SharePoint Config

A people directory can be useful if you want to list all the people in an organisation without users having to enter a search query. Users can then narrow down the list using filters such as Department or Job Title to narrow the results. This is really easy to set up using the default SharePoint 2013 search web parts and doesn’t require writing a single line of code. An example of what this can look like is shown below:

Next week I’m speaking at the SharePoint 2013 evolution conference in London. I’m co-presenting two sessions on upgrading to SharePoint 2013 with my friend Chandima and individually presenting another session on a SharePoint 2010 extranet project I worked on.

I’ve had several requests to show how to implement sorting following my previous posts on creating a simple SharePoint 2010 people directory and using a table based layout for a SharePoint 2010 people directory. This post shows how to implement custom sorting for the people directory so you can sort by first name, last name or any other managed property.

Step 1: Extend the search core results web part to support sorting

There are two search core results web parts that are capable of displaying list of people:

• Search Core Results – provides a generic way of displaying search results and supports sorting by relevance and modified date

According to a Microsoft webcast on the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) certification there are two new SharePoint 2013 development focused exams in development. These form part of the requirements for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) certification for SharePoint 2013. The full requirements for achieving MCSD in SharePoint 2013 will include two non-SharePoint specific exams; one of these is 70-480 – Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, the other has not yet been named.

Details of the entire SharePoint 2013 certification process is shown below:

As you are most likely aware, Microsoft announced the Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 preview on the 16th of July. There is already a stack of information out there but if you are getting started or want to find out more here is a summary of some of the resources I’ve found useful:

Office 2013 Launch Event and Overview

A good place to start is the webcast of the official Office 2013 launch event from Microsoft. If you prefer reading rather than watching the Engadget article Microsoft Office 2013 preview: details, screenshots and impressions gives a good overview of the Office 2013 features. Some of the big changes are that Office has been redesigned to work with touch devices and integrates heavily with the cloud including SkyDrive and… Continue reading Top 7 developer resources for SharePoint 2013 »

Earlier today, Microsoft Corporate VP PJ Hough announced the beginning of a Technical Preview program for Office 15. No specific details of features were announced but it was mentioned that:

Office 15 is the most ambitious undertaking yet for the Office Division. With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio. Quite simply, Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.  

While the Technical Preview program is already full, everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer, and we’ll have more to share about the release then. In the meantime, I

On Saturday the 12th of November I presented a session on “Developing for SharePoint Online” at the second SharePoint Saturday in the UK. The session was aimed at SharePoint developers who had no or little experience building solutions to run in SharePoint Online which is part of Office 365. I’ve included the slides at the end of this post but if you didn’t make it the key points are summarised below.

SharePoint Online Flavours

SharePoint Online is part of Office 365 which has two broad offerings; the Office 365 public cloud and Office 365 dedicated.

As the name suggests the public cloud is a shared environment so other people will be using the same servers to run their SharePoint sites. To ensure one customer doesn’t affect another customer… Continue reading Developing for SharePoint Online »

On the 12th of November I’ll be presenting a session on ‘Developing for SharePoint Online’ at SharePoint Saturday UK. The session is aimed at SharePoint developers who are interested in getting an overview of how to develop solutions in SharePoint Online which is part of Office 365. It will cover an brief overview of what SharePoint Online offers, the limitations and techniques to get around some of the biggest limitations of this environment. This is a developer focused session so it will have a technical focus but won’t be a deep dive – I’ll leave that to Steve Fox in the following session “SharePoint and the Cloud: Crash or Convergence?”.

There are 8 different tracks and heaps of great sessions so if you can make it I’d recommend it… Continue reading Speaking at SharePoint Saturday UK »

The Managed Metadata functionality provided by SharePoint 2010 allows you to centrally manage metadata and keywords. In a previous post I covered how to provision a SharePoint 2010 managed metadata field and add this to a content type and a list definition. In this post I will cover how to add these types of fields to a publishing page layout so that content authors can add metadata and keywords to webpages they create using these layouts.

If there are a large number of content pages this type of tagging can help users find information as these columns can be used… Continue reading Adding Managed Metadata Fields to SharePoint Publishing Pages »

SharePoint allows you to publish SharePoint links so that they appear in Office ‘Save As’ dialog boxes. This is useful if you want to encourage users to save Word, Excel and other Office documents directly into SharePoint rather than the file system as this dialog is shown the first time you save a new file. It allows you to create targeted shortcuts so relevant document libraries and sites are easily accessible when saving Office documents.

In SharePoint 2010 these published links are managed under the user profile service application in a page called ‘Published links to Office client applications’.