In this instance, I’m referring to permissions with a specific focus on SharePoint Site Groups vs Active Directory Groups, their use, pro’s and con’s and so forth.

I had this discussion with one of my customers just the other day and decided to share some of my notes with you.

Permission

So, before we get into that, let’s look at the various elements that can have permissions assigned to them, they are Site Collection, Site, List and List Item and relate to one another as follows:

For the Site Collection piece you can simply add / remove an overall administrator and for all the other levels, you can work with the full permissions levels of Full Control, Contributor, Reader etc.

These items obviously exclude Farm related elements such as service applications, web application policies and the like, but I just wanted to keep this short post practical and specific to how a Portal will function.

SharePoint Site Groups vs Active Directory Groups

In a nutshell, SharePoint Site groups allows for the grouping of users in a group and the assignment of permissions to the group rather than individuals.  Active Directory groups are the equivalent, but specific to Active Directory.  Active Directory groups are managed by domain administrators (via Active Directory) and SharePoint Site groups are managed on SharePoint.

SharePoint Site groups can contain Active Directory groups, but not the other way around.

Okay, so when do I use which one and how?

Active Directory Groups

For large corporates with an established plan for governance, I would suggest creating Active Directory groups and adding them into SharePoint Site groups.  This allows for IT staff to manage permissions from within Active Directory without ever touching SharePoint.

This approach is recommended to be implemented in the more formal or publishing area (where permissions seldom change) of your portal as changes might need to go via formal change control.

A combination of direct assignment and SharePoint Site groups should be used for team sites and areas that change often.

SharePoint Site Groups

Smaller companies that need flexibility and quick turnaround times on changes, I would recommend a pure SharePoint Site group approach.  Large corporates will also utilise SharePoint Site groups, but purely in the their team site / divisional site areas, not for the entire portal.

Utilising only SharePoint Site groups can be hugely effective, but an extra step is required when new people join the company as the onboarding process (usually done via IT) won’t be able to assign permissions across the company (via AD) in one go.  Unless of course you use an awesome tool such as @K2onK2. 

In a nutshell

Ultimately SharePoint Site groups should always be used to manage permissions on SharePoint.  The consideration is just whether or not to assign users directly into it or via Active Directory groups.  If you have a large formal publishing area in your intranet, I suggest using AD groups within SharePoint Site groups and getting your IT department to manage the members of those groups.  For the teams / divisional site collections, I suggesting the use of SharePoint Site groups only as this gives the SharePoint administrators (that are more often than not, NOT Active Directory domain admins) the ability to manipulate permissions.

Resources

For a summary (in pictures) of what I’ve explained here, please have a look at a presentation that I uploaded to slideshare – Permissions Overview.

Veronique, from Let’s Collaborate has also done a really cool poster on end user permissions, download it here – Poster – Site Permissions for End Users (Thanks V!)

Reblogged from Views from Veronique:

We have lift off people!  The website is up and running, the call for speakers and sponsors is ready, and delegates can start registering from Monday.

Last year we did a lot for the environment.  This year it's all about people.  We're doing a blanket and warm clothes drive!  Please bring any extra stuff you may have so it can be donated to charity.  

Read more… 28 more words

There are no jobs.

There are no skills.

The government needs to do more to develop the youth.

This might hold some weight in certain sectors, but in the ICT one, specifically that of consulting I believe there are a number of forces at play that simply make it difficult for companies and prospective employees to connect.

The key challenges that we face in the SharePoint arena specifically are:

• Lack of experience
• Lack of formal training
• Exorbitant salary expectations
• Number of recruiters vs. recruits

Lack of Experience

This is obviously a double-edged sword as you cannot get experience without someone giving you and internship or a chance to start at the bottom and grow. The experience that I’m referring to is however quite specific to the SharePoint space. Let me explain – I interview many candidates with 2-3 “years” worth of SharePoint experience. Although the experience in time is accurate, the exposure is only 1/10th of the SharePoint wheel hence the “value” of the experience is diminished.

Consultants’ experience is molded by the type of organization they work for, but the onus still resides with the consultant themselves.  Rectifying this problem requires the consultants to get involved in the SharePoint community and attend events.  This exposure will allow the consultants to have more ammunition available for that next workshop.  Without this, the consultants will continue to work in the same way and never expand their knowledge.

For more information on how to get involved in the SA SharePoint community, please visit this website – http://www.informationworker.co.za/Pages/default.aspx.  Read more on the twitter hashtag – #IWSA and follow them on Twitter – @SharePointSA.  In terms of events, the easier one to get started on would be SharePoint Saturday.  For more information, check out the website – http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/johannesburg/default.aspx, http://www.sharepointsaturday.org/capetown/default.aspx and follow the hashtags – #SPSJHB, #SPSCPT.  More information exists on facebook also – http://www.facebook.com/SPSJHB, http://www.facebook.com/SPSCPT.

On a side note, I blogged this about the age of consultants a while ago – http://technicallead.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/are-sharepoint-consultants-too-young/.

Lack of Formal Training

As the years have gone by Microsoft have made SharePoint, the platform, easier and easier to use, administer, sell and customize.  Although this has opened up many doors, it has also introduced a lot of, with all due respect, “wannabees” into the consulting pool.  Candidates that have created 1 intranet, dragged on a couple of web parts and googled their way into getting a CQWP working, now call themselves consultants.  In some companies, they are able to survive, but quickly get found out if interviewed.  This ties in perfectly with what I noted above re: experience.  The business user has ZERO technical knowledge of what is possible and looks to the SharePoint “consultant” for guidance on what is possible and what is not.  Now if the “consultant” only knows 1 way of doing things, the business user will take this as gospel and so the cycle spirals on.

See the problem?

Without the “consultant” getting more exposure, they will never recommend different approaches to business and before you know it, the “consultant” has spent 2 yrs dragging web parts onto pages and are now ready to take on the world – “Or so they think.”

Entering into the SharePoint consulting arena is not difficult.  You don’t need a qualification, piece of paper or special introduction, you simply crack open SharePoint Designer and start hacking away.  I sincerely wish that this will change in the future and have seen pockets of it, but still, I’ve come across too many individuals that are at the wheel without their “learners” so to speak.  Perhaps my concept of a SharePoint drivers license is not too far fetched, read more here – http://technicallead.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/do-you-have-your-sharepoint-drivers-license/.

So, how can this be addressed?  Companies that pay for SharePoint services need to (A) do their homework and (B) educate themselves on some of the basics of the product.  On the other hand, individuals need to put in the time to educate themselves via formal training to advance their careers.  Get to know, not only SharePoint as a platform, but also look into supplementary courses to give business a more rounded consulting experience.  For example, if you specialize in the taxonomy, search and information architecture arena, look into an AIIM knowledge management qualification.  For more information, have a look at the AIIM website – http://www.aiim.org/.

The challenge with the above mentioned ideological view is that there are still too many people who ”get by” knowing very little.

Exorbitant Salary Expectations

Taking all the above mentioned points into consideration, its easy to deduce that an individual could build up quite a profile in ONE particular organization.  During the course of employment at said organization, the individual could be seen as the “go to consultant” and demand radical increases.  This is all fair and dandy, but the challenge only comes in when this person wants to move on.  Sadly, they might find themselves grossly overpaid and unable to find a spot at one of the top partners in the country.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for getting your piece of the pie, but when the industry is flooded with consultants commanding salaries above their pay grade, you start having a situation where their CVs are available, but you can’t employ them.

I guess solving this is slightly trickier than some of the previous points.  Employees will always squeeze the most out of their employers, and they should, so basically, “Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.”  In this case, the onus rides on the employer to pay fair value all the while staying relevant and attracting talent throughout.

I won’t elaborate further on this point in this post, but in my practical experience of hiring SharePoint consultants and developers in the past couple of years, I find that the industry is flooded with low end consultants or super highly paid consultants.  A middle tier of skilled, well paid consultants seems to be absent, which is sad.

Numbers of Recruiters vs. Recruits

I love and hate recruiters.  A necessary evil in the game, but a game that is constantly changing.  PNET, Career Junction, LinkedIn are all eating into the market share of traditional recruits, but hey, “it’s all business baby!”

So, what is my point here?  Well, I don’t know the recruitment industry that well, but as an employer that engages with a couple of select recruiters, I get the feeling that the barrier to entry for recruiters to start-up is not tough enough.  As more and more recruiters start-up to make a couple of Randelas, so the amount of duplication that hits my desk starts to pile up.  I will literally get the same CV from 3 different recruiters in one day.  Now again, who do you blame?  Surely you can’t blame the recruiters for (A) wanting to start a business and (B) trying to do business.  You can’t blame the recruit for (A) wanted to find employment and (B) spamming his CV to 10 recruiters, so what is the problem here?

The challenge that exists and will continue to get worse is that as the amount of recruiters grow, the amount of CVs in the market don’t.  What then happens when you run out of CVs?  Well, you start placing the candidates that you have already placed, just somewhere else.  In this process, the candidate gets a slight increase and so the cycle continues.

In Summary – More Education = Better Industry

Consultants in our industry need more formal training.  Before this can become compulsory, the other cogs in the wheel need to start demanding it.  Without companies and partners demanding better, employees will continue to get by with “just enough” knowledge.  Companies need to complete introductory courses on SharePoint before embarking on projects, research the firms that are pitching for their work and follow-up on references before commencing work.  With these couple of items in place, there will be less and less space for inadequate consultants to hide and the industry could stand a chance to correct itself.

The conference was held over 3 days (11, 12 and 13 of March) and I was fortunate to have multiple perspectives (speaker, sponsor and delegate).  In this brief wrap up I’ll discuss my experiences of each, but for a blow by blow, please review the hash tag on twitter – #share4biz.

A Speaker @Share

I spoke at the conference with one of my customers, Nedbank BIS.  They were represented by Nadene Brokensha.  We shared our journey of first choosing SharePoint and later delivering real value via the aggregation of CRM data into an interactive livepivot type report that lives in SharePoint  (leveraging MS Pivot Viewer control.)

The communication in the run up to the event was constant and I always felt sure of where I needed to be / do.  The speakers briefing evening (including drinks) was a total jol and the eventful team gave us great gifts from a community that they support.  <—Loved this!

On the day, the event ran 100% on time and the support in the session for the speakers were great.  Eventful also created a “Speakers Corner” which afforded delegates the opportunity to speak to the speakers afterward, thus ensuring people can interact and keep everything on time <—Great idea!

All in all I would love to continue my involvement with Share as a speaker.  Interacting with the internationals, holding my own for SA and sharing knowledge is simply a great trifecta.

Note:  I will discuss our deck and share it in another post.

A Sponsor @Share

I represented Mint Management Technologies (@Mint_Consulting).  The overall arrangements with the team was also a great pleasure and setting up and taking down the stand was a breeze.  A good balance was struck in and around value for money when you look at the cost of sponsorship, people to man it, collateral and possible leads and exposure that the company gets from such an event.

The aircon did go belly up on day 2, but that is a venue issue, not an eventful challenge.  The wifi was average, but hey now I’m nitpicking.

Share is unique in the type of audience that is targeted.  Instead of the regular IT Techies, actual business users attended this conference and the conversations that my team at the booth were having were more about “How do I extract value from the product investment?” vs. “How do I configure Search?”.

What I loved about the Share team is there directness in terms of discussing the sponsors and urging delegates to visit the stands.  Steve Morris, in the opening speech, piped up and mentioned – “Please visit our sponsors booths, without them this event will not be possible.”  Nice and to the point – Thanks Steve!

Mint will continue its support for community type SharePoint events and look forward to Share 2014!

A Delegate @Share

The price of the conference meant that serious users would attend and boy were they in for a treat.  The quality of content, food, venue, accessibility to speakers and celebrity of guest speakers made this a very special few days.

Yammer hosted a magnificent party that will be talked about for years to come.  The venue was a delight and the African sky played along to make it a special evening.

The opening keynote about governance was a fantastic talk and the closing keynote by Paddy Upton had me on the edge of my seat.  A highlight of the Paddy talk was a straight faced question from Bradley Geldenhuys (@GT_Consult) telling him that the secret to the ODI’s side success is simply to beat New Zealand.  We had a good chuckle about that one.

As a delegate I will remember the event for its great content, fantastic celebrity keynote, amazing food and constant access to speakers.

What more can one ask for?

Summary

Loved the conference in every which way.  The arrangements for speakers were world class, the parties for delegates were out of this world and the content, food and facilities for delegates made everyone feel comfortable and allowed people to be productive.

For a closer look at things have a look at these interesting links related to the conference:

http://shareconference.com/za/overview (Official Overview of the Conference).

http://shareconference.com/za/photos (Pictures from the event organisers).  Note:  Not as cool as Veronique’s pictures.  Perhaps she will comment and leave a link to her pictures which are EPIC!

https://twitter.com/search?q=share4biz&src=typd (Hash tag of conference for blow by blow on this and more Share conferences).

As always Microsoft have pushed the boundaries of productivity even further with their latest offering – Office 2013.  (Excuse the cloud guys, this is an on premise post :p)  I’ve been using Office 2013 with Windows 8 for just over a month now.  The experience is really been a pleasure.  They give you the “inline editing” feel of Office Web Apps yet, it’s a thick client application on your desktop.

My passion is of course SharePoint and I have to admit, they have worked wonders with the Office & SharePoint integration.  Remember
what a drag it is to save & share documents in Office 2010?  Ever had the explorer just hang, have to login 20 different time, all of this just to save a doc?

Well, I’m happy to report that although the interface is largely similar, there have for sure been some work put in under the hood as the saving, opening and general interaction with documents in Office living in SharePoint just works.  Yes, I said it, it just works.

*gulp, I just realised that is a pretty bold statement to put out in the blogosphere, but anyway, this has been my experience.

Other bits and pieces in the mail client specifically has been the inline replying, deleting and flagging (not new, but slicker) coupled with
smart bits and bobs like letting you know when you are on 3G just to save you some bucks.  Yes, we’ve all been overseas and dumped our mail via tethering (it hurts).

The efficiencies in the collaboration space really excites me and specifically the “basics” that Microsoft seem to have focused on.  I love features and functions, but during the years of implementing office productivity software it’s in most cases some of the most basic elements that have let customers down (e.g. document stays checked our forever).

It  seems like they have really reached a point where the features are enough and they are simply bedding down the basics.

Considering other advances like SkyDrive Pro, the tablet ecosystem and better Windows phones, I think Office productivity is in for a big year!

Viva Microsoft!

Sign Up Here for your backstage pass. Follow CRM Rock Star to stay informed.

I guess this is how some customers feel when they hear that SharePoint 2013 is available while staring down an unused SharePoint 2010 license.  Well, never fear, SharePoint 2013 should make it even easier to convince business stakeholders to invest in the deployment of this wonderful product.  How do I know this?  Well, I witnessed it first hand in Las Vegas and what a jol it was!

Arriving in Vegas I was immediately awestruck by the shear size of everything.  I’ve seen a million movies shot in Vegas, but never quite understood the magnitude of things until you see them up close.  I arrived on the Sunday morning and this meant that Philippe (@SharePointBru) and I had an entire day to walk down the strip, ride roller coasters and indulge in a cocktail (yes, just one, but it was ENORMOUS).

After recovering from “ONE” cocktail the conference kicked off with a brilliant keynote address.  As always Microsoft pulled out all the stops and I really enjoyed how demo heavy the keynote was.  Everything was “Office 365” and it was clear from the get go that “ONLINE” was going to be the biggest focus of this conference.

So many sessions, so little time

I’m happy to report that for the better part the sessions were grouped well, had good presenters and great content.  With SharePoint 2013 being new (for those not on TAP) it was a bit of an information overload, but I went with specific goals – Find out what has changed, what is new and how to get going immediately.

I had a couple of great sessions but two that stand out had to be the one on building Knowledge Management Portals and another one on Integrating Metadata from desperate systems into SharePoint.  The metadata one was great simply for the fact that the developer (Pete Gonzalez) presenting it was a total NINJA, but kept it light.  Yes he introduced me to the “demo dance” and I will be using this in all my presentations going forward.

The other session – “How to Build great Knowledge Management Portals” by Lincoln DeMaris, made the entire conference worth while.  It went into great detail, including demo’s on how to create portals using managed metadata’s new “pinning” feature, setting up FURLs (Friendly URLs) and playing with the CSWP (Content Search Web Part).  All of this, obviously, made possible with SharePoint’s updated search (which now includes FAST), but does require the eCAL for most of it.

Other fantastic revelations around licensing included:

• SharePoint FIS falls away and websites can now be hosted by simply licensing the SharePoint Server
• Extranet’s are free for users that are completely outside of your organisation
• FAST Search is completely integrated into SharePoint’s search

Final Impressions

Overall I think the conference was a major success.  The 10,000 delegates were always fed, had Wi-Fi (eventually) and had plenty of opportunity to win prizes, listen to great speakers and mingle with the who’s who of the SharePoint community.  I’m not 100% sure if I’ll be at every SharePoint conference going forward, but attending one where the version is refreshed is a must!

*Yes, there will be a SharePint in there somewhere also.

What do you want to get out of the conference? A question I posted to twitter and linkedin earlier which made me think, what do I want to get out of it? From my perspective, here are my objectives:

Get up to speed with everything SharePoint 2013

Network with #ZACREW and the rest of the SharePoint community

Investigate what’s hot in the ISV & APPS space

Spread the gospel of Mint (and the future of our mobile business specifically)

It’s my first international conference, but feel super excited to reconnect with the international guys that generally join me on the SharePoint Saturday speaking circuit.  Laughs will be a plenty and the Share* jokes & puns will continue to all hours in the morning, but one thing is certain – SharePoint marches on to yet another great upgrade!

The Problem

There were a variety of symptoms that I won’t list in detail here but basically I couldn’t get into my user profile service application in central admin. ‘An unexpected error occurred’ it told me.

The ULS logs were full of the typical generic user profile service errors (e.g. ‘No User Profile Application available to service the request’) and the event viewer was complaining so fast I couldn’t keep up.

The main errors being reported in the event log were:

The service ‘/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc’ cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation. (event ID 3)

and

An exception occurred when trying to issue security token: The requested service, ‘http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc/actas&#8217; could not be activated. (event id 8306)

So it seemed to be a problem with the Security Token Service. Navigating to the URL listed in the error message above (http://localhost:32843/SecurityTokenServiceApplication/securitytoken.svc) showed me an error page.

The Solution

Like any SharePoint administrator worth his salt, I immediately hit Google.

Many opened tabs later I stumbled across this post, which offered a solution that worked: re-provision all the SharePoint Web Services. The author says that this is, “one of the safest ways” to get the Security Token Service working.

Near the bottom of the post is a list of commands to enter into SharePoint PowerShell, which I did:

$h = Get-SPServiceHostconfig

$h.Provision()

$services = Get-SPServiceApplication

foreach ($service in $services) { $service.provision();
write-host $service.name}

Once the commands were run I did an IISRESET then tried to access my user profile service application. Success!

Thanks Syed and Abhishek

One of the biggest challenges in SharePoint the world over is change management.  The simple fact, which continuous to baffle minds, is that amazing solutions are churned out from provider to provider, but many users that are surveyed simply don’t use them.

User Adoption – Still a Challenge

Why is this?  Well, if I knew, I think I’d be one of the richest persons on the planet as this problem is not limited to Microsoft products or SharePoint, but all IT systems the world over.  I bet my good friend Veronique from Let’s Collaborate would love to know the silver bullet answer to fix user adoption, but she too will confess that there isn’t one standard answer.

Growing Adoption – Interesting Scenario

So I was driving in my car the other day and saw a guy in front of me throwing rubbish out the window.  Another person also dumped some litter on the side of the road.  As I looked at it, I immediately thought about how difficult it is to keep our streets clean if people don’t use rubbish bins or city dumping grounds.  (Read:  centralized repository)

I immediately thought about SharePoint (yes, I’m a nerd).  How does this relate?  Well here goes.

Consider this – Let’s say a document is a piece of rubbish and people just put documents all over the place.  How difficult is it to have a consistent user journey or build a file plan that makes any sense?  Now I know that SharePoint has some funky tools to bring content together, but imagine you don’t even upload your documents and just leave it in your email, desktop and “I” drive.  Now that would be a mission to consolidate right?

So, how do we move forward?  Well it’s “simple”.  hehe, not really, but ja, sometimes small things make a big difference.  Start with uploading your documents into SharePoint and simply distribute links and not the actual documents.  If you have all your documents loaded into SharePoint (albeit in various sites) it will be MUCH easier for your Knowledge Manager to consolidate the information and present it back in a file plan / user journey type scenario that makes any sense.

Don’t Litter – Save Documents in SharePoint!

So in closing, next time you think of saving your document as an email attachment, or dumping it on your desktop, consider what you are doing to your SharePoint “environment”.