SharePoint 2010 Benefits

Given my role as an account executive at IncWorx, I interface with many customers that are looking at deploying a new SharePoint farm or migrating to a newer version.  One of the big things that sets IncWorx apart is our approach when it comes to these types of engagements.  It's important to properly plan in the beginning to ensure that your business realizes the full benefits of SharePoint and it doesn't become an unused platform that your IT staff is burdoned with supporting.  The approach below outlines the steps we generally follow in one of these engagements. Please note, installing and configuring SharePoint is the easy part....having experts that can understand your business and align their needs with SharePoint is the hard part...It's also our forte!  You can also learn a bit more here!

Phase 1: Discovery

During the Discovery phase IncWorx generally performs a complete audit of the current systems in use that will be phased out and also conducts “Pain Points” meetings with business users to understand how they could utilize the features of SharePoint 2010/2013.  This phase generally includes the following:

• Analysis of current technology infrastructure
  • Current means of document storage
  • Current intranet (if any)
  • Home grown internal systems that act as a hub for the company

• Review of high level Client requirements for intranet

• Pain Points meetings with key departments to determine fits for new/enhanced functionality in SharePoint 2010, and understanding Client’s near term and short term goals with the SharePoint platform

Phase 2: Information Architecture (Governance and Taxonomy Planning)

During the information architecture phase, IncWorx will work with Client to understand current governance and taxonomy strategies with the goal of understanding the current pain points or gaps.  We will then develop new models based on our extensive experience that will align with Client goals and will ensure optimal usability for end users.  This phase will include a review of any available documentation of the current taxonomy as well as current Governance documentation.

Phase 3: Documentation and Migration Plan

During this phase, IncWorx will create documentation that outlines our findings and recommendations from phases 1 and 2.  The documentation will include, as appropriate, the following:

• Findings from the Discovery phase

• Recommended  taxonomy model(s) from Phase 2

• Governance overview and/or outline

• Recommended features/functionality  found in SharePoint 2010 based on Pain Points meetings

• Determination of the appropriate migration path for existing data that will be housed in SharePoint

• Recommendations for 3^rd party tools based off of our findings in Phases 1 and 2 (if applicable)

• Hardware/software shopping list (if applicable)

• Roadmap and deployment plan that provides approach and strategy short and long term platform growth

Phase 4: Hardware/Software Procurement(if applicable)

During this phase Client will procure the hardware and software based on IncWorx recommendations.  IncWorx will lend guidance for properly configuring and installing components if necessary.

Phase 5: Proof of Concept

During Phase 5, IncWorx will create a SharePoint 2010/13 POC environment based on the roadmap and deployment plan from Phase 3 and will perform one or more data migration tests to validate the approach prior to the Production deployment.  This phase will include:

• Creation of Service Accounts
• Installation of SharePoint 2010/13 (if applicable)
• Test migration(s) of data
• One department/test group built out with data and desired functionality for validation of the approach
• Documentation of all issues encountered as well as their resolutions

Phase 6: Deployment

Once the POC and migration tests are complete, IncWorx will perform the production deployment. 

Phase 7: Testing, Tuning, Tweaking

During this phase, IncWorx will review the production SharePoint 2010/13 environment with Client to ensure that the criteria from the roadmap and deployment plan have been met and that all desired functionality within the scope is present.   IncWorx will also perform a post deployment analysis and ensure that all features and functionality are working properly, that all migrated data is intact, and to finally ensure that client has a solid foundation from which they can continue to build and expand upon for future phases.

Deliverables from all phases:

• Comprehensive roadmap and deployment documentation

• A fully functional SharePoint 2010 POC

• A fully functional SharePoint 2010 production implementation that meets the criteria outlined in the Roadmap and Deployment Plan

Please contact me if you need help or would like to discuss further.  Paul dot Haynes at IncWorx dot com or 847-839-9679.

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 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

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!

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.

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

Many SharePoint admins know that Search is the 800 pound gorilla in your SharePoint farm. There are several schools of thinking when it comes to making your farm run better when using enterprise search. At SharePoint Conference 2011 there was a nice lecture done on the subject of performance tuning in SharePoint 2010. 

The lecture was done by presenter Eric Shupps a SharePoint Server MVP. Eric strongly suggested that you setup your search databases the SQL server's fastest disk. Another important tip is to isolate the crawl and temp databases. The reason that disk placement and database isolation are important is due to these facts -

• Crawl databases can be very large.
• High index sensitivity.
• Heavy transaction volume.

AvePoint released the DocAve 6 public beta that simplifies deployment, monitoring, and enforcement of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 governance policies.  It manages development and lets you test production farms with ease.  It also features a redesigned, ribbon based interface to simplify and automate SharePoint governance and management. 

Key benefits of DocAve 6 include Increase Business Productivity, Reduce Total Cost of Ownership, Provides IT Assurance and Enable Security & Compliance for Business Content.  These benefits help deliver high-performance, global collaboration, increase operational efficiency and improve quality of service & minimize business disruption. 
DocAve 6 is built upon Microsoft technologies including .NET, WCF(Windows Communication Foundation), and Silverlight which works well with SharePoint Design.

With more and more people using Android Phones and Tablets, it has come to my attention that the Android Phone’s and Tablets default browsers block the SharePoint 2010 credentials popup window. This makes it difficult to login and edit your site on the go. If you have a SharePoint site, and plugin your URL into the Android browser you might get a 401 Unauthorized error. Unfortunately, the default browser blocks the login prompt popup which could prevent anyone on one of these devices from logging into their SharePoint site. I recently spent a few minutes testing my own HTC EVO 4G to access our SharePoint 2010 team site.

To fix this issue, just goto the Application Market and download Firefox or Opera browsers. Opera and Firefox are both officially supported by Microsoft for SharePoint 2010 and will allow you to login to your SharePoint site and login. Both browsers will provide SharePoint’s login popup which allows you to login to your site! By using the Firefox or Opera for your browsers, you can properly login and view your site. I also tested a few other browsers like Miren and Dolphin browser that do login but don't view the SharePoint site correctly.

If you have an Android OS phone or tablet and want to use SharePoint Mobile. Give this a try! It is very possible that this could affect SharePoint iPhone user access.

Using mobile phones to access your data really shows off some of the SharePoint 2010 Benefits for end users.

IncWorx Consulting, a Managed Gold Partner

Problem:

For decades, financial reports and data gathering were very time-consuming practices, especially when earnings were expected to be delivered to the SEC in such short time frames. Even more pressure was added considering what happened in 2008. Analysts would spend an exorbitant amount of time gathering quantitative data, checking and rechecking numbers, tracking down support documentation and getting sign-offs from Executive Management. This in turn, added costly mistakes when an analyst reported inaccurate numbers and the company’s stock prices were affected due to high percentage of user entry error. 

A team of analysts needed to spread the work out to various sectors in the organization so that it would not bottleneck. Analysts would need a better way to collaborate and required better collaboration tools. Organizations want to release earnings as quickly as possible to Wall Street, but they also strive for an error-free and an efficient process. 

Solution:

By using SharePoint Server 2010 and having the top consulting firm, IncWorx, help you organization architect a solution; your financial analysts no longer have to submit Excel spreadsheets through e-mail messages that could get caught by spam filters. They can now post them into SharePoint along with all other supporting documentation. The final versions of the financial statements are stored in SharePoint so that anyone questioning a figure need only view the document in the SharePoint portal where one “true” copy of the document lives. Financial staffers can create task lists for individual stakeholders that require additional information. Also, the online tasks and calendars make it easier for analysts to manage their piece of their workflow in SharePoint. Every team member will be fully aware of where they are in the process and can pull any document they need to review and approve.

SharePoint 2010 Benefits:
By using SharePoint 2010, analysts have been able to streamline its complex, time-pressured financial closing and reporting activity; achieve significant time savings; and better focus its financial professionals on moving the business forward. Being able to release earnings faster and file financial statements quicker is a huge benefit to the financial community. An organization would experience reduced e-mail volumes and can quickly and efficiently locate and collaborate on documents in compressed timeframes. Instead of spending three to four weeks in a quarter on closing data, a team can cut this time in half and release earnings faster to Wall Street. Now analyst can concentrate on their core expertise and work more efficiently.

I have numerous financial experiences prior to joining IncWorx. We won the SharePoint Partner of the Year Award from Microsoft and we have worked with many notable clients in the financial sector including Citadel, Duff and Phelps and Next Financial. If you find this information beneficial and want to learn more about how we can help your organization, please feel free to contact Jeffrey Scalet at 847.839.9679 Ex 211.

• About the Project , Our Team & Goals
• SharePoint Overview
• Department and Role
• Document Collaboration
• Document Storage and Search Compliance, Records Management & Off-line
• Questions
• Meta Data Overview
• Homework: Complete Meta Data Documentation

• Summarize workshop results
• Build Gap Analysis
• Identify dependencies
• Lay out a time-line (not a project plan at this point)

• Site Structure build with MindMapping

• Use Meta Data homework (document inventory) and MindMapping to interactively build out the taxonomy with the stakeholders

• Mapped with Visio

In the financial service industry numerous papers and important information are processed hourly. From prospectuses to important client information, organizations are striving to find a platform to store emails, faxes and compliance documents that are vital to day to day operations. Unexpected overhead is incurred when this process is manual, this in turn adds to the spike in operational costs including employee time to manage paper documents and opportunity cost lost in preforming these tasks opposed to other more meaningful tasks. Financial institutions need effective ways to securely, capture, exchange, and manage this information appropriately in a cost-effective way.

SharePoint 2010 takes the hassle out of managing important paperwork and can provide higher return of investment compared to other document management systems. The SharePoint 2010 benefits are vast and can lower cost of document management. With IncWorx Consulting's help, we can automate the time spent managing the paper trail and allow more time in delivering the core competencies of your organization. SharePoint 2010 helps maximize collaboration features for document repository needs. A huge advantage of using the platform is the ability to configure and restrict user access to documents based on individual user roles. The roles are predefined by system administrators and can provide a framework that allows account managers segregation from account executives. In these scenarios managers looking at client histories will never overlap executives accessing corporate strategy documents.

Having a firm like IncWorx Consulting to manage SharePoint can optimize operation efficiencies, boost customer service, create and clear audit trails, and help ensure regulatory compliance through secure access to content on SharePoint-based systems.

Team Foundation Server (TFS) is the first full feature software development life cycle product that Microsoft introduced. It offers source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking and is mostly utilized for software development projects where collaboration is key to the completion of the project. TFS can be used by itself or in collaboration with Visual Studio Team System, serving as the back end platform. If you use it while implementing SharePoint 2010 as well, TFS can be a life saver.

Think of TFS as a wheel. Source control is in the middle, acting as the main cog in the wheel. From there, four spokes emerge that are named requirements management, defect management, task/project management, and release management. This diagram will help you understand how TFS works and the functionalities it provides.

One notable feature of TFS is its very tight coupling with the SharePoint design. Due to this great benefit, TFS can provide a ton of SharePoint help by exposing out pieces of information about a project into SharePoint. For example, say that you are a manager that is managing Project X, and want to have a really quick way to see how many open defects at a high priority level still exist in Project X. You don’t have to go to TFS or get a developer involved. By exposing that project out through SharePoint (which is a relatively straightforward process), any manager could look at that project site in their SharePoint farm or site collection. There are a whole slew of web parts that ship with TFS that can be added to your standard SharePoint environment. You can get a list of tasks, open items, release management, and more.

From a SharePoint developer perspective, there are custom web parts in the project web site that, based on your user ID, will tell you what tasks you have left. All of this is integrated into the development tools that you would be using to develop anyway, such as Visual Studio. There’s also a free product called Team Explorer for TFS. This is the way business analysts and project managers can get insight into projects and information. For the developer, it’s integrated directly into their development environment. It is a single toolset, so you never have to leave your development environment to see existing tasks, bugs that have been allocated against the work you’ve done, etc.

But what if I don't want to use TFS with SharePoint?

There is no limitation to the functionality of TFS if it isn’t integrated into a SharePoint environment. The SharePoint integration is simply there to allow non-developers easy access to information that is housed inside of TFS. For instance, a developer can go in real quick and run a report inside their development environment, finding out how many outstanding bugs they have for a project. A business manager might not know what TFS is, but still wants to know how many open issues there are in Project X. The ability to expose out those pieces of information into SharePoint is how Microsoft solved that problem.

SharePoint just gives non-technical users access to information that is business critical, but housed in TFS. There is nothing that will not happen if you don’t have a TFS public interface, everything works just the same. All the functionality that TFS can provide is exposed through its integration with Visual Studio.

There are a myriad of other functionalities TFS can provide, including the use of build agents, test-driven development, branching and labeling, and its IDE agnostic capabilities. Also, TFS with SharePoint implementation will increase the quality of your software and save you money from what you would have spent on tools that were needed in the past. Call IncWorx and talk to a SharePoint consultant about how to optimize your business processes with TFS today!
 

In the private view, you will see information of interest to you based on your membership in a particular audience. For example, a new employee might see links to training resources. From this single place, you can manage documents, view and set up alerts, connect with other people and information, check your email, and maintain a calendar. The private view includes information pertinent to you as an individual and is your own personal space that allows you to customize SharePoint.

On the other hand, My Site also has a public view that links you to information that you share with other employees. Your most recent documents and any other links or sites that you may want other people to see will appear on this page. To do this, you can easily update your profile, provide appropriate links, and send a link to other people in your organization easily and conveniently. In addition to this, all the functionalities of SharePoint 2010 are available on your public profile page, such as document libraries, surveys, tasks, lists, etc. Links and documents you create in your personal site can be shared with other users in your public site by simply adding them to public document libraries.

Just as you can share information with others in the public view of your personal site, you can also find and connect with people through their public views of their sites. When you connect to an employee, you will also see the links to sites, people, and documents that person has chosen to share. Furthermore, you can see what interests and hobbies you have in common.

The site administrators can grant permissions in terms of the level of personalization that users are allowed to have on their site. They can also modify web parts, the shared view of My Site, and target audiences for content such as links and documents.

As you can see, My Site is just another one of the SharePoint 2010 benefits and parallels Facebook in a lot of different aspects. The customization of your profile, privacy settings, the ability to post links, and the search option to help maintain employee relationships makes it easier for end users to familiarize themselves with SharePoint and help them get acquainted with the SharePoint design.

Since most college students today are constantly attached to their cell phones, it was only logical to assume that SharePoint developers would eventually create mobile device compatibilities. These functionalities include most features of SharePoint and allow the user to access them on-the-go.

Implementing SharePoint 2010 Workspace Mobile allows the user to browse document libraries and lists right from your phone! You can also open, edit, and sync documents directly for viewing or editing in the various mobile office apps like Word 2010, Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010, and sync to SharePoint 2010. In addition to this, you can also perform a multitude of tasks such as people and document searches or receiving SMS alerts on SharePoint content. Since SharePoint 2010 supports accessing information from a web browser enabled mobile phone, it offers:

•Lightweight interface and navigation for accessing document libraries, lists, wikis, blogs, web part pages and LOB data
•Web companions for viewing Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents
•Mobile MySite for staying in touch with colleagues
•Mobile search experience for finding people, contact information, SharePoint content and finding data in custom databases
•SMS Alerts for changes to SharePoint content
•Features are customizable and, all the information is in SDK.

SharePoint also supports a wide variety of mobile browsers, which includes:

•IE Mobile on Windows Mobile 5/6/6.1/6.5
•Safari4 on iPhone 3G/S
•BlackBerry 4.x and newer versions
•Nokia S60
•NetFront 3.4, 3.5 and newer versions
•Opera Mobile 8.65 and newer versions
•Openwave 6.2, 7.0 and newer versions
 
SharePoint mobile device compatibilities out-of-the-box include web part pages, document and picture libraries, lists, blogs, wikis, office documents, search, and MySite. In order for SharePoint to be accessible  outside the corporate firewall, however, IT administrators must publish SharePoint via an SSL VPN gateway, use a mobile proxy, or expose SharePoint server to internet directly.

SharePoint's ability to be mobile within a cell phone could drastically increase the importance of using SharePoint in the collegiate environment. It is projected that SharePoint mobile capabilities will cause an increase in frequency of utilization in the classroom setting as well as relevancy in real world applications. Accessing SharePoint has never been so easy and versatile, and this is just one of the many SharePoint 2010 benefits. College students already carry their cell phones with them wherever they go, and now SharePoint can be with you on-the-go as well.

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/office2010/archive/2010/03/09/configure-sharepoint-server-2010-for-mobile-device-access.aspx