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
The following scenarios are examples of using mobile devices with SharePoint workflows:
- An insurance company that uses mobile applications to locate insured assets and file claim reports for customers
- A company with underground infrastructure, such as a telephone, electric, or cable company, that uses mobile applications to locate underground infrastructure and mark it to ensure it is not damaged during digging
- A water company that uses mobile applications to record how much water each customer uses
- A retail company which uses mobile applications as a point of sale application at outdoor events (concerts, sporting events, carnivals, etc)
As the previous scenarios show, the need for rich functionality, data access, and process integration in mobile applications is common. Creating mobile applications that integrate with SharePoint 2010 saves time developing mobile applications that meet these requirements.
This article focuses on integrating client applications together with the SharePoint framework, particularly showing how to read and write data from SharePoint lists to integrate with workflow processes.
Benefits
Extending SharePoint workflows beyond SharePoint sites in a web browser provides several benefits to workflow participants. The benefits include, but are not limited to the following items.
- Interacting with workflows from a mobile client application (mobile access)
- Reducing the steps to interact with a workflow
- Enhancing the workflow process with rich data and functionality
- Automating parts of the workflow process.
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) If you are looking for a Microsoft Gold Partner to help with your SharePoint Deployment to integrate mobile technology than call the experts at IncWorx at 847-839-9679.
How do I create a SharePoint 2010 Information Governance Policy?
SharePoint Deployment Governance is one of the most important aspects of SharePoint Server 2010. A good SharePoint deployment will take into account these policies presented to an enterprise from the top down. This is part 1 of a three part series pertaining to SharePoint governance.
Governance Defined: Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how an organization's business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals.
There are three main areas of focus when planning for a Governance Policy. This blog post will focus on:
- Information Technology Governance (Part 1)
- Information Management
- Application Management
The first thing to consider is: Are you going to centerally mange SharePoint (within IT) or are you going to locally manage SharePoint (let the divisions manage it)?
Information Technology Governance: This area is heavily focused on policy management. A main focus is educating internal staff on account creation and assigning roles to govern SharePoint. Organizations have to define the site lifecycle by assigning
- Expiration Dates on Sites (How long will a team site stay out there for?)
- The Service Level Agreement of Site Creation(How long should someone wait for a SharePoint site to be created?)
You organization must ask the following questions:
Who will we do SharePoint support? Who has the rights to create Sites, Lists, Documents, Records, Wikis, Blogs, Access, Terms and Term Sets and External Data? There is also a focus on how to assign asset classifications. This pertains to the high, low, top secret priority level of a document.
Use IncWorx Consulting to help you set a good IT Governance policy!!!
Save Time and Money with RouteIt
I have done a couple blogs now on RouteIt talking about how it works and all, but how may it help you? I am sure after reading my other blogs about RouteIt, some ideas were already going through your head as to how you could use it. This blog is to mainly help with that idea generating process, so I would like to give you an example where this product would help your organization. This won't apply to every organization but it should get you thinking more!
Your a large company that deals with many other companies either for products, services, or what have you. You are in constant communication with these companies as they send you emails with updates on products/packages etc... Now you have already created a separate site for each of these companies to hold all and any documents/emails they send you. How would you deal with placing these documents in the right locations? No matter how you handle it, someone is involved to help make sure documents are where they belong. Whether that be they are personally moving these documents or going to each site to make sure the documents there are correct. Either way it takes time.. and time is money.
With RouteIt, all you have to do is create a rule or rules and be done! With our product you can have one central location that people upload documents to and where emails get sent to. In this library, you just create a rule that looks for something you know sets these documents apart from each company, whether that be something in the title for the document, who sent the email, or maybe something in the subject line from the email. RouteIt can look at any of these (plus more!) to know where your files should go, and now that it is more dynamic. Your rules can look to these columns and send them off to their appropriate locations. Once something comes into the library or list, it is immediately routed to it's destination (in the blink of an eye). It is just that simple!
If you are interested in learning more about RouteIt, please contact IncWorx at 847-839-9679 or email us at: info@incworx.com
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
RouteIt Now More Dynamic!
Not too long ago, I wrote a blog about the Content Organizer and in that I talked about IncWorx's new product, RouteIt. If you have not already done so, you can read that blog here:
http://blog.incworx.com/blog/sharepoint-administrators-blog/short-falls-of-content-organizer-v1This has some general information about RouteIt, however, there has been a nice change to the product since then. The change being that RouteIt is now more dynamic. Before when you would create a rule, you would use the list picker to pick the destination and set when it would route your items. This made everything very static, and you would have to create a rule for each type of file you may of wanted to route. For example, if you had some document libraries set up for companies you do business with, then you would have to create a rule to look for one type of file that would be sent to that companies document library. This would have to be done each time for each company document library you had that you wanted to route to. While this still worked and routed perfectly, it would become a little tedious to create a lot of rules that technically are doing the same thing.
Now RouteIt is Dynamic! Meaning, you no longer have to create as many rules as you once might of had to. Continuing with the above example, now all you have to do is use the new 'token' feature. If in the original document library files were getting saved to had a column for each company they dealt with, then you can set up a rule to look at what was in that column and route to that destination. So if you had a document library under Site A named IncWorx. You can create a rule that looks to this company column and based on what was in the column, route to its appropriate destination. So instead of telling it to route to Site A/IncWorx (the old way). Now you would do Site A/[company]. This goes to Site A and then looks at what was in this company column to determine what document library it belongs to. This all happens very fast! You could even use the token feature to have it create folders if you so desired. Since it is dynamic, let your imagination roam as it can be dynamic or static wherever you want!
If you are interested in learning more about RouteIt, please contact IncWorx at 847-839-9679 or email us at: info@incworx.com
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
Deploying Lync Server 2010 Mobility Feature
If you don't already know, Lync Mobile is now available for smart phones. You can download it right from the Android market easily enough. What is not quite so easy, is getting it to work for your organization. I wish it were just as simple as downloading the app and using it. You must first configure Lync server 2010 mobility feature in your environment. Microsoft has some pretty good documentation that lists the steps you need to follow. When I say follow, I mean to the T. One wrong move can ruin the whole deployment! Here is the link with all the steps you need to do:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh690055.aspx (follow exactly)
It is not quite as bad as it may look, you just have to be carefull not to miss a step anywhere. Once you have successfully deployed the mobility feature, your users can do most of the basic Lync activities. This is real nice when you have people in and out of the office a lot that need to stay connected. Give it a whirl, you may love it or hate it. I just hope that in the future Microsoft makes this a little easier to set up and roll out. Especially since more and more things are being pushed to phones and tablets.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
What is the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
CES has been around for over four decades as it reaches out to global markets to cennct the industry. This event helps the consumer electronics to be innovative and thrive in the markets.
"CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). CEA represents more than 2,000 corporate members involved in the design, development, manufacturing, distribution and integration of consumer electronic products. All profits from CES are reinvested into industry services, including technical training and education, industry promotion, engineering standards development, market research and legislative advocacy."
The event is held yearly and mostly in Las Vegas. Every big and upcoming electronics company shows up to this event (even Microsoft). It was even where Atari was first introduced! This is a geek heaven and alway displays what new technologies companies are releasing. This year close to 150,000 people attended the event, with almost 50,000 exhibits. These include product categories such as:
Audio Digital Imaging/Photography
Automotive Electronics Electronic Gaming
Computer Hardware & Software Emerging Technology
Connected Home Entertainment/Content
Content Distribution Internet-Based Multimedia Systems
Digital Health and Fitness
|
| Lifestyle Electronics
Telecommunications Infrastructure Video
Wireless & Wireless Devices
The event is always a good time, and if you have never been, I recommend a trip out there in the years to come!
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
If you are looking to customize SharePoint 2010 using Custom Actions (CustomAction element), you may encounter a situation where the contents of the ScriptBlock do not fire. For example, when adding SharePoint support for jQuery you might have something like this in your elements.xml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Elements xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/">
<CustomAction ScriptSrc="JQueryLib/jquery-1.7.1.min.js" Location="ScriptLink" Sequence="100"></CustomAction>
<CustomAction ScriptBlock="$.noConflict();" Location="ScriptLink" Sequence="110"></CustomAction>
</Elements>
This is intended to make the jQuery library available to every page and also to eliminate potential issues with using the dollar sign ($) for referencing jQuery in your SharePoint 2010 environment. ScriptSrc is used to reference the file containing javascript (in this case the jQuery library), while ScriptBlock gives you the ability to add in-line javascript.
I see two potential issues with the above approach, and both are related to your inability as a SharePoint developer to control or even be aware of the actions of SharePoint, other developers, third party tools, etc. within the same SharePoint environment.
Issue #1: The first issue is encountered when you have more than one ScriptBlock defined within the same scope but you haven't assigned the CustomAction a unique id. For example, let's say your SharePoint environment has two features activated at the site collection level, and both have CustomActions with ScriptBlocks defined. The ScriptBlock with the lowest "Sequence" number will execute and the other will be ignored entirely. You can avoid this situation by including "id=<your unique identifier>" on your CustomAction elements.
Issue #2: While the Sequence number is helpful in influencing the order of .js files and the processing order of in-line code from ScriptBlocks, the .js files and in-line code are not placed "together" at run-time. All of the .js files are referenced in one area of the page, and the in-line code is located in another. As a result, if multiple features were using custom actions to reference their own versions of jQuery (and perhaps using the noConflict trick of obtaining a reference to their specific version of the jQuery library), then using the ScriptBlock as above would always reference the "last" jQuery library (or the one with the highest Sequence number). Placing the noConflict code in its own .js file and referencing it that way gives you much greater control over the order of how your libraries and javascript are deployed.
In summary, if you have a ScriptBlock that isn't firing in your SharePoint implementation, check to make sure your CustomAction is assigned a unique identifier. Having more than one ScriptBlock with no unique identifier will cause all but one (the one with the lowest Sequence number) to be ignored.
IIS 7 Rapid Fail Protection
If you do not already know, Rapid Fail Protection is feature within IIS7 that is on by default. It basically is there to check for a specified number of hard failures in a given time period, again the default is 5 failures within 5 minutes. If a hard failure that occurs meets this default setting, then the Application Pool will crash and does not automatically restart. The only way to get it going again is to manually start it.
If this does happen for you, in IIS Manager you would see a little stop symbol next to the name and it would also say stopped under Status (depicted below).
When this sort of problem occurs an entry is written to the Event Logs (usually under System), which IIS 7 does a little better of a job properly reporting errors. You will most likely also get a 503.2 - Service unavailable error when trying to access the Application Pool.
Personally I think this is a great feature, if it did not exist a broken application/service could crash > restart > crash > restart etc.. taking up all your system resources. This Rapid Fail Protection will at least stop that from happening, 5 errors in 5 minutes seems a bit long but luckily you can edit this (or it appears you can). In IIS Manager select the Application Pool in question and click Advanced Settings to the right. You will see a window like the below picture, scroll down to Rapid Fail Protection and you can disable it or change the frequencies.
It let me change it so I am assuming it will keep those settings, I have not personally tested this yet. One last note, I would only disable this setting or really mess with it at all if its for a development/test server where you know you will be breaking things enough to cause this to go off.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
Integrate Mobile Apps with SharePoint Workflows
With some work, you are now able to integreate any mobile applications your organization may have created or use with SharePoint Workflows. This, like anything very custome, must be done within Visual Studio 2010. You first will need to create the mobile app to be used with SharePoint (though I suppose there are other ways to create it). Continuing with Visual Studio, you would need to create a Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) application. To get it to link with SharePoint 2010 sites/lists/workflows, you need to reference and call the WCF service to the WPF app. Once you have done all of this, you have to create your Visual Studio Workflow.
There is a lot of codeing and work to be done to get all this to work, but it could be a real time saver if you have a lot of employees on the road all the time. You can get very creative with this, as it is all custom. Microsoft has a GREAT article with very detailed steps on how to accomplish this very task. Right now it may seem like a lot of work, but it is nice to know Microsoft is trying to get things on mobile devices. That is where the world is heading, and if they want to be apart of it, they need to stay with the times. As time goes on, this will become much simplier I assure you. It could even start to be happening with the new versions of SharePoint and Visual Studio.
Her is the link the the Microsoft site with all the detailed instruction and sample code. Take a look at it even if you never plan to use it, as it is pretty neat.
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg454783.aspx
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
Microsoft Access 2010 and SharePoint 2010
With Access 2010 you can move your table to SharePoint 2010 and have user forms show up in SharePoint as well. One thing to note is that forms need to be created as Access web forms. This makes it so, for one, SharePoint can use these forms and two, it relies on the new Access Data Macros to drive the behaviors. Below is a nice diagram I found depicted the connection between Access and SharePoint 2010.
Let's take a closer look at how this all works!
Open Access and go to your database you want to send to SharePoint. You will need to run the Web Compatibility checker to make sure everything can transfer over smoothly. If any table fails, you will be given a list of the errors or problems so that you may try to fix them. Assuming all pass, you can then publish your database to SharePoint 2010. While publishing, Access moves the forms, reports, macros, tables etc to SharePoint. This will allow any users that have Access 2010 on their machines to download a local copy of the database to edit them if needed.
All your tables should now be SharePoint 2010 Lists and create all the necessary links between Access and the Lists. This way if someone were to download the database to their machine, Access will get all the SharePoint list data to maintain a local cache. While a user has this database open, Access will periodically sync with SharePoint with any changes made on either end.
All your forms get converted to ASP.NET (.aspx) pages, including javascript for any supported page events. The layout for these pages is mainly driven by HTML tables. One thing to keep in mind is that your controls on the form need to be placed within the cells. This helps Access transform the form into an appropriate .aspx page.
If your organization is looking to move your Access database(s) to SharePoint, you can do so with the peace of mind knowing everything should go over smoothly. Luckily, for those that are not using Access 2010, you can link SharePoint with Access 2007 as well. The link between Access 2007 and SharePoint is slightly different, but most functionality should still work as intended.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
How to a place a video to my SharePoint 2010 page?
SharePoint Help: I have been asked by many firms how to attach a video to a SharePoint page. This blog post will give you step by step instructions on how to add video to a SharePoint site. Uploading large video files are typically a bad idea due to the amount of resources they consume. Our SharePoint Consultants recommend using the Remote Blog Storage Service to store these files in remote locations.
Step by Step Instructions:
- Click Edit
- Click inside the web part you intend the place the video
- Click Insert
- Click Web Part
Once the web part prompt appears
- Click Media and Content
- Click Media Web Part
The media web part will now appear on the site.
- Click the check box to the left of the Media Web Part Title
- Click Change Media Drop Down
- Select From Computer
- Click Browse
- Select file
- Click Open
The video file will now appear on the SharePoint Page. If the video file exceeds the maximum upload size please give us a call. 847.839.9679 Extension 201
IncWorx Consulting, the go to SharePoint Partner!
Office 365 supports custom code
This finally makes Office 365 seem like such a better product. It was just too limited at first. Not being able to do anything custom, I think, was a big turn off. I know that not all organizations want or will ever do anything custom, but what about the ones that have no other choice! This new version finally lets everyone be happy!
You can design and create customized sites and list templates that you can access through Site Settings, just like with normal SharePoint 2010. One nice thing about this, in Office 365, is the fact that you can access both .stp and .wsp files from any site within the site collection. You can also download them and transfer them to other site collection in your Office 365 environment, and they can be downloaded to an on-premises instance of SharePoint. This is a very nice improvement to Office 365.
Now for the cherry on top. Microsoft came up with a mechanism to allow you to deploy custom code to Office 365! This will let you further customize your site by letting you create custom master pages to really suit your organization. To allow for the ability to deploy custom code, Microsoft uses the sandbox approach. Through this, you can create custom web parts, event handlers etc... All custom files are stored in the User Solutions gallery.
To end this blog, I just wanted to list out a few other things quickly you can now also do in Office 365:
- Change what is stored in user profiles.
- Enable the Content Organizer to automatically “file” documents in different locations based on metadata.
- Create a corporate metadata scheme using Managed Metadata Services.
- Associate a specific document template with a library.
- Create customized workflow for content within SharePoint.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
How to change the upload file size in SharePoint 2010?
SharePoint Help: This blog post will give you step by step instructions on how to increase the maximum file size in SharePoint 2010. There are few reasons a SharePoint administrator would want to do this but the reason I wanted to do this is due to the fact I want to upload a large video file to a SharePoint home page. This blog post will show you how to do this. First you will need to remote into the box SharePoint is on and make this edit in Central Administration.
- Remote into SharePoint Box
- Enter Central Administration
- Click Application Management
Once the application management screen appears
- Click Manage web applications
- Click the General Setting Drop down
- Select General Settings
Once the general settings prompt appears change the Maximum upload size.
Once the general settings prompt appears change the Maximum upload size.
This was a quick and easy way to customize SharePoint to get any file size into a document library.
IncWorx Consulting the go to SharePoint Partner!!!
Win 7 Internet Security 2012 Security Trojan Virus Fix
Symptoms: Win 7 Internet Security 2012 will launch and start scanning, recommends you to update Win 7 Security, Critical Trojan Virus are on your computer, Internet will not work, programs will not open, everything says that it is not recommended to move forward. Your computer will give you pop up after pop up saying that you need to update your Win7 Security. Prompts you for a credit card.
The following images are related to this virus:
Fix:
If the admin account is infected on your system you will need to create a new admin account so that you can delete the .exe file that is currently causing the problem.
How to create a new Admin Account
- Start
- Right Click Computer
- Click Manage
- Click Local Users and Groups
- Click Users
- Right Click under users: Add New User – Set Users name: Admin Password: Admin
- Click Back
- Click Groups
- Click Administrators
- Click Add
- Type Admin – Click Check Name – Click OK – Click OK
- Capture Computer name by clicking Start – Computer
- Computer name is on the bottom left
- Log Out and log into the new admin account
- If your system is on a network start the log-in with the computer name then backslash then admin account
How to get rid of your virus
- Click Start
- Click Computer
- Click C:
- Users
- Click the folder of the User that is infected with the virus i.e. the user you were on when you noticed the virus
- Click AppData
- Click Local
- Delete Everything that is not in a folder especially things that end with .exe
- Delete at own risk but it has been my experience that anything that is not in a folder is malicious
- Click LocalLow
- Delete all items not in folder
- Click Back
- Click Roaming
- Delete all items not in folder
The virus should be deleted. Log off this user and back into the user account that has the virus. The easiest way to make sure you get rid of this virus is to do a system restore before your system was infected. You can also use Melwarebytes and Spybot but I recommend doing the Restore. This does not affect any files you have worked on. It simply restores all settings from the last backup and restore.
How to do a system restore:
- Click Start
- Click All Programs
- Click Accessories
- Click System Tools
- Click System Restore
- Next
- Click the date that restores your computer pre virus
- Do the restore
About IncWorx Consulting
IncWorx Consulting is one of the industry leaders in SharePoint Consulting. Their team of SharePoint Administrators and SharePoint Developers are awarded the SharePoint Partner of the Year from Microsoft.
IncWorx Consulting the SharePoint Experts!
Visual Studio 11 with DirectX and SharePoint Features
Well with the new year here, Microsoft has been releasing more and more information on their new product versions. Visual Studio 11 is sure to be a nice improvement from the initial look of things. I wanted to just briefly touch on two points I thought were pretty neat in the new version. Those being the added support for DirectX and some new SharePoint Features.
The support of DirectX means improved developer shader support through the editor. This is to help make editing easier and give more build integration. Also, you will not be limited to the text editor anymore as their is going to be a designer to help create shader effects. In this designer view you will be able to make changes and see the effects in real time. Since this is new, there will be a new debugging tools to help debug DirectX frames etc.
Visual Studio 11 is also enhancing the way developers would do things for SharePoint. In this new version, you will be able to edit SharePoint lists through the new List Designer. This means no more having to manually edit XML files! The designer lets you display, sort, and group available site columns among so much more. Since everyone and everything seems to be pushing for cloud support, Visual Studio 11 is no different. You will be able to publish solutions to remote SharePoint sites, including Office 365.
These are just some of many new features to come to Visual Studio 11. One last thing to note, it looks like Microsoft is trying to improve the performance in the new version. It looks like they are really trying to listen to what users think about the current version and their insights to how it could be better.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
Colligo Briefcase for iPad's with SharePoint Security
This new App/Tool from Colligo makes it possible for iPad users to access SharePoint 2010 confidentely without the worries of security compromises. Colligo Briefcase makes it easy for organizations, with the growing use of iPad users, to store, view, sync, and share SharePoint files, lists, libraries etc.. All of this without the need of using a browser even! This app even lets users access SharePoint while being offline. Here is a quick rundown of some of the security features offered:
- Separate passcode to access the Colligo Briefcase application
- Hardware-based encryption (AES-256 bit) for all stored data
- Remote data wipe capabilities (via MDM systems)
- SharePoint credentials stored in Keychain, providing the highest form of trust-chain security
- Stored data can be wiped automatically on 10 failed login attempts
- Ability to restrict the SharePoint sites accessed and content cached (via Colligo Administrator)
- Ability to restrict which content can be shared with external recipients (via Colligo Administrator)
- Supports all SharePoint authentication methods
This will really help users with the adoption of SharePoint; by giving users access to SharePoint, while on the go through one of the most used tablets (iPad). This was always one thing that prevented organizations from using iPad's. Everyone wants one, but if it can't be used to help you work, then it become more of a toy than something needed. This app helps bridge that gap.
Looking at some things happening with Windows 8, it makes me wonder what the new version of SharePoint is going to be like. Windows 8 loooks to be aimed a lot towards tablet users so it wouldn't surprise me if the new SharePoint is as well. Especially now, looking at Colligo Briefcase, extending a windows product to apple tablets. I think this only shows us how technology is changing and what people need to do to keep up!
You can read/find out more here:
http://www.colligo.com/products/sharepoint/colligo-briefcase/
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
Nintex Workflow v2.3
So like many companies pushing out updates to products for the new year, Nintex is no different. It has released it's newest version of Nintex Workflows with added features/improvements. The two biggest updates are the improved integration tools and now Nintex Live is apart of Nintex Workflow 2010.
Improved Integration Tools:
This helps make leveraging your in-house business data and systems even easier than before. There is an added button called "Run Now" which lets you see your workflow integration actions before you actually run the process. Nintex Workflow now supports multiple output queries, making it easier to gather information from business systems and get multiple rows from database queries. The "XML picker" lets you query InfoPath forms quicker by allowing you to choose the fields you want and a graphical view. This tool can also be used on web pages and Office documents. The last thing worth noting here is the new option to right click actions to disable them. This helps keep debugging controlled and causes less of an impact on your SharePoint environment.
Nintex Live:
Nintex Live is a growing catalogue of on line services and actions, and now this is available through Nintex Workflow. Some new actions available here are the ability to identify languages and translate text, send Twitter updates, validate e-mail addresses, convert currencies, and more! By having the two together now helps you to easily interact with Office 365 environments. Just create your workflow(s) and connect them to Office 365 in no time at all.
Other good news; version 2.3 update is available free of charge to any current Software Assurance subscribers! Nintex is always striving to be and do better, and this latest update just goes to show that very thing.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
Prompt for credentials when accessing SharePoint 2010
If you wuold like to stop being asked to input your and your users credentials when accessing your SharePoint 2010 environment, here is one way that should solve this problem. This is done in Internet Explorer 8 but 7 and 9 should be very similar.
- Go to Tools -> Internet Options
- Click the Security tab
- Select Local intranet (1)
- Click Sites (2)
o This will open another window that has 4 check boxes, the first saying “Automatically detect intranet network.” Make sure this is checked and then click Advanced
· Another window will open up that will have two fields, one that says “Add this website to the zone:” and one that says “Websites”
· Add each of your SharePoint portals/web applications (http://X.yourcompany.com, http://X.yourcompany.com/IT etc) you can also try and add a domain wildcard (http://*.yourcompany.com).
o If you have http and https set up then you will have to add one for each (http://X.yourcompany.com and https://X.yourcompany.com) same with the wildcard.
o Make sure Require server verification … is unchecked
o Click close -> OK
· Back at the internet options Security tab
o Click custom level which opens a new window (security settings – local intranet zone) (3 in the first picture)
o Scroll down to the very bottom to where you should see “User Authentication” “Logon”
o Select the Automatic logon only in Intranet zone option or Automatic logon with current user name and password could work as well depending on how your security is set up
o Click OK
· Make sure Enable Protected mode is unchecked (4 in the first picture)
A Domain Admin should be able to apply the same settings to every user so that not everyone has to do this. I also like to do the same set up but instead of selecitng Local Intranet, you will select Trusted Sites. All the options should be the exact same as what is described here.
IncWorx Consulting is a leading Microsoft Gold Partner focusing on SharePoint Consulting, SharePoint Support, and SharePoint Application Development.
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