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?”

I had to hide this link for users that did not have Full Control permissions on the site, because they were getting an access denied error when clicking on the link; the User Information list is only available to administrators.

SPSecurityTrimmedControl was the man for the job, but I couldn’t figure out what setting to use for the PermissionsString property to get it to only show content for users with Full Control permissions.

After some clever investigation on my part Googling, I eventually figured out that the property to use for this is ’FullMask’.

So, the following snippet shows how to display content only to users with Full Control permissions on the site:

<Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat="server" PermissionsString="FullMask">
    Content goes here…
</Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

The questions were different from the usual content heavy stuff and it got me thinking – “Do I have enough life & business experience to really answer this man properly?”  This provoked a second question – “Are SharePoint Consultants too young?“

Why do I ask this question?  Well, it’s quite simple; in the South African context, “consultants” very quickly get given or demand this title simply by working on a particular technology for a couple of years.  In another scenario companies often bestow this title on the lucky “20 something” simply because their company is too small to have specialised resources.  Putting “consultant” into someone’s title also allows said company to pimp this individual out as many things. #FoodForThought.

In other industries consultants are white bearded men with years and years of experience on their side.  Why is that not the case in SharePoint?  Firstly, I believe Microsoft have made the technology quite easy to work with, hence technical resources are “skilling” up quicker and quicker.  Secondly, companies give away the “consultant” badge way to easily in the Microsoft partner ecosystem.

I wish I could spend another 1000 words on this topic, but I have to run to make it to a presentation at Teched Africa.  My key “take away” on this topic is this:

Before adding “consultant” to your title, ask yourself this question – “Am I consulting with the customer or am I simply deploying a technology?”  The answer to this question should give you an indication as to where you fit in. 

Side note: I admit that I didn’t like this site. Let’s call it “SharePoint_DevEnv_01-Oct-2011_000004″ for brevity sake. It had done nothing wrong to me, it hadn’t insulted my family, but it just rubbed me the wrong way and had to go. You know how sometimes an SPWeb just gives you the willys? Well this one did, and I’m glad it got the axe.

The site had no sub-sites, no custom features or code – it was basically an empty team site with one or two documents in it.

Attempting to delete it by going Site Settings > Delete this site failed, as did trying to remove it via the Sites and workspaces list.

What did work however was PowerShell (cue Superman theme). I’m not sure why PowerShell managed to delete the site when SharePoint’s front-end wouldn’t allow me to, but I was happy with the result nonetheless. This being a dev environment, I wasn’t really concerned if a larger issue was at play – the environment gets reinstalled every so often anyway.

To delete a site via PowerShell, simply go Remove-SPWeb “http://server/sitename”, then press Y to confirm.

One of these bits of functionality is the ability to show a users email related elements on parts of pages.  For example, you may have a page that shows that latest departmental documents, a voting poll and then a web part(s) showing his / her Outlook tasks, inbox & calendar (daily view).

Now putting this together “sounds” easy enough as SharePoint ships natively with a number of OWA web parts, sadly, they simply don’t work in this manner.  One would think an administrator can simply drag these on, configure the exchange server and badaboom, think again.  The web part has two properties, Mail Server & Mailbox Name (not exact names, but you get the idea).

The Mail Server is “easy enough”, one would think, but the second property, Mailbox Name, is what causes the issue.  As it turns out, Microsoft seemingly created these web parts with the idea that users would add them to their MySites if and when they need them.  You and I both know, that regular users will never venture into the “Edit Page” arena as it is simply too scary.  So this limitation, renders these web parts “defunk” (IMHO).  Herewith some links that try to cross the casm of this method:

http://www.sharepoint911.com/blogs/laura/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=676af157-7d96-4e15-a987-54b8a3e4d948&ID=2
http://blog.hametbenoit.info/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=61
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-foundation-help/working-with-outlook-web-access-web-parts-HA101810215.aspx

So although the native SharePoint web parts can’t be of much help, Microsoft have made a couple of really cool things available to Exchange 2007 & 2010 users that can be put to great use.  So the solution goes something like this (feels like I’m writing a rap, which I’m not, but I digress).

Users can access outlook web access in a number of ways which are essentially separated into ways of authentication.  For simplicity of this post, think of two ways only, Integrated Windows Authentication & Basic Authentication.  (more on this here – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125207.aspx) 

Navigating to outlook web access (OWA) that is enabled for integrated windows authentication will take the currently logged on users credentials and basic integration will “prompt” similar to a forms based authentication (FBA) setup.  Traditionally, basic integration with SSL, HTTPS, is used for companies that wish to give their users access to email via a browser whilst not on site. 

So, for practical purposes, you can imagine that using basic authentication (where a user needs to login every time) won’t work on a corporate intranet as you are trying to give a user a seamless experience by using their current credentials to personalise the site.  In summary, a corporate intranet that prompts users for logins all the time, is not a place where users will “like” to work on.

The answer is then to use the outlook web access address that is enabled for integrated windows authentication, which will show the currently logged on user’s email without prompting them – AWESOME.  Wait, there is more.  In exchange 2007 & 2010 Microsoft have made a number of query string parameters available to show different areas of the users exchange profile.  Herewith some examples:

Outlook Calendar: https://<server name>/owa/?cmd=contents&module=calendar

Weekly Calendar View:  https://<server name>/owa/?cmd=contents&fpath=Calendar&view=Weekly

Outlook Tasks:  https://<server name>/owa/?cmd=contents&module=tasks

Herewith a full list of the switches & query string parameters:  http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232199.aspx

I’m sure the light bulbs are starting to flicker, so now what?  Well, it’s quite simple.  Decide what you wish to show the users by using the article link above.  Once you know what you wish to show (Inbox, Tasks & Weekly Calendar view for example), add 3 Page Viewer web parts to a SharePoint page and configure the links to the HTTP://* links as created above.

The link noted above will more than likely only be available inside your organisation as many companies will opt for the HTTPS enabled basic authentication externally.  Having said that, this functionality can really add to the user adoption drive as most of use spend ages in our email every day.

Happy configuring. 

Okay, back to reality, just for a tad.  What is SharePoint?  This is a question that anybody in the SharePoint industry has to answer almost daily.  Have you got your story down?  Do you know exactly how to answer that question?  Scripted?  Pictures in your head so clear, you know you can do it in your sleep?

Wrong approach!

Why you ask?  Well it’s quite simple.  Different audiences require different answers.  For example, you might be talking to a very technical audience in which case the use of the word platform might get you a couple of nods.  You might be presenting to a business audience with existing exposure to SharePoint, you might be presenting to people that have never heard of SharePoint never mind ANY of the concepts that are inherent to the use of it. 

Concepts like collaboration, web content management, business intelligence, workflow and enterprise content management are foreign to people not intrinsically involved in the industry.

Okay, I think you get my point.

So I have many “What is SharePoint” stories and I’ve used a number of them.  For our summit I came up with a new one – “SharePoint is a Pizza” and it worked like a charm.

SharePoint is a Pizza

The basic principle of my analogy is this; When ordering pizza, you have a couple of choices to make.  Will I go with chilli?  Will I go chicken, meat or vegetarian.  Do I take one off the menu or do I build my own?

I compare this decision making process directly to the process of matching requirements to the best suitable SharePoint functional area(s) .

A company might have a fairly basic content management requirement coupled with an advanced workflow need.  What to do?  Well, in this case, SharePoint Foundation coupled with K2 blackpoint would be their flavour.

In another case, a company might have a full range of requirements, but will only be rolling out the first 25% of it, train, adopt and then move on.  They can therefore start with “Sites” & “Search” and later move into “Business Intelligence, Workflow and Content”.  Their flavour – SharePoint Standard, with a bit of Enterprise sprinkled on later.

The analogy goes further and compares the addition of toppings (which sends costs up) to the addition of requirements which inherently adds to the SharePoint costs.

I’ve stripped the deck that I used for the IMMIX Summit down to include just the “SharePoint is a Pizza” section.  You can view it here – http://www.slideshare.net/FrancoisPienaar/sharepoint-is-a-pizza.

Different companies therefore have different flavours and it’s important to understand that SharePoint can cater for the varying flavours of customers.

What is your flavour?