IncWorx Consulting

The Kansas City Chiefs are one of the premier teams in the NFL, based in Kansas City Missouri that have a multitude of business operational groups within their organization.  The Chiefs move fast both on the field and off, and when it comes to matching up technology with their business, they need high powered solutions.  The Chiefs implemented SharePoint 2010 to replace their old intranet to increase the ability to collaborate and share information across the organization and ultimately to make the business more efficient.

Two big issues that the Chiefs identified with SharePoint 2010 were that the design left them wanting more and user interface was not as intuitive as they hoped.  There were concerns that as a fast paced business, the efficiency and productivity of the end users would suffer and there would be poor adoption.  In order to address the issues, some of the internal IT staff began devising a plan to build a custom design and develop tools to enhance the user experience.  They quickly found that the efforts would take a great deal of time and resources, in addition to everything else that they had to get done on a daily basis.

After viewing a demonstration of BrandIt, the IT staff for the Chiefs quickly concluded that BrandIt met a lot of requirements they had developed for a more intuitive design, and had additional value adds that would drastically improve the usability of SharePoint 2010 that would ultimately help everyone in the organization be more efficient.  The time required to implement the solution went from 2-4 months if they built it custom, to less than 2 hours, which was the time it took to get BrandIt up and running. The Chiefs technical staff can now focus their efforts elsewhere since the huge hurdle that they were facing was tackled by BrandIt!

For more information about BrandIt, contact paul.haynes (at) incworx.com or call 847-839-9679 X204

If you have been looking for an auto complete web part for SharePoint 2010 that requires zero coding, the auto complete web part that is part of IncWorx's BrandIt solution might be just the thing!  BrandIt has been in production for 2 months, after 6 months of beta, and the development team is heads down rolling out new web parts to accompany the solution.  This web part  is one that I have been excited about for a while.  As you can see below, the screen shot shows that I have started typing a name and have the letters "M" and "A" in the box and it has begun to show me all queries that match the search and narrow as I type more letters.

This web part was built using jQuery, so the content will populate automatically without the whole screen having to refresh which is very common in SharePoint.  In this particular example we've shown a very basic functional.  I can instantly find the contact, click their name, and an oulook email message pops up. 

The beauty of this web part is that it is highly configurable and can deliver some very advanced functionality.  It literally allows you to point to any list/library within SharePoint and create an auto complete search box for it.  In regard to some of the additional functionality beyond that, the possibilities are endless.  I could do a search for Matt Breski, and take a look at where his clients are across the United States.  All the user would need to do would be to click his name, and then on the back end, our web part would look for all of the clients in our system that are assigned to Matt, look at what their city and state are, plug the data in to Google Maps or Bing Maps, and it would open a new window with a map of the U.S. showing a pin for all of his client location across the country. 

If you are interested in leveraging this functionality and would like to learn more about our BrandIt offering, of which the web part belongs, feel free to click the header of this blog and schedule a demo! 

When you are programming new features for SharePoint, you want to be mindful of the “deactivation" process. During this deactivation process, we should remove unnecessary items. However, when removing those items, you may run into some issues.

Let’s look at the code sample below:

//goes through the lists, finds the event receiver, and then removes the event receiver.

            foreach (SPList list in ((SPWeb)properties.Feature.Parent).Lists)

            {

                for (int i = list.EventReceivers.Count; i > 0; i--)

                {

                    SPEventReceiverDefinition def = list.EventReceivers[i - 1];

 

                    if (def.Class == "E_Receiver.EventReceiver.EventReceiver")

                    {

                        def.Delete();

                        list.Update();

                    }

                }

            }

In this example we are looping through a list collection, looking for an event receiver and deleting it. However, when you run this code you will end up getting an error. The error you will receive is “Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute.”

Before we take a look a correcting this issue, lets discuss what is causing the error.

We are going through a list collection and deleting any instance of our event receiver, in the “Foreach loop”. But once we delete an item we are modifying the current list collection. The “Foreach” loop looks to see what the current value is, before it moves on to the next item. But since we deleted the current item, we get the “Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute” error.

Now that understand what is going on, we can now look at a solution to correct the error.

The simplest way to avoid modifying the collection would be with a “For Loop”.  With a “For Loop”, no modifications are made that will interrupt the looping process.

//goes through the lists, finds the event receiver, then removes the event receiver.

     for(int i = lists.Count - 1; i > 0; i--)

            {              

               SPList list = lists[i];

               for (int i2 = list.EventReceivers.Count; i2 > 0; i2--)

                {

                    SPEventReceiverDefinition def = list.EventReceivers[i2 - 1];

 

                    if (def.Class == "E_Receiver.EventReceiver.EventReceiver ")

                    {                       

                        def.Delete();

                        list.Update();

                    }

                }

            }

 

If you are looking for custom SharePoint development or SharePoint Support, please contact me at jason.billman(at)incworx.com.

One of the most important parts of any SharePoint implementation is giving the users of the site the Look and Feel they are accustomed to.  SharePoint 2010 offers a much improved experience in terms of using PowerPoint themes; however it is still limited in terms of giving users the branding experience they look for.

For those looking for more control over the Look and Feel of their SharePoint sites, BrandIt offers anyone, with or without a technical skill set, the ability to transform the generic out of the box look into a completely unique site all without a SharePoint developer.  Our color picking tool gives you the ability to dynamically change not only the background color but the text color of different regions of the page as well as the web parts placed on the page.

This screenshot gives you an idea of what is possible with BrandIt.  The possibilities are endless!!  Something additional in mind?  Contact me at matt.breski (at) incworx.com, where our SharePoint experts can give you the experience you are looking for!

After writing a recent blog, I received a question that has come up time and time again after a SharePoint implementation.  After enabling the SharePoint site collection feature "SharePoint Server Publishing Feature" for one of many reasons, the left most global navigation will change from home to the title of your SharePoint site.  This is a pretty simple fix...

1. Click on Site Actions > Site Settings

2. Under Look and Feel, choose Title, description and icon

 

 

 

 

3. Change the description for Title and Description to Home or any other description you're looking for

 

 

 

 

 

4. Click OK and navigate back to your home page to verify the change.

 

 

 

 

 

Check back often for additional SharePoint help, or email me at matt.breski (at) incworx.com to get more information about our S3 - SharePoint support program!

If you provide SharePoint support for your organization or a number of them you will eventually run into the need to un-install SharePoint 2010 from one or more servers.  In many of those cases, Office Web Apps will also have been installed.

This was the case in my most recent un-install.  I had successfully removed SharePoint 2010 and Office Web Applications from the the server. However; I then got the error “The install progress conflicts with a previously installed Microsoft Office 2010 Server product.” when I tried to install again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

After some digging, I found that the Office Web Applications un-install had left behind some registry keys that were preventing me from installing SharePoint 2010 again.  To find and remove the keys, follow these steps:

1. Open the Registry Editor by running regedit command

2. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOTInstallerProducts

3. Identify the keys that are related to Microsoft Office Web Apps as seen below:

 

 

4. After you identify it is a Web Apps key, right click on they key and choose to delete it - BE SURE NOT TO DELETE ANY OTHER KEY!!

After deleting all of these keys, you should be back in business and able to proceed with you SharePoint implementation.  Good Luck!

 

Other notes:

While this worked for me I make no guarantees.  Myself nor IncWorx can be responsible for anything that happens to your system!  Make these changes at your own risk!  If you are looking for help with your SharePoint deployment, contact me at matt.breski (at) incworx.com!

In an earlier post, found HERE, I walked you through how to add dropdown menus to the SharePoint 2010 global navigation.  I've had several questions around how to add additional sub menus simliar to those seen below.  Adding these submenus requires you to customize SharePoint within the sites Master Page.

 

 

 

 

 

To make the changes, follow these simple steps:

1.  Open the site in SharePoint Designer by choosing Site Actions > Edit in SharePoint Designer

2.  From the left hand navigation, choose Master pages and in then click the appropriate Master Page.  In this example I selected the v4.master.  When promted to checkout, choose yes.

 

 

 

 

 

3.  Once the Master Page has loaded, select to view it in Code mode, which can be found at the bottom of the screen.

4.  At this point you will need to search the code for the keyword "Orientation".  This will bring you to the section of code where we need to make our changes.  It will look somethign like this:

 

 

 

5.  At this point you can enter your values for StaticDisplayLevels and MaximumDynamicDisplay Levels.

• StaticDisplayLevels is the number of levels of sub navigation to show by default
• MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels is the number of levels of sub navigation to show as flyouts when hovered over.

6.  Once you have entered your values save the changes to the Master Page by right-clicking on the file name and choosing Save.

 

 

 

 

 

 

7.  Finally, right-click on the file name and choose to Check In.  When prompted, choose to publish a major version.  Once complete visit your site again and verify your changes!!

Good luck!  If you are looking for additional SharePoint help, contact me today at matt.breski (at) incworx.com to receive more information on our SharePoint Support Program!

If you have been following our blog or have seen any other posts, you're probably very familiar with our new UI/UX package called BrandIt.  If you haven't been, BrandIt is an easy-to-deploy UI/UX package that includes a custom master page as well as Web Parts that were designed to help improve the user experience and bolster user adoption. 

With BrandIt having been in production state since the end of March, our next phase is to roll out new web parts to continue to increase the usability of SharePoint.  Our most recent web part/functionality roll out is the "Recently viewed documents" view.  This is a feature that many users of the various office tools enjoy using that is not available in SharePoint out-of-the-box.  Having provided this functionality within the BrandIt package, we have equipped users with yet another added benefit that will make them LOVE using SharePoint 2010! 

If you have any questions or would like to see a demo, contact Paul.Haynes (at) IncWorx.com

IncWorx Consulting is thrilled to announce that they have recently added another remarkable product to their arsenal. This one is a rules-based document routing tool for SharePoint 2010, and is appropriately called RouteIt. This helpful package actually trumps the very basic Content Organizer feature within the SharePoint design for a variety of reasons. This blog will help you understand the differences between the two so you can see how RouteIt will dramatically increase user acceptance within your organization.

RouteIt is similar to Content Organizer in many ways, but there are numerous benefits that RouteIt provides where Content Organizer falls short.

• To start, RouteIt is compatible with SharePoint Foundation, Standard, and Enterprise versions, whereas Content Organizer is not available on Foundation.
• With RouteIt, any number of lists or document libraries is allowed per site, but Content Organizer only supports one.
• The user may find it annoying when a new document library called “drop off library” is created when trying to enable routing on an existing document library, but RouteIt eliminates this frustration.
• RouteIt also works with lists as well as document libraries, but Content Organizer only supports the latter.
• Content types are not required with RouteIt, since rules are based on columns of metadata, but the opposite is true for Content Organizer because rules are based on properties of a specific content type.
• The final thing I’d like to point out is the fact that RouteIt supports metadata-based destination URLs, whereas Content Organizer is a little trickier. It allows folders to be specified using metadata, but the destination site, list, library, and folder hierarchy remain static.

As you can see, RouteIt for SharePoint 2010 benefits your organization in a multitude of ways. The convenient improvements RouteIt brings to the table greatly outweigh the Content Organizer feature. RouteIt will help you customize SharePoint to make it even easier to use and you will be wondering how you ever lived without it! Contact us today and RouteIt!

IncWorx Consulting is thrilled to announce that we have released a new comprehensive branding product called BrandIt. This tool was built to address the most common complaints that we hear about user’s experiences with the SharePoint design out-of-the-box. In order to make users more enthusiastic about using SharePoint, we have completely redesigned the custom master page and added functionality.

The existing template for SharePoint is so bland and boring that it makes users not want to work with SharePoint. The functionality is there, but the front end usability and functionality fall well short of the UI's that business users interact with when they leave work (iPhone, iPad, droid, etc.). In an effort to increase user acceptance, we aimed to put more information at the fingertips of users and make navigating around task management easier and more convenient given the new standard users have when it comes to UI and UX .

When you purchase BrandIt, you get about 2 months’ worth of development and it only takes about 30 minutes to install. BrandIt includes a custom master page, custom CSS for elegant styling, jQuery functionality to avoid unnecessary refreshing, and even a color picker for changes to color schemes that requires no coding at all!

But we didn’t stop there, this amazing branding package also includes three unique web parts. The first is an interactive tabbed banner that supports full HTML and allows companies to send messages organization-wide instead of sending emails that some people may not see. The second is interactive tab control, which allows users to have access to multiple lists without cluttering the page and does not require you to refresh the page. The third is a custom calendar complete with day, week, month, and task views to help you prioritize what you need to get done.

In addition to all this, we re-styled and re-organized everything utilizing a base template. We did not modify anything that would cause issues for updates and patches, all our features are client side and can be put in the code, and it is very fast and easy to install.

BrandIt is truly a revolutionary package and something IncWorx Consulting is extremely proud of. So why wait? Couldn’t your intranet use a makeover? Get the SharePoint help you need and see a free demo of what BrandIt can do today! To schedule, please call Patrick Kelleher at 847-839-9679 or email me at patrick.kelleher (at) incworx.com.

IncWorx Consulting is very excited about a brand new product they just rolled out called BrandIt. This is a comprehensive branding package for SharePoint 2010 and a great way to customize SharePoint to give your organization’s intranet a better look and feel.

One of the three web parts contained in this package is the interactive tab control. Like the other 2 web parts in the package, this was built using jQuery, which allows the web part to have some really neat functionality. For example, when using the SharePoint design out-of-the-box, you had to click on a tab and wait for the page to refresh in order to direct you to a different page. With the interactive tab control, all you have to do is hover your mouse over any tab and the content will automatically appear, it’s that easy!

Another feature to note is its compatibility with SharePoint lists. The interactive tab control can connect to multiple lists in SharePoint and display them right on the main page. You can have as many lists as you would like here, and the jQuery within the tab control makes it easy to navigate around them without cluttering the page.

The interactive tab control makes all the information you need available to you in one spot without having to click through multiple screens and waiting for each page to load. This is just another convenient web part that proves why BrandIt is a very useful tool that your organization should not go without. In addition to improvements to the look and feel of your intranet, the web parts within it add a lot of user-friendly functionality to the product.

If you would like to learn more about the interactive tab control or would like to see a demo of BrandIt in its entirety, please contact Patrick Kelleher at 847-839-9679 or email me at patrick.kelleher (at) incworx.com.

IncWorx Consulting is very excited about a brand new product they just rolled out called BrandIt. This is a comprehensive branding package for SharePoint 2010 and a great way to customize SharePoint to give your organization’s intranet a better look and feel.

One of the three web parts contained in this package is the custom calendar. The calendar provided when using the SharePoint design out-of-the-box lacks functionality and quite frankly, doesn’t do much. The design and colors are very bland and there is only one view.

Our new custom calendar web part completely changes the game. It is unique because we have made an interactive calendar with day, week, month, and even task views to help you manage your tasks quicker and easier than ever before. Is the month view too much for you to handle? Now you can focus on what you need to get done within the course of the day in the “day” tab or even plan out priorities throughout the week with the “week” tab.

To compliment this freedom, we have also integrated a color picker in the custom calendar to create your own themes and skins. Not only does this provide for a more attractive experience, but it also increases user acceptance because it makes your users more excited to use your intranet.

Once again, this web part utilizes the wonder of  jQuery, so there’s no need to refresh the page or wait for long redirecting processes. Everything you need is at your fingertips with these helpful options. You don’t need to hassle with clicking over to the calendar in the out-of-the-box version anymore because more information can be displayed in a variety of different ways, depending on what works best for you.

If you would like to learn more about the custom calendar or if you would like to see a demo of BrandIt in its entirety, please contact Patrick Kelleher at 847-839-9679 or email me at patrick.kelleher (at) incworx.com.

IncWorx Consulting is very excited about a brand new product they just rolled out called BrandIt. This is a comprehensive branding package for SharePoint 2010 and a great way to customize SharePoint to give your organization's intranet a better look and feel.

One of three web parts contained in this package is an interactive tabbed banner. This is advantageous because it is list-driven and supports full HTML. This was also built using jQuery, which allows content to be automatically populated from multiple lists and list views if the user simply hovers their mouse over a tab.

If you’ve ever had the problem of being lost or not knowing the happenings within the company, this collaborative tool will help you because it was built to keep everyone on the same page.

The other benefit to the interactive tabbed banner is the convenience factor. Instead of sending an email organization-wide and having some people miss it (it’s hard to keep track of all those email we get per day!), this web part allows companies to deliver consistent messages organization-wide. In this way, it acts as the Yahoo! or MSN homepage, updating you on current events or announcements within the organization.

As you can see, the interactive tabbed banner is a very useful web part within our new comprehensive branding package, BrandIt.

If you would like to learn more about the announcement banner or if you would like to see a demo of BrandIt in its entirety, please contact Patrick Kelleher at 847-839-9679 or email me at patrick.kelleher (at) incworx.com

IncWorx recently launched a comprehensive branding package called "BrandIt" that includes a custom master page as well as 3 web parts.  I wanted to call out specifically one of the web parts that we include with the package, the web part is an interactive tab control.  

This is one of my favorite web parts in BrandIt for a couple of reasons.  First off, this web part basiclally allows you to connect to multiple SharePoint lists and essentially lets you have them at your fingertips.  The cool thing is that this web part was built using jQuery, so you can hover your mouse over the tabs or you can select an option to click on these tabs and the content will instantly populate.  No need to refresh the entire page or click a link and have to wait to be directed to a particular list.  This allows you to have a ton of information right in front of you on the main page without having to navigate all around the intranet to find what you need! 

 

How to view events on a calendar and set resources

The other day a client was having a problem with a OOTB Calendar in SharePoint 2010.  They had created a new site and set up Resources for the Calendar.  After they had done this, anytime they went to add an event to the calendar it would not show on the calendar view.   Even if they created a new calendar, the same would happen.  If they switched the view to the All Events view, they would see the events they had created yet the actual calendar view was empty.  After looking into this we realized when Resources are active it changes the content type for the calendar list (from Events to Resources).  For whatever reason, when this happens, SharePoint's calendar view no longer recognizes these new events. If the content type was changed back to Events, they would show in the calendar but then they could not set Resources.

Now we had to figure out how to have both, as this was critical to the client.  Luckily it is not too difficult of a fix to get both working.  Here is what you would need to do (assuming you already set up Resources).

• Create a calendar and in More Options select 'Use this calendar for resource reservations'
• Once created, go to the list settings for the calendar
• Click 'Title, Description, and Navigation' and set 'Use calendar for resource reservation' to no
• Back in the calendar list settings, click 'Change new button order and default content type'
• Check 'Reservations' and set it to the default content type

That is it! now you should be able to add new events like always, while being able to assign resources and check their availability.

 

IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.

Calendar overlays are one of the great SharePoint 2010 benefits, but if not setup correctly during the SharePoint implementation it can be a nuisance. I want to share with everyone this fix to the error "Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority" when adding an Exchange overlay.

 

Problem -

Error message: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority

After adding an Exchange overlay SharePoint 2010 displays this error.

 

Cause -

 This error is caused by a trust relationship issue when using 3rd party certificates between your SharePoint server and Exchange Server.

Or

The trust relationship between the SharePoint Farm and the Exchange server doesn't exist or hasn't been configured correctly.

 

Solution -

1) Go to "Central Administration" and click on "Security"

2) Under "General Security" click on "Manage trust"

3) Create a name (e.g. Name: Webmail) 

4) Root certificate for the trust relationship:  <enter cert provided downloaded from third-party CA> (You may have to locate the root cert from your third-party vendors site)

5) Click OK

 

After completing the resolution steps you should be able to reload your page and see your calendar overlay.

 

Contact IncWorx Consulting at help@incworx.com with your next SharePoint support question!

 

Are you looking for a viable way to support SharePoint?  Has SharePoint grown to the extent that you have a lot of business requirements that you cannot fulfill, but you don't yet have the approval to hire a full time SharePoint admin?  Did you just lose your one and only person who was supporting SharePoint at your company and now you're scrambling to support SharePoint? 

I have seen virtually all of the different scenarios mentioned above and many more that are extremely common.  Supporting SharePoint has been a pain that has been popping up more and more with the growth of the platform, given the complexities associated with working with the technology. 

A few years ago, IncWorx was primarily a project based firm.  We have been around since the early days of SharePoint and have done a lot of work with the 2003, 2007 and 2010 products and we have done more migrations that I can count on all of the fingers of our employees.  We have a wonderful collection of clients that includes GM, Dell, P&G, Fortune Brands, and hundreds of companies that you have never heard of and we won the SharePoint Partner of the Year Award in 2010.  One problem that we were running in to was that our project teams were in very high demand and the queue of projects was pretty long, but when our past clients needed minor help or a new prospect had a simple issue they needed help with, we would have to drop what we were doing to assist (which was throwing off the scheduling of our projects).  The situation was popping up more and more, and we started to realize that only a small percentage of companies had enough internal expertise to fully support SharePoint and that when people needed help, they could not get the attention of a consulting firm to help them with a very small problem that might only require 1 hour.

Given the situation that was popping up often, IncWorx decided to create a dedicated SharePoint Support team.  The team consists of Senior level SharePoint consultants who our clients get direct access to.  We modeled the program around giving our clients an experience unlike the 'call center' experience, which was easy to do, because we're a small niche SharePoint specialty firm.  Some of the key highlights are that we give you a primary point of contact who is familiar with your environment, your team, and your goals who you have direct access to and recieve very quick turn around times from. 

We offer an annual contract with a bucket of hours to use each quarter and we generally provide an initial setup to become familiar with your team and your environment, to perform and audit and health check, and to address some of the issues sitting in the backlog or to fix things we found during the health check.  After the initial set up, we provide remote support going forward and can connect remotely via VPN/citrix or can work via remote desktop of one of your admins. 

If this sounds like a service that you would be interested in, I would be more than happy to schedule some time to speak with you and cover your scenario and we can determine if this package would work for you.

IncWorx Consulting, traditionally a consulting services firm, just started rolling out products that address the needs that we hear all of the time from our customers.  One product in particular, RouteIt, helps users automatically route documents from a 'drop box' document library to the specific document library that it belongs to.  Our tool allows you to create rules based on the meta data of a document , similar to outlook's rules based routing, and will route documents instantly. 

To add additional horsepower, there are tools that can be used in conjunction with RouteIt (ask me if you're interested) that will allow you to extract metadata from a document.  So when used in combination with RouteIt, a document comes in to a document library, one of these extraction tools will populate the metadata, and RouteIt will automatically put the document where it belongs.

A good use case would be a hospital, they scan documents that will land in a general scanning drop box , one of these extraction tools would pull out things like the patient ID, patient name, physician's name, etc. and our tool would be able to automatically put those documents in to that patients file, or the physician's file, etc.

Please let me know if you're interested in learning more about this tool.  I would be happy to do a demo and provide a trial of the software.  

IncWorx Consulting has taken leaps and bounds in the mobile arena to integrate mobile devices to SharePoint Server 2010.

Recently mobile devices have become more powerful and easy to use. Laptops, netbooks, tablet PCs, and mobile phones are relied upon to provide workers access to the information and applications that they must have to do their jobs. Additionally, developing applications for mobile devices is now easier than ever. As a result, more and more often business scenarios demand integrating client applications together with business processes and workflows.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to provide workflow capabilities that enable you to model business processes and integrate them with multiple applications and systems. You can create client applications to extend reach of the workflow and make it available outside the context of SharePoint sites. Creating client applications to access workflows in SharePoint sites requires a client application, networking (services), and integration with SharePoint lists and workflows.

Scenarios

Benefits

Components

You must create several components to integrate mobile client applications together with SharePoint workflows. These components include the computer that is running SharePoint Server, sites, lists and workflows to store data, define business processes, and define security permissions, the mobile client applications that access the data in the SharePoint lists and workflows, and the services which support communication between the mobile client application and the computer that is running SharePoint Server. The following figure shows these components and how they are related. Rely on our SharePoint Experts to configure these types of scenarios.

(Provided by MSDN)