SharePoint, My Site and Tracking Colleagues
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...
Read MorePeople Picker, SharePoint and Forest Trusts
Everything in my SharePoint Farm was working well until ….. I decided to install the recent February 2009 Uber packages from Microsoft, don’t ask me why but I have a habit of trying to keep up to date, even though Microsoft explicitly states when you download the hefty packages that you should only install them if you are experiencing one of the issues listed in the KB article and should wait till the next service pack. Have you ever sat down and read one of these Cumulative Update KB’s, they go on for pages and how am I suppose to know if I am actually a recipient of one of the...
Read MoreSharePoint Workflows and InfoPath Form Services
One of the biggest selling points of SharePoint is the ability to extend and automate day to day business processes. This is usually one of my key points of emphasis when demonstrating SharePoint’s capabilities to key stakeholders of the business. What I am specifically referring to here is the ability to take an everyday business process, analysing the steps, people and processes involved and automating that through electronic workflows. Workflows within SharePoint automate otherwise manual and usually repetitive business processes, providing you with the ability to add some smarts to...
Read MoreWindows 7 is coming to a store near you …
Well, it sounds like a life time ago that I first started investigating the next and greatest thing since sliced bread, yes Windows Vista. After a 5 year gap between operating system versions, there was a lot of hype around Windows Vista and how much better it is than Windows XP. Many argue against that and have not yet gone down the route of implementing Windows Vista into their networks or on their home PC’s. XP has better start up times, ummm, yes if you are running XP on today’s hardware, but how about we run XP on a Pentium 4 with 256 RAM and compare that against...
Read MoreData View Web Part
I have been doing a lot of work lately with SharePoint 2007 and came across 2 scenarios where I needed to utilise the Data View Web Part (DVWP) available from within SharePoint Designer (SPD). I honestly think that this is one of the many under utilised tools from within SharePoint. Scenario 1 The request was to be able to display a subset of an existing SharePoint list from one sub site and display it on another sub site. Scenario 2 The request was to be able to have items within a list highlighted (different colour for instance) based on a condition, a.k.a conditional formatting. In both...
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