Posted by richardb on December 6, 2011 – 7:34 pm
We use SharePoint 2010 and the MySites functionality for blogging, so to become aware of an Intranet blog post you need to check your MySite to see any updates. It would be great if we had something on our Intranet homepage that shows us latest blog posts instead.
After some digging around we were left with the alternative of purchasing a 3rd party web part or launching VS 2010 and creating our own. Neither option was very appealing, so we came up with an alternative out of the box solution, with a little configuration thrown in.
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Posted by richardb on December 1, 2011 – 6:59 pm
If you have ever setup Incoming email on a document library you will have noticed how the emails will arrive into the document library in .EML format. When you click on the .EML file it will either open up in your browser, or prompt you to Save it to your hard drive. The browser will show you the main body of the email, but will be missing all the good stuff like TO,CC, BCC Subject, attachments etc.
I’m going to walk you through the steps of setting up SharePoint and IIS to allow you to open these files in Outlook instead. This allows you to see the original email in all it’s glory.
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Posted by richardb on November 30, 2011 – 9:00 pm
Filed under .NET, SharePoint
Microsoft has very good guidelines for how to build applications that can update large SharePoint lists without causing your server to grind to a halt.
The main piece of advice: don’t use the SPListItem.Update method in a foreach loop. They have a very good article here that describes how to build such an application.
The general gist of the approach is to build a MethodFormat of the following syntax:
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Posted by richardb on November 30, 2011 – 8:39 am
Microsoft has just released the first update to SharePoint Online and they have added a couple of features that really strengthens the “cloud” proposition to anyone trying to decide whether to keep their SharePoint farm local or go online.
Business Connectivity Services
BCS in SharePoint Online allows us to finally connect internal line of business systems to our SharePoint Online portal. It’s now possible to start generating meaningful dashboards, KPIs and even CRUD (Create, Read, Update Delete) applications in SharePoint Online that can connect to your internal systems. Read More »
Posted by richardb on July 29, 2011 – 1:16 pm
Filed under .NET, SharePoint
We had an interesting request on a recent project. Our UX designer Emily had come up with a very nice, simple design for the clients new SharePoint site. The design goal was to reduce the complexity of the UI for high level execs who had a specific need for the site. Emily’s design hit this on the head. For the exec assistants however, they needed to see original SharePoint in all it’s glory for the same site.
So we needed away of showing a branded site to some users, and a non branded version to other users.
The solution we adopted was pretty simple in the end: We will create a SharePoint group, called CustomBrand say. Any user in that group will get the branded site, any user not in the group will not.
To implement the brand switching we will do the following:
- Create a HTTPModule which will intercept every request going to the SharePoint site
- For each request, check if the user making the request is in the CustomBrand group
- If they are, apply the custombrand by setting a custom masterpage, otherwise do nothing
