SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome

I finished reading a great article about the "SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome". These are valuable thoughts on a subject that is not exclusive to SharePointers, but to many areas in IT and life. The 5th point is a must!

Read it here.

I'll have to say I don't feel I am being affected by that syndrome, as I believe I have good coping mechanisms for all of the mentioned causes.

Yet another quick SharePoint Intranet checklist

I was checking an old blog post (Ago/09) from Joel Oleson (here) and the 10 points he raised back then remain current. It's about why your SharePoint deployment may be falling short. Here's a quick list to wrap his comments, with my own tweaking:

1. Easy access, everywhere (the mobile and tablet market have gone huge)
2. My Sites up and running
3. Rich, complete and editable User Profiles
4. Enhancing search with people and other systems
5. Using blogs and wikis (enhanced editions)
6. Presence enabled
7. Easy navigation (browsing and searching)
8. Avoid junk by expiring content, sites, lists, documents...
9. Use tagging, rating and useful metadata
10. Keep information dynamic and updated

There are some points more important than others, of course. But all of them should be in the back of your mind, whether you are planing a deployment of SharePoint, or if one is already up and running, but some of these areas have not been well thought or implemented.

Technical diagrams for SharePoint 2010

Whether you are working on your topology or the logical architecture of your solution, these resources from Microsoft may help you and make your job easier. Common example solution diagrams are provided and you can adapt and expand according to your specific scenario. Or use them just as guidance.

Provided as visio files for editing and also pdf for viewing, you can find the diagrams here.

Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SPS2010

Microsoft released a nifty tool to help developers build PowerShell commands. It was built using Silverlight and allows you to easily drag and drop commands (nouns and verbs) to a design area, where you can see the API documentation and fill the necessary and optional parameters in a GUI. A step in the right way.

You can find it here.

Usability in SharePoint

Nowadays, I believe developer teams are more and more used to the concept and importance of usability and design. Apple has clearly shown the way. Microsoft is adjusting to the new reality (i.e. Windows 8 Metro UI), but SharePoint still needs a lot of work.

Yes, I know, SharePoint is just a platform and can be built upon, which is great. But the out-of-the-box functionality should always provide not only a good, but a great experience for the user. Ribbon and having most actions asynchronous was just the first step. The overall usability needs a push.

I just finished reading a great article on EndUserSharePoint, Usability Issues in SharePoint 2010 My Sites: Social Design Patterns and Standards, by Marcy Kellar and Chris Poteet. Highly recommended!

SharePoint Calendar with Outlook Reminders

This is a standard requirement, one that SharePoint does not fulfill out of the box.

All the people out there that are using calendars and relying on them for their daily schedule, know that reminders are a central option. Even those (like me) who use it frequently but do not depend on it on a daily basis, have that one task they have to do every month, when the Outlook reminder rings the bell.

So, telling users how great it is to have a common calendar in SharePoint and then telling them "No, there are no reminders, but you can copy-paste the event to your personal calendar" is a no-no. There are solutions, not all of them are pretty or easy as they should. The one I will present is my preferred one. Ultimately, you will have a SharePoint RSS feed exposed in Outlook with reminders whenever something pops up. And something also needs to be done to have that RSS feed being refreshed more than once an hour.

This solution came together from a lot of different sources of information, improvements and workarounds users found for each specific aspect they needed to solve in SharePoint. But no one actually set a complete guide and how-to, for something I believe is a very common requirement. So, that's what I will do, in 3 steps.

Requirements:

1. Have a new field while adding a new event to the calendar, where users set their reminder date;
2. Have Outlook popping reminders up, when that date is reached.

Solution:

• Step 1: Create the "Reminder date" field and the "Outlook reminders" view
• Step 2: Configure the RSS feed in Outlook with reminders
• Step 3: Getting a faster refresh on the RSS feed

Step 1: Create the "Reminder date" field and the "Outlook reminders" view

You should start by reading the first part of the great post by Paul Liebrand, it's in here. It shows how to create the field, add the view and get the RSS feed Url.

In my specific scenario, I made some changes:

• The field is not calculated, it is user defined;
• The view shows all the past reminders, not just the ones from today;
• The view works with the time also, not just the date.

Follow these steps:

• Create the field with type "Date and Time";
• Change the view's filter from "is equal to" to "is less than or equal to";
• Edit the view with SharePoint Designer to include the option "IncludeTimeValue" in the filter, as described by Nick Grattan, in here.

Step 2: Configure the RSS feed in Outlook with reminders

Add the feed and then configure a rule so that Outlook warns you when a new item arrives. Just follow the second part of Paul Liebrand's article, all in there, step by step.

Step 3: Getting a faster refresh on the RSS feed

Having reminders being refresh once an hour is not OK. So there is a solution for it, disabling the update limit and creating a new send/receive group with a custom schedule for the updates (5 minutes in my case). I got this information here. The first step, you can do it after adding the feed, by going to "Account Settings > RSS Feeds > Change".

There you go!

SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata Columns problems

Beware!

Managed Metadata Columns are a good addition to SharePoint, but the integration with the rest of the products and features is still very scarce. Multiple things may go wrong.

The project I'm working on had a column which would be better off with Managed Metadata, and not a Choice field. I've been searching and searching, drilling and drilling, and can't make it work correctly. I navigate through the term set but the value never gets saved. Can't really tell why.

But I did find many caveats while searching for information: it will not work with Workspace, InfoPath, Datasheet View, "Begins with" and "Contains" filters in Views and Calculated Fields. Also, they'll be hard to use in SharePoint Designer Workflows. And if your root site uses the Blank template, the hidden feature supporting this functionality will not be activated by default.

All the info here and here.

SharePoint 2010 Tip #5: editing the NewForm.aspx in a list

If you need to edit the NewForm.aspx in a list and open it in SharePoint Designer, in advanced mode, you will notice that the webpart where the item adding happens is not configurable. It just displays a sample of what you'll get rendered in the page.

The reason for this is the default webpart used here is from the type ListFormWebPart, whose behavior is to automatically render the fields and controls needed according to the list definition. No customization here.

You'll need to add the DataFormWebPart, where these fields and controls will be fetched directly into your aspx page and can be edited. To do it, just go to "Insert > SharePoint > Custom List Form..." and choose your list, content type and the action you want to perform (new, edit, display). The old webpart can be deleted.

Warning: new fields will not be added automatically to this webpart.

SharePoint 2010 Tip #4: "Columns that require data are not included" in Datasheet View

If you have this error and are absolutely sure you are filling every required field, then this may well be the reason. If you activate the option to manage content types in a list and then change the type of one of the columns in the Content Type from Required to Optional/Hidden, it will erroneously leave the list field as required.
You must go to the field definition in the list and set it correctly.

SharePoint 2010 Tip #3: Workflow not starting automatically

This one is a classic. If you are logged in with the System Account, among other things, workflows do not get started automatically with your actions, such as creating a new item or editing an existing one. You have to use a different account.