SharePoint Config

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’.

I’ve had a couple of requests to extend the people directory I covered in a previous article on How to: Create a Simple SharePoint 2010 People Directory. One request was to show how to display the results in a table based layout. Displaying a basic table like the one shown below is really straightforward and simply involves some modifications to the XSL property of the search results web part.

Microsoft will shortly be releasing a new SharePoint 2010 exam that targets “Information Workers”. Between now and the 1st of June you have the opportunity to take the exam for free while it is in a beta testing stage. While it isn’t explicitly stated I imagine this works like most new exams and the beta period is used to evaluate the exam content but if you pass the beta exam you gain the full certification.

This exam isn’t particularly technical and is focused on power users more than developers/IT pros so is open to a wide range of people. Continue reading SharePoint 2010 Microsoft Office Specialist Beta Exam 77-886 »

I’ve had a few clients ask for a page on their intranet that allows users to browse a list of people within the organisation without having to enter a search query. They then want to see a list of filters such as Department or Job Title to allow them to filter the results. This is really easy to set up using the default SharePoint 2010 search web parts and doesn’t require writing a single line of code. An example of what this can look like is shown below (note no query is specified, we have just clicked on the ‘people directory’ link in the top nav):

On the 13th of April I presented at the European SharePoint Best Practices conference 2011. The session was titled Search Driven Knowledge Management and in the session we covered some of the SharePoint features available for structuring information so content is easy to find. As this was a community track session we looked at some real world projects that had information architecture requirements that didn’t line up with the out-of-the box SharePoint features. We looked at the requirements for these projects and I showed how solutions were built using a combination of the SharePoint features and customisations built on top of the SharePoint platform. This included using a search driven architecture and automating the tagging of content using the new content management features of SharePoint 2010.

Search scopes improve the SharePoint search experience by letting users search over a subset of information within an organisation. For example you can create a search scope for a specific project or a group such as Legal or Marketing. Search scopes can either be created at the search service application level and ‘shared’ by all site collections, or defined within a specific site collection.

Shared search scopes in SharePoint 2010 can easily be created using PowerShell commands such as New-SPEnterpriseSearchQueryScope. Corey Roth covers this in his article on Creating Enterprise Search Scopes with PowerShell. While the PowerShell method can also be used to create site collection related search scopes you might also want to do this programmatically in a feature receiver when the site collection is created. Another thing you might want to do programmatically is to associate a search scope with a display group such as the ‘Search Dropdown’ so it appears in options next to the search box. I’ll cover both these scenarios in this article.

The SharePoint 2010 object model has several classes that can be used to create search scopes and display groups. These can be useful if you want to create search scopes in a feature receiver when a site collection is created. There are several things to watch out for, however, as you can run into problems if you use the SearchContext, SearchServiceApplication and SearchServiceApplicationProxy classes. This article describes these problems so you can avoid them in your code.