To localhost or not?

I come across this error a number of times.  Junior consultants access SharePoint via http://localhost and then cannot understand why the site doesn’t work as expected.  The reason for this is pretty simple.  The default IIS website (running on port 80) will be available, but when navigating to list pages and site settings, you will either see the roots lists OR you will get an error.

Other functionality will give funny errors or will simply stop working (InfoPath Form Services being one.

Alternate Access Mappings

SharePoint uses alternate access mappings to “translate” the URL received.  This capability allows us to use multiple URLs to access the same content.  For example, we can have http://intranet.sps.co.za (for internal users) and http://extranet.sps.co.za (for external users).  Both URLs, from a DNS perspective, will point to the same logical IP / server, but once it hits the SharePoint server, it will be translated and pointed to the correct IIS web application based on SharePoint’s rules.

Alternate access mappings is often overlooked as a critical part of the configuration as many “basic” sites either do not use it, or have it pre-configured for their default web application.

I hope me sharing this small post, will give the consultant experiencing some funnies another tool in his arsenal when troubleshooting SharePoint.

Talk to me!!!

Okay, I’m not really in a relationship with SharePoint, but I might as well be.  From time to time a couple of funny errors creep in and although I’m 100% aware that it is the user that did something wrong, what is worrying is that the user was able to complete the “misstep”, if you will.

This morning I was working on a tender document, I made some changes (out of an attachment) and then wanted to save it back to SharePoint (like a good information worker should).  I clicked on “Save & Send” –> “Save to SharePoint” and then “Save As”.

A dialogue popped up and I pasted the link to the folder in SharePoint I wanted to save to (mistake).  After “saving” the document, the document library was no longer available and the error I received when trying to view the content read – “Code blocks are not allowed in this file.”

Thankfully, I knew that the content couldn’t possibly be lost.  I logged into SharePoint Designer and tried to get directly to the document library.  The library was available, but none of the files.  **heart stopping moment**

This got me thinking and I realized that something funky must have happened to the view.  I created a new view, and badaboom, all sorted.

In Summary

All content in SharePoint is saved in a database.  Files that render this content can get corrupted, but the underlying content will be fine (for the most part).  In some cases, a broken web part will also cause a page to go wonky, but after removing the web part, everything is fine.

Didn’t think so…

So what is all the fuss about?  I’ve been in the SharePoint game for as long as I can remember and for the better part of the last 5 years I’ve been involved in sales and pre-sales of SharePoint based solutions.  The beginning of my sales “career” was predictable; “This is SharePoint, look at all the cool features”.  From there it went into the “This is an information management system, look at all the benefits” and now I find myself in a fantastic medium between both of the extremes.

What about the customer?

In a sales cycle of a solution based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 the customer paused the engagement to review products that compete with MSDYNCRM2011 in order to ensure they are making the right decision.  This got me thinking.  If we aren’t using the word “SharePoint” in our pitches, how does the customer know what they are buying or what the enormous ancillary benefits are to owning the platform?

The answer is pretty simple, they don’t.

What about the community?

In some ways I firmly believe that the SharePoint community gets wrapped up in its own hype quite a bit.  “Oh, SharePoint this and SharePoint that.”  “Oh, you can’t use the word Intranet, it’s so done”.  Well, why not? 

No matter how far our (the community at large) understanding of knowledge management, and so forth, has come, customers still contact us almost weekly for a “Intranet to enhance internal communication and share documents.”  In that particular scenario I think it is paramount that the customer understands (at a high level) the base platform, it’s underlying benefits, features and functions and high level roadmap capabilities.

I find it a chore to discuss basic SharePoint elements in some sales pitches, but more often than not I get reminded how important it is.  As I’m so close to the tool and what it does, I’ve almost forgotten how cool and beneficial some of the basics are to customers.  Check in / check out, versioning and self service permission management can literally change a company, but yet in some solution selling engagements we don’t harp on it.

So where to from here?

To each their own, but I do believe we need to get back to basics, and learn to love the brand.  We mustn’t be afraid to stand proud and say we are selling SharePoint and that our Intranet’s are based on SharePoint.  Customers need to know that and I think in some cases the community needs to remind themselves that the basics can make a remarkable difference in companies if implemented correctly.

Is the word SharePoint taboo, I think not.

Now what happens when you are putting together a pretty straight forward website and simply want to utilise the built in controls?  Well, it all works find and dandy until you need to order the sub pages.  Here is the scenario:

A heading (sub site) has pages and you want to manually sort those pages in the order that makes the most sense for you.  SharePoint’s navigation can do it, but a combination of settings need to be correct.

Top Navigation

Global Navigation Settings in SharePoint

So where do I arrange my pages?  The sub sites are set to inherit from the main site for ease of maintenance.

The answer is in the navigation settings themselves.  Although the sub sites inherit navigation from the main site, the ordering of the pages must still be done on a site level.  Now if you have not selected the “show pages” option in the site level (as it inherits from the top) you won’t see the pages to sort them.

In other words, to get past this gotcha, enable the “show pages” setting for the current navigation, sort the pages, click OK and then revert the “show pages” setting back to what it was:

On the sub site, enable “Show pages”

Sort the pages

Click OK and then revert the “Show pages” setting for the current navigation.

In summary, I find that many things are possible in SharePoint if you dig around long enough and play with different combinations of settings.  More often that not, I find that an implementation method is the root cause of the problem, not the product itself.

Happy SharePointing, keep it classy.

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)

A message I have across the board is this;  Be sure that you are using the correct part of SharePoint for the task at hand.  This is of course assuming that SharePoint was the correct tool in the first place, let’s move on.

Example

When building public facing websites, article pages are used to create content, both static and dynamic.  One of the native columns that ship with an article page is the Page Content column.  This column allows for HTML editing via a WYSIWIG interface with the ability to switch to HTML view for the advanced user.  It is pretty powerful, yet simple to use.

During one of my many system reviews I came across an installation that was using the Content Editor web part in the place of the Page Content column.  Now in theory, these elements are identical, but under the hood, the following is revealed:

• Content Editor does not support versioning;
• Content inside of the content editor web part cannot be displayed in a Content Query web part via XSLT as it is not a selectable column;
• As it does not support versioning, it by extension doesn’t support (Variations, Roll backs, Scheduled Publishing)

SharePoint is a wonderful platform that can enrich many companies’ collaboration and information sharing capability, but used in the wrong manner it can also be very painful.

The education in SharePoint never stops and with a new version on the horizon, I can’t wait to see what’s vNext. 

After much digging and prodding I stumbled across the answer: I had forgotten to tick the Windows Authentication box when installing the IIS7 features.

So I enabled it like this: Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off >Internet Information Services > World Wide Web Services > Security >tick ‘Windows Authentication’, did an iisreset for good measure, and smiled as SharePoint loaded up.

There are probably many other reasons why one might get a blank page when hitting their SharePoint site, but if you run into this one, remember to check if all the relevant IIS features are installed. You never know.

I used the following resources to get some answers:

Stuart’s Tech Punch – http://techpunch.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/sharepoint-portal-services-team-services-determine-service-pack-version/

Microsoft Description of Service Pack 3 – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923644

Complete list of Service Packs (2010, 2007, 2003 and 2001) – http://www.sharepointdesignerstepbystep.com/blog/SitePages/SharePoint%20versions.aspx (Great Resource)

The client should be going through an upgrade at some point, so here is hoping we get the work and move them onto the new hotness soon soon.

Have a great holiday everybody.  See you early in January.

Today, I’ll discuss the Project Task list and it’s integration with Project Professional.

For anyone that has ever needed to run a project in the Microsoft ecosystem, I’m pretty sure you cracked open Project Professional and built a plan.  For those that have been Project Managers you’ve probably worked with Project Professional in conjunction with Project Server, which is a slightly bigger kettle of fish.

Project Professional is a great product, it’s to a project manager what MS Word is to a document writer.  It is so packed with features, that stand alone, it can fulfil many features needed to run projects in an organisation.

There are however times, when the sharing of the plan becomes a requirement and this is when Project Professional starts to hit some limitations.  Similar to Visio, if you wish to share a plan / drawing, you need to convert it to PDF and mail it to your colleagues.  This approach, is time consuming, static and creates unnecessary data duplication.

Enter the Project Task list for SharePoint.

The Project Task list in essence allows the SharePoint administrator to create tasks that are dependant on one another.  These tasks are then shown in a Gantt chart view which gives resources a lovely snapshot of how their particular tasks effects the rest of the project.

The list works wonderfully on it’s own, but for those that have access to Project Professional the combination really takes it to another level.

The following screenshots illustrates how easy it is to synch a Project Plan to SharePoint via Project Professional:

1 – Once the plan is created, click on File –> Save & Send –> Synch with Tasks List

2 – Enter your SharePoint site URL, click on Validate, select the appropriate list and click on “Sync”:

3 – The tasks will begin to sync:

4 – After the successful sync, the tasks are available in the SharePoint list:

Staff will now be able to view the entire project plan without the need for a Project Professional license.  The project manager will also not have the requirement to save the plan to PDF in order to share it.

Some caveats do exists, so just beware of some of the following “gotchas”:

- When adding resources, you have to use the exact resource names of the AD Accounts for users.  Using generic resource names e.g. Consultant, Infrastructure Specialist et al is therefore not supported;

- The project plan can only support manual scheduling

- Only finish-start predecessors without constraints / lag times;

- Ensure there are no special characters in task names

- To view the expanded Gantt view you have to click on the folders which is a little cumbersome

In closing, I think the Project Tasks list is a great tool for the company that needs to manage basic projects.  When you require slightly better resource and task management, the combination of Project Professional and the Project Tasks list works very well.  Lastly, when things get very serious, Project Server becomes the necessary evil.

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?”