Posted by mohamedr on January 6, 2012 – 9:33 am
Part 1: The Problem
Employees periodic assessment is an important and tedious repetitive process for the HR department. As a leader in Software Development, Quercus Solutions decided to computerise its employees assessment process. I was charged with implementing a simple, affordable, and extensible solution using a non code InfoPath Form and a declarative SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow.
Process Description and Security Constraints
Quercus Employees assessment process involves four parties, the employee himself, his coach, the HR department, and the company manager. One big concern is to keep the assessment data completely private and secure.
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Posted by mohamedr on January 5, 2012 – 12:24 pm
The Association for Information and Image Management AIIM recently published the results of their survey regarding the State of the ECM Industry in 2011. I will summarize here some of the findings concerning SharePoint.
About the Survey
The survey covers 650 individual members of the AIIM community between January 28,2011, and February 14, 2011. Survey Participants represent organizations of all sizes. Larger organizations over 5,000 employees represent 35%, with mid-sized organizations of 500 to 5,000 employees at 41%. Small-to-mid sized organizations with 10 to 500 employees constitute 24%. Organizations of less than 10 employees (26) are not included in the report.
The findings concerning SharePoint are classified in three headings; Read More »
Posted by mohamedr on January 3, 2012 – 10:48 am
This series of articles are addressed to IT persons who are not necessarily exposed to SharePoint. Those interested in Information Architecture (IA) and Enterprise Content Management would possibly find the subject more beneficiary than others. SharePoint specialists may be interested in the content from a high level and global perspective.
The objective of this series of articles is to examine SharePoint capabilities and limitations in the context of Enterprise Content Management, including Web Content Management.
In Part 1 I am going to discuss the notion of IA and its implications for Content Management Systems. Also, I will discuss the concept of SharePoint Governance and its relation to IA.
For the empirical purpose of this article I am going to adopt a very simple and clear definition of IA as:
“The organization of information into coherent structures that optimize its usefulness and enable its efficient navigation and retrieval (search). This usually requires the categorization of information using hierarchical or network artefacts.”
The above definition implies that developing an IA includes the following essential undertakings: Read More »
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 andrew on October 27, 2011 – 11:56 am
We have an Intranet?
I don’t visit the Intranet very often, it’s rarely updated. I just use email.
The Intranet doesn’t make my job more productive, so why bother?
I typically can’t find what I’m looking for on our Intranet.
I don’t know how to use the Intranet.
Our Intranet is useless.
Sound familiar? If not, congratulations, you’re one of the few who may have got it right. The primary purpose of Intranets can be summed up in 5 words: “A vehicle for sharing knowledge”
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