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 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.
Read More »
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:
Read More »
SharePoint 2010 – What is Managed Metadata?
Managed metadata is collection of hierarchical terms that can be used for defining items in SharePoint. New to SharePoint 2010, Managed MetaData Services offers an incredibly powerful tool for centrally managing the overall taxonomy of your SharePoint 2010 deployment… Read More »
Systems are becoming more and more interconnected each day. Coordinating all that interconnectivity becomes a challenge, especially in terms of security. A party or client, such as a user, web service, web site, or even another device, may need to collaborate with more than one system. Using a claims-based security approach, a coordinated effort can be made to provide common security information to all systems . Here is how….
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
