SharePoint4RealFolks

I have spent alot of time dealing with Sharepoint. It all started almost a decade ago when they released the very first version of SharePoint which I implemented at an airline. I was hooked. The evolution of the product had spurred many innovative and business centric solutions. However, I have always been a fan of making things look the way a client or my current employer wants. Branding! There are literally tons of sites at this point that go over the intreacies of SharePoint branding. The cover everything from deploying custom masterpages and templates to designer modifications. All of them are useful. This series of articles will cover branding SharePoint Intranets initially. So many times a client wants their Intranet to be an extension of the company brand. This usually makes SharePoint developers cringe. Changing even small components to a masterpage design can have a trickle down impact that isn't seen for weeks or even months down the road. However, a corporate Intra

Ok, if you have not seen the first entry of this series I recommend you start here . If you have already read part 1 lets get right down into the dirty details. We left of discussing the main time maintenance screen. This screen allows you to add,edit, and delete time entries based on the active week list. Please be aware that you can simply make every week active and it will show all the data throughout time entry. Another quick point. The system will allow you to enter time for somebody else. This was by design in case employees were out and tme had to be entered for vacation, training, or some other reason (a dreadful super glue accident involving a toilett seat for instance). To be safe the main view that lists time will display any entry where you are the designated employee in the Employee list, Created By, or Modified By person. This, of course, is all based on the current logged in user. This will allow you to see all the time you have entered. This will also ensure that

As a Manager, Director or Project Manager it is vital to track spending to give upper level execs a true ROI for work. This helps justify expenditures presently and forecast more accurate needs both in resources and material in the future. The only true way to gather this type of data is to measure time spent on projects and work. The caveat is, of course, that the data being entered is accurate. A time tracking tool will allow you to track and cost analyze current work loads and based on that predict future needs. Think Agile methodology and estimation and you get the idea. Developers are expensive and building solutions is even more expensive. I wanted a solution that was easy (read : cheap) to maintain and required little or no downtime in enhancement deployment. Essentially I didn't want to go through code deployment and feature stapling and so many other things that I wouldn't dare list them all here. As a developer I see this as a two-sided coin. I have much more co

"To the cloud..." Well that was the plan. I have been using the Office 365 for some time but went full force with it today. Like I usually do I just started clicking install everything...next...next...next. Well the end result was nice. I have a new domain, email, Sharepoint team site (which is public). I was able to hook it all up to my SP Workspace 2010, iPhone (email and moshare app). That's when Lync bit me. Don't get me wrong, I love Lync...I just don't love how it is not backward compatible. At all, with Communicator. Well after doing some digging I ran across this link . This was a start. So after some work here is what I had to do to get it to work for me. First, my story: I had Office Communciator 2007 R2 installed. I was running Windows 7 x64 with a ton of stuff on it. I installed the Office 365 Beta and then Lync 2010. Lync2010 Worked great with Office 365. But alas when I attempted to enter settings for the work IM on 2007 R2 it was a n

I have decided to rev up my blog again. After spending a few years in management in both the airline and healthcare industry it is time to do something new. I have decided to contract as a Sharepoint developer, administrator and implementation specialist. I figure since I have been building with this tool since it first came out I should start leveraging all that knowledge that I keep inside. I am not sure how often I will write up information or what my topics will be. Generally I see this as something that can drive me to write: Feature Articles on making SharePoint do something for business. This can range from workflows OOB or in Studio using C#. It may also include CM, Document Management, or other solutions. Development - This can be anything from feature stapled enhancements to custom web parts. As I find something useful or learn something new I will share it with the world. I may even go over some of my older solutions as well. Administration / Configuration - Just setti

Anyone who has implemented Search knows all about the fun of setting up your Document Library content types as searchable meta-data. That step alone can be mind numbing, and once you have it done it always seems like one or two columns never show up for the mapping to be made until a few days later. No matter how many times you run full and incremental scans. It's like it has a mind of it own. And then begins the fun of customizing the search page to make the information easily searchable. The default methods leave alot to be desired in the way of user-friendly. So....we did something a bit different. Background: We have a group that scans information into scanners on a daily basis. This information is stored in PDF format and sent to a specific document library in Sharepoint. Once the information has been placed into the library a workflow item kicks off informing the group that they need to fill out the fields (meta-data) for the document and move it to the completed folder. Issu