to tweak your site as more and more content is added.  Resources on the tool can be found here -http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo

What about SharePoint & Products?

Quite simply put, SharePoint 2010 doesn’t ship with out of the box functionality which will help you write your tags into the correct for format for search bots.  For this to happen you either have to (A) develop your own utility or (B) use one that has already been developed. 

Enter Mavention Meta Fields

From what I could find online Mavention Meta Fields seems like a great solution to the SEO “challenge” in SharePoint.  The add-on utility allows the author to edit the meta tags not only for SharePoint, but for the page also.  The functionality works 100% like the utility I was involved in for MCMS 2002 many moons ago.

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/easy-editing-meta-tags-publishing-pages-mavention-meta-fields/

Summary

SEO tools and utilities alone will not get your site ranked better on the web.  The day and age of creating a million back links, registering your site on search engines et al are gone.  As per Chase Sagums 10 core principles, I believe that the key elements all web authors need to concentrate on would be “Creating Remarkable Content”.

Here are some other links that I used in my research, enjoy:

http://www.glynblogs.com/2010/07/generate-a-sitemap-for-sharepoint-2010-using-powershell.html – Glyn Clough

http://www.wssdemo.com/livepivot/ – WSSDEMO crew

http://blog.mastykarz.nl/how-we-did-it-mavention-nl-part-3-search-engine-optimization/ – Waldek Masykarz

http://www.thesharepointmuse.com/2011/12/lesson-learned-when-you-need-to-use-publishing-in-sharepoint/ – Marcy Keller

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg430141.aspx – Randy Drisgill (I consider him the ultimate branding Ninja on SharePoint)

Project Governance

As I was driving to work this morning, I started thinking about some of the projects I had worked on the last couple of years.  Some brilliant, some not so much, others mentally challenging and a couple just very basic.  One thing that hit me, was how different the project delivery industry (e.g. IT) is to other industries.

I guess that is a fairly generic statement, but what got me thinking is how the IT industry seems to have a lot of grey area.  Although consultants work on an hourly rate (for time and material projects) I still find that there are many clients that expect a lot of “free” work to be completed. 

Baffling, I know.

I guess it has something to do with the fact that you can’t “touch” an IT solution.  Sure you can touch software, but if you take a product and build a solution on top of it, how do you quantify what was delivered and how does EXCO determine that it has been completed.

This is the key question and leads into a biggy and something I’m very passionate about;

Project Governance

Clients will be clients, staff will be staff, but without proper project governance, your project is doomed to fail.  In the project kick off meeting, everyone is buddy buddy and life is good, but the minute the vendor misses a deadline or an expectation is not met, hold on to your seat pockets, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Project Governance is something that most companies adhere to in some shape way or form.  Microsoft have also developed their “Sure Step” methodology to help vendors through the delivery process.  Over and above that, you obviously have various other delivery methodologies that range between agile and waterfall plus everything in between.

Project Governance (yes this is a very broad term) is almost pointless when things go well, but essential when things start going a little south.  It ensures that the client & vendor are able to have an objective discussion void of emotion by simply looking at the facts.

Good Project Governance

“Mr Customer, as per minutes dated 01/01/1900, we committed to doing XYZ.  XYZ has now been changed, therefore we need to raise a change request which will effect the time frame and cost of the project.

Bad Project Governance

“Hi Pietie, I told you in our last meeting that you weren’t going to get those fancy drop downs.  Now you’ve asked for them, that’s going to cost you a little bit extra mate.”

As noted above, project governance is a broad broad topic, but in summary, have a look at the examples above and ask yourself –

“Which conversation do I want to have with my customer?”

Visio 2010 Stencils for SharePoint 2010

In work and currently in my studies I model all sorts of SharePoint diagrams.  I’ve used a number of publishers information, but came across a fantastic stencil for Visio 2010 and I just had to share it with you guys.

These stencils were published by John Champman and I have to give a big shout out for the work on that.  I will for sure be using it over and over and I’m sure anybody reading this post will be eternally grateful.

Here is the link – http://www.johnchapman.name/visio-stencils-for-sharepoint-2010/.

Create Collaboration Portal using PowerShell

When I first installed and started playing with SharePoint 2010 one of the first “huh” moments was the mystical dissapearance of the Collaboration Portal template.  I later learnt (via blogs and @ the Boot Camp) that the template was in fact not missing, but simply hidden from the interface.

Why was this completed?  Who was responsible?  Well, too be honest, I can think of no logical explanation as to why Microsoft would want to move away from this portal template as it really just worked.  In any event, here we are, SharePoint 2010 portals flying up everywhere with the Team Site as the basis.  Do I have a fundamental issue with the new template?  Nope, but it still didn’t cure my sadness (sheds a small tear).

Microsoft have done a great deal of work when it comes to the upgrading of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to SharePoint 2010.  I’m not going to go into too much detail, but part of this work was making the older templates available via code to ensure that upgrading / migration is a lot more seamless.

To use these templates all you need to know is their site definition name & number.  A found a fantastic blog which lists all of them, you can view them here – http://www.toddbaginski.com/blog/archive/2009/11/20/which-sharepoint-2010-site-template-is-right-for-me.aspx.  Thanks Todd.

Okay, enough of my random ramblings, let’s get down to what brought you to this post.  Let’s create the site using the Collaboration Portal site template.  It’s quite simple, simply open PowerShell and execute the following command (obviously adding your own paramenters where applicable):

New-SPSite -Url http://intranet/sites/collabportal -OwnerAlias contoso\administrator -Name “My Intranet” -Template SPSPORTAL#0

After a couple of seconds the operation will complete with the following result:

Usability Update – SharePoint

In SharePoint 2010, users have the wonderful ability to select multiple items and complete functions on groups of items rather than one by one.  This does not apply to workflow tasks however, but is very useful for check in / out specifically. The datasheet view is also there for meta data manipulation which works great for big lists.

All the items described above does however only apply when users have been trained effectively and they are more than simple viewers.

What happens when users haven’t been trained on interacting with task lists?

In this scenario the portal administrators need to hide bits and pieces from the users to ensure that they can’t get to (A) the ribbon and (B) the other list views.

(A)  ”Hiding the ribbon”

We will not really be hiding the ribbon, but what we are doing is making it less likely for the user to get to the ribbon when simply wanting to view a list item.

To do this, update the current view and simply de-select the “Allow individual item check boxes” as per the following screenshot:

(B)  ”Remove Title URL link from web part”

This is something I often do when doing intranet’s just to ensure that users don’t “easily” get into the list view of a particular list.  Off course users with a bit of training will very easily get to this view by clicking on “View all site content”, but by removing the link from the title in the web part, you make a little more difficult for the basic user to get into an area that will potentially confuse them.

To do this, edit the web part and remove the link that is under Advanced –> Title URL as per the screenshot below:

The basic updates above will not fool any trained users, but when rolling out an intranet for the first time, these minor updates will make it less “scary” for those users that are being exposed to SharePoint for the first time.

Happy configuring.  :)

SharePoint 2010: Cannot find link to Master Page / Page Layouts?

This may be trivial to some people, but I just wanted to post this quickly as I’m sure many people starting out with the SharePoint branding will need to know this.

Where can you set the master page / page layouts if you create a Team Site / non publishing site collection?  Well, Microsoft obviously knew that people would want to use the publishing features with the non publishing enabled site collections, so this is an example of where the feature framework really works well.  To resolve the “problem” simply complete the following steps:

- Navigate to the landing page of your newly created site collection

- Click on “Site Actions”

- Click on “Site Collection Features”

- Enable “SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure”

Enable on site collection level

 - Click on “Site Actions”

- Click on “Manage site features”

- Enable “SharePoint Server Publishing”

Enable on a site level

Once this has been completed, you can again access the master pages and page layouts via site settings as you would normally do for  a publishing portal.

Editing *.master pages – Page Cannot Be Found

Styling SharePoint 2007 is a challenge onto itself.  I know I haven’t been for any formal training (which I am now considering), but I recon my HTML, CSS et al is not too shabby so I decided to take a design, created by my colleague Lawrence and modify it for one of our clients.  Boy was I in for a surprise.

Firstly, I have to say – IE8 “F12″ DOM Inspector is the absolute business.  You can make changes on the fly and without this I sincerely doubt I would have been able to get anywhere with the design.

Secondly, Heather Solomon is “SCHWEETNEZZ”.  Her blog is absolutely littered with resources that are essential to any “style newbie” trying to brand SharePoint (Intranet / Internet).

So now that I’ve got the mad props out the way, I get to my error.  I was happily editing the master page to change the look and feel and the minute I saved, my entire site went down – “Page Cannot Be Found”.  I was completely thrown and although my troubleshooting of SharePoint has become somewhat legendary of the years, this one had me.  The page was there, I didn’t delete it, what gives?

I did the Bing / Google thing and finally found a post from Heather (mad love given before) that saved my day.  In the post she mentions how the “~”  dissapears when saving the master page from time to time.  I double checked the source and what do you know, some of the user controls where no longer relatively references.  Updating the references (in notepad this time) sorted the problem and I happily delved deeper in the CSS madness of branding SharePoint. 

Here is the original post – http://www.heathersolomon.com/blog/articles/BaseMasterPages.aspx

 

 

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