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Archive for the ‘SharePoint Ideas’ Category

SharePoint 2010 gets into the Groove

Date:May 17th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

With all the furore surrounding the business release of SharePoint 2010 it would have been easy to miss the launch (or relaunch) of another little Microsoft product in the SharePoint space which quite neatly addresses some of my personal SharePoint bug bears.

Wonderful though SharePoint is there are always a few things we wish it would do better. Personally I have always been a little frustrated by the limitations on sharing with people outside of your own organization, the difficulties around working off-line and with the difficulties of moving documents from your PC and other applications, into, and out of SharePoint.

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SharePoint 2010 gets into the Groove

Date:May 17th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:2 ;

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SharePoint Site Templates: KISS guide to creating, saving and using

Date:April 27th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, Training
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas, Training Comments:2 ;

A site is the key place within SharePoint to bring together all the people, content and activities associated with a particular process, project or group. And if the process or project is regularly repeated within your organization having a site template for it saves a lot of time and helps to ensure consistency and facilitate continuous improvement.

There are any number of scenarios where you might use a SharePoint site template, for this example we are using a recruitment process, but you could equally well set one up for any regularly repeated process or project you manage: training courses, audits, conferences and sales exhibitions, product testing, office moves, procurement, risk assessment, staff appraisals – the list goes on.

SharePoint comes with some Out of the Box Templates, there are other available on-line, free or to purchase. But all of these are “off the peg” options: great if you are short on time, but they’re not going to be a perfect fit for your business processes.

To get a SharePoint template that fits your processes perfectly you are going to have to make your own – and thankfully it’s exceptionally easy to do – so here’s how.

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Use SharePoint Filtered Views to Stop Sending Alerts to Yourself

Date:April 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Filter, filters, SharePoint, SharePoint alerts, Tip
Category: Filter, General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

How annoying is it when you have just created or amended an item in SharePoint, and you immediately get an Alert email about it?

You know the kind of situation: you might be working in a team list, you have the list set up to alert you when an item assigned to you is added or amended, so as soon as you add or amend an item yourself an alert email pings through to your inbox. Completely unnecessary inbox clutter.

So, lets switch off those annoying “alerts to myself” – has to be an easy one click operation, right?

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SharePoint 2010: What’s Hot and What’s Not – #3 Social Networking

Date:March 22nd, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:2 ;

This is the final part in our occasional series on what’s hot and what’s not for the end user in SP 2010.

A couple of weeks ago we focused on our favorite new feature for end users: FAST Search, which we think is going to make a huge impact on how people store and search for content in SharePoint 2010. Last week we took at pop at Business Connectivity Services – which we feel could cause more problems than it solves.

Today we are throwing stones at SharePoint 2010 Social Networking – which gets our vote for joint top turkey in terms of new features that have been heavily hyped, but in our opinion are not likely to deliver much real value for the end user.

The thing with SharePoint 2010 Social Networking is that we just don’t understand why its there. This is enterprise software – it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to help you get the job done. Have Microsoft added these features just because “social” is so darned sexy at the moment?

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SharePoint 2010 What’s Hot and What’s Not? #2 NOT!

Date:March 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:3 ;

So here we are with the second installment in our occasional series on SharePoint 2010 features for the end user.

In part 1 we looked at the new features in SharePoint 2010 that we thought would be most welcomed by end users. Our vote went to FAST Search, because it’s going to make search within SharePoint much more like search in Google – which has to be a good thing.

This provoked a lot of debate and whilst some of you agreed with us, others had different candidates for the top spot.

A lot of people liked the improved UI and the introduction of the Office Ribbon, others loved the new Metadata features, tagging and voting, and others thought Records Management was going to be a winner.

But enough of all this positivity: (we are British after all: skepticism is our default setting!) this week we are looking at our pick for the #1 “turkey” feature SharePoint 2010, the feature that has been really hyped but that we believe could easily sink without a trace.

And our vote goes to . . . . well, we have a tie for top spot actually:

Business Connectivity Services
Social Networking

So, today we are going to talk about Business Connectivity Services, and on Monday we’ll come back to Social Networking- we wouldn’t want to bore you by gong on for hours!

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SharePoint 2010: What’s Hot and What’s Not for End Users — #1: Hot

Date:March 4th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:1 ;

Along with many others in our part of the technology industry, we’ve spent the past few months with our heads firmly buried in SharePoint 2010, getting our products compatible, and along the way getting really familiar with the wealth of new features on offer.

So as we’re now at the “been there, done that” stage with SP 2010 we thought it might be useful to share our thoughts on what the killer features are, and where to watch out for the white elephants!

This week — killer features.

There’s a lot to get the developers excited: Just do a quick Google search and you’ll come across bags of blog posts on all the great new developer features. But here we want to take a slightly different tack and focus on the features that we think will make the most difference to the end user.

Our vote goes to FAST search.

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SharePoint Alerts not working?

Date:December 2nd, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, SharePoint alerts, Tip
Category: General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:1 ;

This is one of the most common questions posed in SharePoint forums.

SharePoint built in Alerts are one of the best used features of the system – but also one of the most problematic. There are just so many different ways they can go wrong! And when they do go wrong the internet advice available on how to put them right is very fragmented and often confusing. All manner of suggestions come up – many of then not appropriate to the particular problem the user is having.

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How To Use Filters in SharePoint to show items in the current Calendar Month

Date:November 26th, 2009 Author:Ryan Tags: Calculated Columns, Filter, Tip, View
Category: Calculated Columns, Filter, SharePoint Ideas Comments:209 ;

Its very easy using the Filter feature of SharePoint views to show only items completed in the last 30 days or items due in the next X days; for example :-

Completed >= [Today]-30

On the Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques post Ed asked how you could filter for the current calendar month rather than a rolling 30 day period (for example all tasks due this calendar month).

Like all great questions it seemed simple enough – something like only showing items where the Month and Year of the due date = the Month and Year of the current date.

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SharePoint: Barriers to End User Adoption – and How to Overcome Them

Date:October 22nd, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

Download our Free White Paper

It’s a relatively simple task to deploy an application like SharePoint within your organisation: the challenge comes in getting people to use it in a way that is consistent and productive.

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