Welcome to part 2 of My Site & Managing User Profile Properties.  In Part 1 we introduced User Profile Properties and how these can be automatically populated via Windows Active Directory (AD).   We also went into some detail regarding the Organization Hierarchy Web part.  You can access part 1 here if you missed it.  In today’s post our focus is around creating additional profile properties either by mapping to existing fields in Active Directory such as Company or creating a field which may not necessarily be mapped to Active Directory but is required to be entered by the user manually. ...

A couple of months ago I posted an article introducing My Site and social enterprise networking with SharePoint, and focused the discussion around tracking colleagues via the colleague tracker web part. If you missed that article, you can access it here.  I also promised that I would provide future articles discussing other My Site features so here is a two part series on My Site and Managing user profile properties with today’s discussion around populating Windows Active Directory (AD).  Some of the common question’s asked are what fields should be populated in AD and how does one populate the...

In the second and last part of this series we will be focusing our efforts in securing our SharePoint Site through setting up a publishing rule in ISA 2006.  If you recall in the first article, we began our setup by extending the default SharePoint site into the Internet Zone, created a certificate request via IIS to be sent to a 3rd Party Certificate Authority and applied the certificate to our newly created extended site.  If you missed it, you can access part 1 here. So let’s begin the second part of our setup!  The first item we need to address is the newly created certificate that has been...

Do you want to provide your information workers access to your SharePoint Site whilst out of the office easily from any internet connection without compromising security?  Do you want to accomplish this without complicated client-site VPN setups.  In this 2 part series I will be providing you with step by step instructions explaining how you can leverage Microsoft’s Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) 2006 and the out of the box SharePoint publishing rule to provide secure access for your corporate users using SSL.  YES! That’s right! Whether you like it or not, Microsoft ISA is a...

SharePoint is all about collaboration right?  As much as we enjoy sending emails, there are limitations and shortcomings around collaboration when relying on good old trusty port 25.  Don’t get me wrong, Microsoft Outlook and Exchange are great communications tools but fail miserably when it comes to sharing information and working together in achieving a common goal.  Have you ever tried to organise and plan a meeting by sending emails to attendees with multiple attachments and re-sending those when modifications are made.  As a recipient this can become quite overwhelming and at times...

Did you know you can create policies within SharePoint that will dictate how long a document will reside in a library before it’s automatically disposed of?  Did you know you can enable barcodes on documents for physical asset recording?  Did you know you can achieve all of this without writing a single piece code?  Information Management Policies within SharePoint is a key and usually under utilised SharePoint feature  that will assist any organisation with the lifecycle management of document  libraries, plus a whole lot more.  These policies can be created at the document library level and...

Wouldn’t it be great if you could deliver digital media content including Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) from your SharePoint site without buffering issues and poor viewing experience.  We must admit that SharePoint itself isn’t great in handling and storing digital media in particular large Video files and we can blame SQL for that!  Even though you can host WMV’s in document libraries just like any other file, features such as fast streaming capabilities effectively eliminating buffering time, and reducing the likelihood of playback interruptions due to network...

Ever wanted to provide clients or other external parties such as vendors, affiliates etc access to your SharePoint Sites without having to provide them with a Windows Active Directory Account?  Luckily, SharePoint provides you with the ability to setup multiple authentication providers and in today’s post I will provide you with step by step instructions on how this can be easily achieved utilising Windows 2008 Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) formerly known as Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM). Previously, the most common method of  providing Forms...

To virtualise or not to virtualise?  I thought I would provide you with some insight into my SharePoint infrastructure setup and hopefully place some minds at ease when it comes to virtualisation and SharePoint. First and foremost, all of my servers are running in a virtual environment and have been for quite some time.  Virtualisation is handled by VMware Infrastructure v3.5 across 3 beefy ESX Hosts running dual Quad Core Xeon processors with 32GB RAM each connected to a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network with 15K Disks. The ESX hosts are also housing other virtual machines outside of the...

Social Networking meets SharePoint! My Site is SharePoint’s answer to Web 2.0 social networking public sites like Facebook and LinkedIn specifically tailored for the corporate workplace. For any organisation especially those located across disparate locations it provides the ability to create synergy between those offices and users within offices. Today’s focus is on colleagues and the colleague tracker web part. Colleagues are those users that are part of your Workgroup plus those users you add manually that are not directly part of your Workgroup. Your Workgroup is automatically populated as...