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Posts from the ‘SharePoint 2010’ Category

Jan 19

New Office 365
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Office 365′s New Edition with Microsoft Office 2013 Available January 29, 2013

REDMOND, WA

According to news sources including Neowin.net, Microsoft Office 365′s new edition will be released on January 29.

In previous articles, we have covered what new features are going to be available in the new edition in-depth from a technical standpoint, including the ability to program custom SharePoint applications using a number of common languages very familiar to developers. However these technical aspects are beyond the scope of this article, because the interests of our readers are the actual business uses for the new technologies including new functionality and its business impact.

Rumors have abounded for weeks, including speculation by highly respected Microsoft Reporter Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet and bloggers from Brazil. Originally, speculation was that the planned Microsoft launch on January 29 would be about the release of Windows 8 Phone operating system and equipment in countries like Brazil where they were not yet available. However, when speaking to our contacts in Brazil we were told that Microsoft was not in the habit of launching their new phone technologies directly in Brazil and other countries directly, but rather left these launches to their individual distributors in these countries. There was also the possibility of a launch of Surface Pro, so that was another reason to wait with the announcement of what the launch was about. We saw no benefit to announcing a launch without being certain of the content and impact for the end users. This author has been eagerly awaiting announcing this because of the new capabilities of Microsoft Office 2013 as well as new functionality in Microsoft Lync and SharePoint. However we have waited until we had more confirmation, and this came some ten hours ago.

We at the Web and I have been assured by Microsoft that all of the technologies and techniques available in the previous version of Office 365 would remain intact. Existing business processes will not be interrupted or affected. As a further safeguard for the proper and effective management of change in client organizations, the upgrade will not become mandatory until November. After the upgrade, new technologies and techniques will be available, but the Web and I can help with any re-training for changes and ensuring the continuity of existing business processes and workflows.

New technologies in SharePoint include the ability to create programs within SharePoint include both features for internal SharePoint intranet and extranet sites as well as the ability to create much more sophisticated public facing sites. That is just the tip of the iceberg, however, with Java and CSS becoming available, both branding and functional capabilities will increase. The Web and I will be helping many of our clients transition to sites that can help them create effective client portals, easing the workflow and communications between businesses and their clients. Minimal development costs will deliver tremendous ROI on this front. New business connectivity service capabilities in SharePoint will allow interfaces both inbound and outbound with SharePoint, making SharePoint the glue that binds newer and more streamlined business processes, saving a great deal of time and money on the way. Search improvements, improved Identity Management functionality, and granular security for content management will round out the most exciting new aspects of SharePoint 2013. Social computing for the workplace has also improved, but the utilization in the workplace is more applicable to larger enterprise users than to small and medium businesses. Our larger government clients such as Hunter College may be good candidates for increased use of social computing through SharePoint, but discussions on this matter have not yet commenced.

Lync has some exciting new developments which will greatly increase the functionality both for secure enterprise IM and for meetings with multiple users. A “Brady Bunch” style meeting will be possible, where all members of a meeting will be able to see all other members of a meeting tiled on their screens much as they did on the television show from the 1970′s. Unlike the show, however, they will be able to simultaneously edit the same document using Office Web Apps. Sporting a cleaner and more efficient interface with less “Chrome”, Lync will become easier to see and control as well as gaining these new functionalities. Persistent chat rooms and topics can be created, which can help smaller teams collaborate more effectively, even in disparate locations with disparate working hours. Asynchronous communication has become increasingly important in the global workforce, and Microsoft has given businesses greater potential for effective global expansion with these tools. Tabbed conversations will enable users to communicate more effectively with multiple users by allowing them to do so in one window with tabs instead of the usual many windows of the current edition of Lync. New video features including one-click start will be available, which is an excellent tool for managers to maintain a presence with their direct reports in disparate locations. Lync layouts will have many more options than they do now, and we will report on these once we get to test them. Lync mobile users will have added functionality including the possibility of video chat. No longer will employees be inaccessible anywhere, as long as they are provided with a Windows phone.

Exchange Server 2013 also holds great new possibilities for making the use of E-Mail more efficient. New built-in social features will allow users to have better control over conversations and related E-Mails, which will save users a great deal of time by not forcing them to continually search E-Mail for related items and persons. Users will be able to merge contacts from different E-Mail addresses so that they can be consolidated into a single contact, saving a great deal of time and confusion in the process. The great new streamlined look of Outlook will also save users time, so employers will benefit from less time being wasted on employee navigation of E-Mail, which is currently a serious cause of wasted time and money. Seamless integration with Lync will bring E-Mail, meetings, and Enterprise IM together in one place, saving even more employee time and effort. In addition to these time savings, we anticipate there will be a great savings in worker frustration. Often worker frustration with technology both new and existing leads to poor performance, and having a more seamless and well-designed interface and functional approach will lead to happier and more productive workers.

We at the Web and I are ready to help make this change happen for you starting in as little as ten days. Being the first Microsoft Partner in the United States to announce this detailed news helps set us ahead of the crowd. We want to help all of our clients make the best decisions, and we will discover with you on your own time what works and does not work for you. To find out more just call us today at 646-853-0573.

Oct 9

Sharepoint-2010_logo
2 Comments

Controlling Where Users Save Documents

There are several levels of lock-down security that can be implemented to ensure documents are saved to a specific location, including network drive or SharePoint library. The requirements of document storage and the amount of security determine the method which will be used for enforcing your policy.

Passive Measures

The first, simplest, and most cost-effective, especially when you have a number of workstations, is to limit where Microsoft Office documents are save, by using settings within Microsoft Office itself. Each program employees are using needs their settings individually set to your chosen location. This is especially useful for organizations wishing to have their users save to a SharePoint location, since SharePoint is optimized to be at its’ best for Microsoft Office documents, and most organizations are using Microsoft Office exclusively. This method can also be used for network drives as well.

If an organization that wants their users to save to SharePoint and does not require users to have the advanced features of the Desktop version of Microsoft Office, then they can set options within the SharePoint library to cause the documents to be opened directly within SharePoint using the Web Edition Programs of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access. That is not practical however for special archives where documents are being prepared from templates with many features and defaults, because it would change the nature of future documents as well as past documents, should they be edited post-implementation. However if you are a small business just starting out, limiting use to the Web application and not installing Office on the local machine enforces strictly that all work gets done in SharePoint. This is also helpful with older computers, which may be very slow running Microsoft Office. Running on the Web Application provides another advantage: you are just running a web browser; the actual application performance will be faster, for the Web Application is running on the Servers.

Policy Enforcement

Mapping My Desktop and My Documents Folder to

The two methods above only involve saving Office Documents, but some organizations are also saving Adobe Acrobat *.pdf and / or Image *.bmp *.jpg *.gif *.png files of substantial importance, then you may want to include additional features. Most people save documents to their “My Desktop” or “My Documents” folder. This procedure can be used to enforce saving documents through proper configuration.

The first step is to use the Registry Editor’s HKEY Current User Software Microsoft Windows Current Version, Policies, and Explorer. Simply create a new DWORD named NoDrives. The value of the DWORD needs to be in hexadecimal format. You can blank out one or more drives, and the value of the letters A-Z of one or more drives need to be converted into a hexadecimal value. Arrange the letters from Z-A (Descending Order). Put a zero under each drive letter you are not hiding and a one under the ones you are. Starting with the one furthest to the left, you have a binary number. Convert the binary number to hexadecimal and enter it into the DWORD value.  When a user opens up My Computer, they will now see all drives except the ones that have been hidden according the hexadecimal encoding.   At this point, you will have successfully hidden the drives of the local machine.

Now map your network drive to the machine if this has not been done already or map the SharePoint library as a drive. Multiple SharePoint libraries can be assigned multiple network drive locations. Target both the My Documents and My Desktop folders to folders with the same names created into the appropriate target destinations using folder and search options of these folders.

Further Security Application for SharePoint

If you have SharePoint 2010 or Office 365 with SharePoint 2010, you have additional options available to protect important documents. Specifically there is a check in and check out version control that can be implemented very quickly and easily within the settings of each SharePoint document library. When you add this level of security, each person who wants to edit a document signs it out. This prevents one person from signing it out except as read only until the other user checks it back in. It is easily apparent who has stewardship of the document in question, and if anything goes wrong, an administrator can undo the latest checkout and have the last version intact. Version control allows both major and minor versions, and you can keep all versions of a document or restrict the versioning to a particular number. Strict archives will do well to enforce major and minor versions with enforced checkout maintaining all versions without limitation by number of versions. Storage conscious small businesses may elect to keep only 5 versions of a document, to improve storage utilization. However we advise organizations to carefully check their compliance requirements, for we are very sensitive to the needs of organizations to maintain compliance to industry standards as well as, state, federal, and local government standards.

Who Have We Helped With These Issues Recently

Drossman and Associates http://jdlaw1.com

Hunter College http://www.hunter.cuny.edu

We would love to include you among those who we have helped. Call us now at 646-853-0573.

Jan 19

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SharePoint Customization and Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Office 365, the popular new cloud service which is revolutionizing business across the World, has four software products that serve to help people in business collaborate, communicate, store and share information: Exchange, Lync, SharePoint and Office. One of the most useful and important pieces of software in this suite is SharePoint, the highly customizable document storage and collaboration intranet portal.

Of all of the four products offered with Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint online might well be one of the most useful because of its usefulness in creating and sharing content. SharePoint Online comes with the base configuration, but with a bit of knowledge it can be customized to be useful for many types of businesses.

When different people are working on the same project and sharing the same files, SharePoint can help to keep track of all of the changes. SharePoint can also host databases for collaborative data. Larger companies that have enterprise systems can share the data from those programs with SharePoint where it can be analyzed.

The most common use of SharePoint is to make a corporate intranet to facilitate internal communication and sharing of common documents. The following are instructions on creating your first corporate intranet.

From SharePoint Administration, create a new site collection. Each site collection has a root template, and for this project it is best to use the Team Site Template.

Once the initial site has been created, sub-sites can be created for different purposes. Some sites can be for discussion. A site can be created as a document repository. There are no limit to the number of sites you can create, but it is best not to create unneeded complexity. Lists and libraries can also be added, along with lookup functionality that makes them act like a database application. Policies can be stored and shared using the Wiki Site Template.

Although Microsoft offers a wide variety of site templates, pages, and other structures, they are very generic. Customization should follow careful planning by your SharePoint administrators in order to build an environment that reflects the needs of your company.

Another good feature is the ability to customize a site from a template and save that as a new template. This allows you to re-use any customization that you will need again, such as project-specific sites that will likely need to be replicated frequently over time. For companies that have their own on-premises SharePoint, the customized templates can be downloaded and transferred to your on-premises instance as well.

The process of saving a customized list or site template is quite simple.

If you are saving a list as a template, go to the default page for that list, then click the Library Tab at the top of the page under Library Tools. On the right=hand side click Library Settings. In the next option group that opens, click, “Save document library as template”. Fill in a file name and description and click OK. Then when you go to create a new list, it will be available under Lists in the Templates.

Saving a site you have created as a template is very much the same. On the top of the page, go to Site Settings under Site Actions, and then you can save your site as a template.

Another great feature of SharePoint is the ability to get access to external data for use in multiple scenarios from data analysis to mail-merge applications. Using the Business Connectivity Services (BCS) application this is possible. Use of this feature enables connectivity for ERP system data into SharePoint. The data is presented through a method that SharePoint calls the “External Content Type”. Our client First United Services makes use of this. They have their Microsoft Dynamics CRM data linked up to SharePoint. The great thing about Microsoft Dynamics CRM is that it is made to work with SharePoint, and it has an easy way to set it up.

For other ERP systems, open SharePoint Designer 2010, which will give you the option to create a BCS External Content Type. With the site open in SharePoint Designer, click the Site Objects list then under that click External Content Types. This will create a basic definition in SharePoint designer. Then you can add all of the details to connect to the external system.

In addition to ERP data systems, other types of web service data sources can be used, such as geographic data systems, market data, or other public data such as the public data accessible through Amazon’s Web Services.

Another option that Microsoft offers with SharePoint Online is the option to develop and deploy custom code. Visual design changes as well as new web parts are possible. With Office 365, Microsoft gives you the options to sandbox your applications. This segregates the code you make from the rest of the server farm, protecting other Office 365 user companies from the possibility of malicious code being written.

Office 365 is customizable because one solution does not suit all types of companies or sizes of companies. The customization possibilities in SharePoint Online allow for enough customization to be useful for any kind of company of any size, enhancing communications and collaboration. Other customizations that are available in SharePoint include:

  • Adding user defined fields to the user profiles.
  • Using the Content Organizer to arrange data in different locations based on metadata.
  • Create associations between a document template and a library.
  • Building workflows to define tasks and the flow of work.
  • Defining content type policies that can delete aging files or review workflows.

With the significant capabilities and possibilities available within SharePoint Online and Office 365, it is a great time for your organization to discover the possibilities. For a free consultation, please give us a call at 646-853-0573.

Jul 7

SharePoint Server 2010 on Microsoft Office 365
2 Comments

Editing Your Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise Files Offline

Office 365 Enterprise includes the ability to keep local copies of all of your files on any desktop or laptop computer. This has proved significant for clients of mine who wish to take their work with them on their laptop. They wanted to be able to work on their Microsoft Office 365 files remotely without an internet connection, and then to have the files synchronize later. Multiple people in an organization can have files checked out simultaneously.  Synchronized files are not new. Windows 95 first introduced Windows Briefcase. You could use Windows Briefcase to synchronize to a network drive or to a removable device. People used them for file synchronization when they worked after hours or in travel on their business laptops, then later synchronized the Briefcase with the corporate serve. Limitations included the requirement to keep file names exactly the same. Not only could the system be used for documents such as Word Documents, Excel Spreadsheets, and *.pdf Acrobat files, but they could also be used to replicate Microsoft Access Databases.

Today SharePoint 2010 comes with Office 365 Enterprise and can replace your corporate network drive with sophisticated libraries and lists. Each library is like a server version of the Briefcase only with more functionality and strict security and versioning options. Just like with Windows Briefcase, SharePoint libraries can be edited offline and then synchronized later at the user’s convenience. Versioning control can be implemented optionally, allowing drafts and major and minor versions. The minor versions are draft versions. Administrators have total control over access to the documents, edit permissions, and versioning rules. These help protect the integrity of document libraries in the event of synchronization.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 is a desktop application that is included with Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise Version.  This is your Briefcase, and setting it up can be tricky. Use the Web and I to set up your SharePoint 2010 portal site and the Workspace desktop for your users. Microsoft Office 365 is a sophisticated application with many options and is best implemented by certified Microsoft Partners like us. Call us today at 646-853-0573.

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