Category Archives: SharePoint

SharePoint, Social Media

SPC11 Tweeting Guide: How to Use Twitter to Become Rich, Attractive and Popular

[Image via  Renegade HR]

  1. Do you currently own or have you ever owned a twitter account? If yes:
  2.  Do you use it more than once a month? If yes:
  3. Do you use it as a therapist? If yes, you might want to tone it down a bit.  No one likes a whiner! If no:
  4. Do you use it because you read/heard/saw on The Today Show/Tosh 2.0 that it offers a lot of networking opportunities? If yes:
  5. Do you think you’ve taken advantage of these networking opportunities? If yes, why are you still reading this article? Tweet my headline and get back to networking! If no: read on.

So here’s the deal, would-be networkers: SPC is a huge conference stuffed with “influencers” and “inventors” and “evangelizers” and other people of import. Unless you snag a front row seat at one of their sessions or have a honing pigeon ability that tends to kick in da club, you may not be able to meet these poobahs in real life. But you can meet, shoot the breeze, swap Qwickster jokes and photos of the grandkids, divulge industry secrets etc… with them on Twitter.

“But howwwww do I do that no one likes me sad face going to cry into my spplatypus now,” you say? Here are the steps: Continue reading SPC11 Tweeting Guide: How to Use Twitter to Become Rich, Attractive and Popular →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 8: SharePoint 2010 My Sites, or So Much Depends upon a Possessive Pronoun

 

Microsoft has this sporadic obsession with co-opting generic words. Sometimes they pick words so general they obscure their entities’ functions, and sometimes they pick words that are already incredibly common in our vernacular. The poor My Site exemplifies the latter technique, made even more inane by its possessive pronoun.  You could argue that the pronoun works as an indicator of the My Site’s purpose, but I will counter that argument with: my My Site is so much cooler than your My Site, but less cool than her My Site.

Gross.

Anyways, behind the silly name lives a pretty useful product: a space that houses your personal effects, makes searchable your abilities and interests and notifies you of colleagues’ relevant activities. My Sites have a private side made up of your newsfeed and personal documents, and a public side made up of your blog, shared documents and profile. Your newsfeed and profile are stored on the My Site Host site collection and your content is stored on your individual My Site site collection, but you access them all from the same place.

Your My Network

When you navigate to your MS, you’ll be dumped on your Newsfeed, which tracks the public SharePoint activities of any colleagues you’re following, kind of like a Facebook wall. You add/remove colleagues to follow by clicking “My Colleagues” from your Newsfeed. You edit your other Newsfeed settings (interests, email notifications, types of activities followed) within your “Edit Profile” settings.

Your My Content

All of the documents and images you upload and blog posts you write are kept here. Documents can be uploaded to a private library (“Personal Documents” or a public library “Shared Documents.” If you haven’t set up your blog yet, you can create it within My Content. You can also add other web parts to this page—I added a links web part with links to some of my colleagues’ mysites, the marketing team site and the companywide portal.

Your My Profile

If you work for a big organization, this is the My Site’s most useful component. By default, it has space for your job title, status updates, contact information, topics you’d like to be asked about, recent activities, where you fall in your team’s organization chart, and things you have in common with a given viewer (eg you and Barnum Smith are both members of the StarCraft All-Stars Club). Each field’s contents is indexed by SharePoint’s search engine, so if I need to find a colleague who knows Tagalong, I can just search “tagalong” and the relevant employee(s) will pop up.  Different people within your company will see different portions of your profile; you can see what is visible to whom by choosing from the list of options under “View My Profile as seen by.”

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 7: (SharePoint) Listomania

Definition:
An all-purpose definition of a list is: a collection of items that have a common theme. Hallelujah, it’s a definition that stands in SharePoint. The purpose of a SharePoint list is to store and display actionable information in a way such that it can be analyzed, exported, sliced and diced, shared and acted upon. By information, I mean everything from birthday announcements to bugs to project stati. You presumably have a better idea than I do of what information you need, and as long as it can be referenced in a visible way, you can make it the subject of your sharepoint list.

Creating Your SharePoint List:
Okay, have that information ready? Good, because whatever it is will dictate the the type of list you’ll be creating to house it. In my case, the information is marketing tasks for the new line of vegan ice cream my company is launching. So I’m going to great a task list, and I’m going to create it within the product’s dedicated meeting workspace. Luckily for me, Tasks is one of the pre-configured list templates for the meeting workspace, but if your list type is not pre-configured in your site type, you can just go to “Lists,” and then click “create” and either find the appropriate template or choose “custom list” and design your own. As you can see, there are lots of ready-made options, grouped into function-based categories like “Collaboration,” “Communication,” “Search” and “Web Databases.”

Viewing Your SharePoint List:
After you create a list, SharePoint will display it to you in a list view, though you can shift it to a “Datasheet View,” which looks like an Excel spreadsheet. You can also add or subtract fields from your list by clicking “create column” in the ribbon or going to List Settings and adding/deleting columns.

Sharing the Contents of Your SharePoint List:
If I want to assign tasks to my fellow project members, the task list will send them an email notification once I’ve specificed their names. Workflow functionality like approval and dependency can be added to pertinent lists. Additionally, you can export lists to Excel using SharePoint’s out-of-the-box button if you just need to view the raw data or OfficeWriter if you need one-click reports in Excel and Word.

Lists vs Libraries:
A library is a type of list devoted exlusively to the storage of files and display of file information. And it’s such an important type that it gets equal billing with its progenitor.

SharePoint

Office 365 vs Google Apps vs HyperOffice vs Zoho

Battle of the Online Collaboration Suites

[Excerpted from Nothing But SharePoint]

Last week, Alpesh Nakar published a review of Office 365 in which he asserted that “there is no competition for Office 365. Simply nothing.” Sweeping statements like that are catnip to this crochety blogger, so I decided to play devil’s advocate and say: there are a number cloud-based collaboration suites, and presumably most of them have some advantages and some disadvantages over Microsoft’s version.

For the sake of efficiency and my own sanity, I only looked at three of the most popular cloud collaboration suites: Google Apps, HyperOffice and Zoho Collaboration Apps, along with Office 365 Kiosk, SMB and Enterprise editions. I compared each in terms of desktop features, platform compatibility, browser compatibility, system requirements, administration and support offerings. My findings? Not to be all “it depends on your needs” but… it depends on your needs. And on your re$ources. If you want a one sentence recommendation: go with Office365 Enterprise if offline document editing, heavy-duty formatting (especially of PowerPoint presentations) and workflow are integral to your company’s mo, and if you’re all running on Windows.

Continue reading Office 365 vs Google Apps vs HyperOffice vs Zoho →

Events, SharePoint

Boston SharePoint Salon: A Shared Mobility

Technology-wise, ours is a nebulous world, but mobile’s increased prominence is one point of certainty. It’s not hard to imagine using our phones to unlock our apartments, start our cars, buy our groceries, record our sleep rhythms, yell at our significant other when he opens that container of Chubby Hubby… And on the business side of things, an increasingly accessible workforce translates into an increasingly accessible workspace. More and more workers have a need for a mobile replica of their brick-and-mortar office: they need to be able to do things like read and approve documents, fill out forms and assign tasks on the fly. In SharePoint, we have a potential vehicle for an empowered mobile workforce, but at this stage, both in-house and third-party offerings are underdeveloped. Continue reading Boston SharePoint Salon: A Shared Mobility →

SharePoint, Women In Tech

Stories from the WIT Trenches: Marcy Kellar

[This is the fifth in a series of posts exploring the personal stories of real women in technology. Every woman in tech overcame at the very least statistical odds to be here; this blog series aims to find out why, and what they found along the way. If you’ve gone to any SharePoint conferences in the past few years, you may have met-and had your jumpshot taken by-Marcy Kellar. A bubbly usability-focused consultant, Marcy is a passionate and supportive member of the SharePoint community at large. Check out her SharePoint blog here, and her event photography portfolio here. And if reading her story inspires you to share yours, please feel free to email me.]

Hello.  I’m Marcy Kellar. I own my own boutique consultancy that focuses on solution strategy and user experience design.  I am a consultant who goes by whichever title is appropriate at the time.  I’m a solution strategist, solution architect, user experience architect, user interface designer, creative director, branding specialist, business analyst.  Basically, I solve problems using user-centered design methods.  My primary focus is on SharePoint but I also engage in early strategy envisioning and user experience design while its platform agnostic.

1)       Can you take us back to your “eureka!” moment–a particular instance or event that got you interested in technology? Continue reading Stories from the WIT Trenches: Marcy Kellar →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 6: SharePoint Libraries or Between the Stacks

When I was eight, I got blacklisted from my elementary school’s library because I’d lost too many books (I think my check-out : return ratio was 1:9.) In those days, I really could have used a library more like SharePoint’s, where nothing checked out is lost unless I delete it. Not that inadvertent deletion is an impossibility, but I’d like to think it’s an improbabality.

Annnnyways. “Library” is one of MSFT’s better terms, in that it accurately describes the component’s functionality, which is: store content. “But a list stores content too,” you say. Yep. I didn’t say: “distinguishing, boundary-laying term.” Basically, the way I think of it is that a library holds content created outside SharePoint, like Word docs and pictures, and a list holds content created inside SharePoint, like tasks and meeting attendees. Continue reading NEUGS Part 6: SharePoint Libraries or Between the Stacks →

SharePoint

NEUGS Part 5: A SharePoint Page Is Like the Box Holding the Chocolates

 

[Image via Steve Ottenad]

In SharePoint as in life, a page is a place that stores information in a visible format. In life, you might use ultra glossy paper for your photography opus and parchment for your diplomas. The same holds true for SharePoint, minus the parchment paper, which is hopefully coming in Office 2015. Anyways, there are two primary types of pages: site pages and application pages.

The Site Page:

There are three types of site pages: the publishing page, the wiki page and the web part page.

Events, SharePoint

23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference

This past Thursday-Saturday, Alison, Nick, Ben and I repped SoftArtisans and OfficeWriter at the inaugural SharePoint Saturday The Conference. Between speaking engagements, vlogging, dance parties and running demos on OfficeWriter’s SharePoint integration, there wasn’t a whole lot of downtime, but as Sandy Ussia told me, “I’ll sleep next week.” (Plus, unless you have Freudian recall, sleeping makes for a boring blog post.) Many attendees and speakers have already published their recaps, but this one is coming to you fashionably late, in a fashionable list.

Claire:

1.       If you don’t have anything nice to say, look up. The cloud was definitely this conference’s hot topic, with everyone from Mary Jo Foley to Jeremy Thake to Joel Ward weighing in. One takeaway: Microsoft’s in-the-works Online Services Delivery Platform will bring all the hosted services into one infrastructure. Maybe it’ll be accessible through a browser-based tool bar, too. Continue reading 23 Lessons from SharePoint Saturday the Conference →