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Bamboo Solutions is a leading provider of Web Parts and Solution Accelerators for Microsoft SharePoint. In SharePoint Blank, a new employee (and a blank slate with regards to SharePoint) candidly blogs his day-to-day SharePoint learning, sharing his trials and triumphs.
July 2008 - Posts
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Along with several colleagues, today I attended part one of Bob Mixon's six-part webinar series on challenges related to findability in SharePoint environments. Today's findability focus was that tools and technology alone is not the answer, and addressed the notion that user actions –and user expectations– play a large role in the relative success of an intranet's findability.
Mixon defines findability as "the art and science of making information available to users," noting emphatically that this means "it's not just search." In addition to search, the key components of findability were identified as being: governance, architecture, design, and navigation. Mixon noted that most users tend to search on the internet, but resort to browsing (i.e., point and click) on intranets. Once thousands of sites/documents exist within an intranet, however, search becomes essential in that environment as well.
 At one hour in duration, Mixon's live presentation over his shared PowerPoint slides was both crisp and effective. So as to address in-session questions, Mixon's business partner Jeff Dalton manned the handy live chat module pictured at left. In response to one such question regarding the logistical challenges regarding providing end user training within large organizations, Dalton replied with some exciting news. It turns out that Mixon Consulting are working in partnership with Mark Miller at EndUserSharePoint to create a virtual training facility for end users, and they are anticipating September launch for the area. Well played, gentlemen!
As well, an in-session online poll regarding the relative success of search implementation within the organizations of attendees provided another clean method of interaction with –and feedback from– the audience without interrupting the flow of the presentation.
For information on registering for the remainder of the (free) series, please see Mixon's guest appearance in the Bamboo Team Blog. If you missed today's kickoff, you can get up to speed with the PowerPoint portion of the presentation via this Media page on the Mixon Consulting site.
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Since I was all but raised by Stan Lee, I simply couldn't resist that title, but let me say this up front: I'm not recommending that you should be working with spreadsheets in SharePoint. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who's less a fan of spreadsheets than me, and one of the aspects of SharePoint that I truly love is that by creatively leveraging lists, it's now possible to live a professional life largely free of the dreaded spreadsheet.
However, I learned in last week's Learning Tree seminar that it is not only possible to directly import Excel spreadsheets into SharePoint, but that unlike Word docs, they're not simply uploaded, but are converted into Web content within your SharePoint environment. How is this done? By leveraging the power of lists, naturally!
If you insist on bringing your Excel spreadsheets into SharePoint, doing so is a very simple process. From your SharePoint site, select Site Actions -> Create -> Custom Lists -> "Import Spreadsheet" hyperlink under the Custom Lists header. Once you've done so, and once you've assigned the name, description, and file location, you'll be presented with this popup:
From the dropdown menus on this popup, you'll select the Table Range (Range of Cells, Table Range, or Named Range), and Range Type (chosen from the available sheets in your spreadsheet). Having done this, your spreadsheet will be automatically converted into a SharePoint list, with the data displayed as requested.
It should be noted that there are some pretty serious limitations to working with spreadsheets in SharePoint, and chief among them is that high-level formulas will not translate to the SharePoint environment. Only basic formulas such as add and subtract are supported.
But if you've just got to have your spreadsheet info available in SharePoint --depending on the level of complexity-- SharePoint is there for you.
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If you follow the Bamboo Team Blog, you may have already seen a photo of our corporate portal strutting its stuff on my manager's iPhone. Since I'd read that post, it didn't come as a surprise to me to learn at the Learning Tree seminar that SharePoint sites were accessible via mobile devices, but it did come as a surprise to learn about the existence of out-of-the-box default optimization for mobile devices.
Unfortunately, thus far, I've gotten no love on the Bamboo portal front from my own smartphone, a 1st Gen Motorola Q. I haven't given up the fight though, and will report back should I meet success prior to upgrading my phone.
Leaving my personal smartphone woes aside, however, as mentioned above, the bit of new wisdom that I wanted to share is that (absent any device/configuration-related issues such as my own) not only should any SharePoint site be readily accessible via mobile devices, but they're meant to be optimized and formatted by default for mobile devices. All you need to do in order to take advantage of this native functionality is to add a /m/ at the end of the site url.
I say SharePoint sites are "meant to be" so optimized because, alas, my initial tests met with limited success. Hitting the Hawaiian Air site I mentioned last week, and appending /m/ on my phone, the resulting page looked exactly like the version I received without having added the /m/ at the end. More surprising still, while I can get to Bob Mixon's Mastering SharePoint site on my phone just fine, adding /m/ to the URL results in a frustrating "this page cannot be found error." (By the way, speaking of Mastering SharePoint, Bob just blogged this afternoon that he'll be kicking off a 7-part series of free webinars this Thursday morning ... check out the full details here.)
And so it seems that the built-in mobile functionality that I was so excited to learn about is hardly bulletproof. It'd be a powerful feature indeed if and when the bugs are ironed out, however, so here's hoping we'll see progress in that direction sooner than later ... especially as the adoption rate of smartphones only seems to be increasing.
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Continuing the things I learned at Thursday's Learning Tree seminar was the degree to which SharePoint respects permissions. Put another way, SharePoint is an absolute fiend for respecting permissions. I spent some time today poking around and looking at permissions on our portal by way of investigation.
Looks like when our portal was set up, it was set up so that permissions are inherited from parent folders or libraries. Which is to say that if you have full control (the SharePoint equivalent of an all access pass), you'll have unfettered access to all non-private content on the portal. An option pops up that says, "to manage permissions directly, click Edit Permissions from the Actions menu," but from what I can tell, it's not really an available option. I mean, I can click the Edit Permissions option, but I don't see the ability to manually say, "remove access to this specific file from this specific person." If I'm missing something here, kindly speak up and let me know, but this is the way things appear to be set up in a case of inherited permissions.
All of which leads me to believe that decisions to inherit permissions (or not) are decisions that get made at the site levels, and in our case these decisions were made (I'd guess) by our Sys Admin who, needless to say, knows a heck of a lot more than I do about setting up SharePoint environments. Your own portal mileage may vary. For that matter, if you're setting up your own portal from scratch, based on what I heard and saw in the seminar, you can even choose to set up your site such that no permissions are inherited site-wide, and thus all permissions can be set at either the area/collection, or at the individual document level. Which certainly has it's convenience in terms of allowing for flexibility of permissions, but it also has it's inconveniences, especially if you're managing content that shouldn't always (or usually) be visibe to everyone with site access.
Related knowledge attained at the seminar, which makes perfect sense when you think about it (but which I hadn't thought about), is that search within SharePoint also respects permissions. Your search results will only reflect those areas and documents contained within a site which you are authorized to view.
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I'm feeling the need to preface this particular post, the first example of some of the things I learned at yesterday's Learning Tree seminar, with a reminder that I've only been using SharePoint for a couple of months now. I suspect that some of the things that were new to me yesterday are likely to surprise even to some fellow novices ("Wow, he didn't know that? I knew that in my first week!"), but I'm equally certain that there are other newbies out there to whom this information will be beneficial.
In the case of this first example, I know that such will be the case, because I told two fellow (relative) newbies about this one earlier today, and it was news to both of them as well. To wit: if someone had asked me before yesterday if I knew if it was possible to drag and drop documents into a SharePoint library, I'd have had to confess that I didn't know, but that I'd be surprised to learn that it was possible based on what I've seen and done so far.
Well, not only is it possible, but it turns out there are (at least) two ways to accomplish this handy task. The first, and what I had assumed was the only, method is via a data viewer Web Part. This was the method that was used in the demo, and the one which I was planning to try for myself today, but a funny thing happened on my way to installing a data viewer: I discovered that it was an unnecessary step.
I had decided to take a look at the options under the "View: All Documents" menu documents page of our portal and, lo and behold, one of them is "Explorer view." I thought to myself, "gee, that sounds promising, let's give it a whirl." Selecting Explorer view, I was served up a login challenge for our portal, and upon entering my information, sure enough, the familiar Explorer window appeared as a popup ... with the contents of our SharePoint document library all present and accounted for. Once I had the Explorer window on the screen, I was able to successfully drag and drop a document file directly from my desktop into the SharePoint document library via the Explorer window ... without any need to upload the file!
So if, like me, you've found the necessity of uploaing files to a SharePoint document library to be a rather onerous task, and weren't aware of the drag and drop capability, join me in rousing chorus of "huzzahs!"
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As previously mentioned, today I attended Learning Tree's one-day seminar, "Empowering Your Organization with SharePoint." I'm going to say straightaway that I'm not even going to attempt to encapsulate the full day's learning in a single blog post. In fact, the seminar, as authored and presented by Dux Raymond Sy, provided such a wealth of new-to-me SharePoint information that I expect to be following through by demonstrating that newfound knowledge via hands-on applications for at least a week's worth of blog posts.
Before we commence with my following through and performing the SharePoint tricks I learned in today, however, I do want to mention that this was my first time attending a Learning Tree course, and I was mightily impressed. Between Dux's presentation skills (which are as engaging and naturalistic as is his writing style), to the very effective, very slick, and very proprietary MagnaLearn technology (which allows for two independent projection screens, and a touch-sensitive tablet which allows the instructor to mark up slides on the fly), the seminar came alive as a truly dynamic presentation. Copious instructor-led demos throughout the day served to both illustrate the information being presented, and to demonstrate SharePoint's general ease-of-use for end users. One of my favorite quotes of the day was in reference to how easy it is to pick up most out-of-the-box SharePoint features: "if you aimlessly bid on eBay, you're well qualified [to use SharePoint]."
Tomorrow I'll begin putting some of the practical learning of the day into action, but for today, I'll leave you with an interesting tidbit. As we know, though SharePoint is largely deployed for intranets, there are more and more internet-facing sites built on SharePoint. As I say, this in itself was not news to me. What was news to me, however, is that it's possible to build an internet-facing site that looks nothing like what we (OK, I) tend to expect a "SharePoint site" to look like. Don't believe me? Then get a load of these three Web sites (from company names which will be familiar to many), all three of which Dux assures us were built with SharePoint: Starbucks, Paul Mitchell, and Hawaiian Air. Pretty cool, no?
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If you've grown weary lately of my numerous mentions of the time I was logging in researching and assembling Bamboo Nation's new resource for project management, you may now rest assured that we'll be resuming (what passes for) regular service ‘round these parts directly.
I can make this promise for two reasons.
The first reason is that this very evening I flipped the switch on SharePoint for Project Management, our newest Bamboo Nation topic area. Our goal with this area is to create the definitive resource for using SharePoint for project management, and I certainly hope you'll agree that we're off to a great start. I can tell you now that the primary reason for my excitement over the site is that Dux Raymond Sy agreed to join us in the endeavor, serving as our resident expert on the subject matter. If you check out my Q&A with Dux, I expect that the reasons for my excitement will be immediately apparent, as will the fact that we couldn't have found a better fit, or a more capable partner for this topic area. It's been a pleasure working with Dux while putting the site together, and I'm very much looking forward to his regular contributions to the area going forward.
The second reason I'm able to promise a return to delivering your daily dose of my ascent of Mount SharePoint is actually related to the first reason. As previously mentioned, I'll be attending a one-day SharePoint seminar that Dux will be presenting tomorrow in his role as an instructor for our friends at Learning Tree. You can count on me to do my best to deliver the goods on what I learned upon my return.
As a final note, if you'll kindly indulge me one more plug ... if you're not a project manager yourself, but you have a friend or colleague who is project manager working with SharePoint, would you please be a pal and send them the SharePoint for Project Managers link? Cheers!
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For the past several weeks, Bamboo's COO has been conducting a series of twice-weekly presentations for employees on SharePoint architecture, with the idea being that the talks are being given as if for a CIO-level audience. I've been tempted to blog every one of these sessions, but today's offering featured a section that simply had to be captured for SharePoint Blank. Specifically, the portion regarding several applications (in addition to Office-related ones I've already covered) that essentially "plug and play" with SharePoint.
As we're in the final pressure-cooker period of readying our SharePoint for Project Management topic area for launch, I'm unable to start experimenting with any of these just yet, but that doesn't mean I have to wait to share them with you. (Also, feel free -always- to push me to return to a given topic that I've said I plan to revisit if I haven't gotten to it in due course.)
So without further ado, here are a few Microsoft products that I didn't know worked with SharePoint:
- You can store and share a OneNote library in SharePoint (via Office 2007) and, by doing so, even those without a OneNote "client" will be able to access your data;
- As with Outlook, you can take the contents of a SharePoint library offline via Groove; and
- You can combine SharePoint and Popfly to create two-way mash-ups ... which can then be featured just about anywhere you like, including your Vista sidebar.
I may not have the time to play with these new toys in SharePoint yet, but if you do, by all means, please report back!
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 Calendaring is on my mind for a variety of reasons today. Among the reasons are, a) the traumatic vanishing of all of her meetings from my wife's Outlook calendar, b) the impending deadline for the launch of our new Bamboo Nation topic area on using SharePoint for project management, and c) my general appreciation for calendaring in SharePoint, as a direct result of having made a number of new additions/changes to our team's editorial calendar today.
After a day that was almost entirely consumed with b), along with a little time spent offering consolation over a), I had cause to engage in c) at various points throughout the day. Since effective calendaring is obviously of paramount import to project management (and since project management in SharePoint is occupying a great deal of my mental space these days), it occurred to me after having added a new item to our editorial calendar this afternoon just how second nature calendaring in SharePoint has already become for me.
I think I've mentioned before that we're (naturally) using our own Calendar Plus Web Part within the Bamboo portal, but I have little doubt that the out-of-the-box SharePoint calendar is equally easy to use (albeit not as fully featured). It's the little things like the ease of adding a new list item to our editorial calendar, and having it immediately surface within the Calendar Plus (color-coded to reflect the nature of the task, natch) that one can easily take for granted in SharePoint.
So I just wanted to take a moment today to offer a shout out to all of the fine SharePoint developers in Redmond, Reston, Ho Chi Minh City, and everywhere else in the world. Thanks to you all for making the rest of our lives a little bit easier, and for helping make our workdays more efficient. Cheers!
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Earlier this week when I was seeking a new Web Part to sharpen my SharePoint claws on, I noticed a funny thing with the Colleague Tracker Web Part that I'd installed on my My Site a couple of weeks ago. When I had installed the Web Part, it showed my colleagues' status, and that was it. Suddenly, earlier this week, every one of my colleagues had a notation next to their name in Colleague Tracker saying, "New member of [company X]."
Following the [company X] hyperlink, I discovered that it pointed to a new project site on the portal that had been created by one of my colleagues. I asked him what the story was with the seeming addition of everyone in the company to that project, as if it were a new group or the like. He was unaware that the Colleague Tracker had even done that, seemingly of its own volition, and noted that it represented "Microsoft struggling with trying to be a social networking site."
My response was that, in my opinion, it was a worthy struggle so I heartily encourage those efforts. As big of a footprint that social networks have in this Web 2.0 world, there's always room for improvement and innovation and, needless to say, I'm all for seeing such innovations take place within SharePoint.
I hadn't really thought much about that exchange from earlier in the week until I hit my My Site a little while ago, saw that every employee at Bamboo is now a "New member of [company Y]," and just had to smile ... because [company Y] represents a new project site created by the same employee of whom I'm speaking.
That's not all though. There's also a useful, and new (to me) feature evidenced within the Colleague Tracker, and it's one which also appears to be pulling colleague information from elsewhere ... possibly from their own My Site in this case. Anyway, let's just say that I have Colleague Tracker to thank for being able to say, "hey, Lily, have a happy birthday on Sunday!"
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Guilt is a terrible thing, and I've been feeling guilty again of late since I haven't been able to deliver a steady stream of hands-on SharePoint learning updates.
 I just found out today that, thanks to our good friends over at Learning Tree, I can promise you that I will be ingesting a wealth of new SharePoint information just one week from today. I can make that promise because I'll be attending Learning Tree's one-day seminar on SharePoint right here in Reston, VA. The seminar focuses on the enterprise experience, and is presented as an executive briefing on the benefits of SharePoint deployment within an organization. Which is to say that while it won't be a hands-on, knee-deep in code type of technical course, it will provide me with new perspectives on SharePoint in general, along with what I have no doubt will prove to be a boatload of blog-worthy information.
Best of all, the seminar is being conducted by Dux Raymond Sy, whose SharePoint blog I plugged a few weeks ago in this space, and who is also a full-fledged member of Bamboo Nation ... and from whom you'll be hearing a lot more very soon within Bamboo Nation. (He wrote, teasingly, while realizing that particularly perceptive readers may be able to make some educated guesses as to what I'm referring. Stay tuned!)
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I should begin by saying that the day after I first mentioned in this space that SharePoint Magazine was coming soon, a colleague came by and asked if I knew that they'd reached out to us with interest in doing a feature on MashPoint. Nope, it was pure coincidence that I mentioned the magazine, but I'd say that certainly qualifies as a happy accident in the (relatively) small world of the SharePoint ecosphere!
The news of the day, however, is that SharePoint Magazine hit the virtual stands today.
My favorite feature of the debut edition is the first of a series of articles by Paul Culmsee using the leave (read: vacation) form as an example of the many facets of SharePoint functionality, including ease-of-use, workflow, and InfoPath. This article is filed under the "Technical" category of the site, but even if you're a non-technical sort, don't be alarmed -- you're in good hands with Culmsee, who writes with a deft, conversational flair, and liberally laces his article with amusing commentary. (To say nothing of his rather bold appropriation of copyrighted characters in his use case ... from one blogger to another, I'd advise caution on that score!)
Straight off, upon visiting the site, I was happy to see a nifty interview with Joel Oleson, SharePoint guru and member of Bamboo's Technical Advisory Board. That interview, conducted by Arno Nel, editor of the magazine, is the first offering in their "People" category. Kudos on a fine choice of whom to spotlight in the first issue!
In their "Products" category, Laura Farrelly, Director of Marketing for Newsgator describes their Social Sites offering, focusing on the product's integration with SharePoint. Intriguingly described as a manner of providing "Facebook for the Enterprise," there are some very cool features in this offering, and I will definitely plan on circling back to check out this product with as soon as time permits.
Among the other features in this first edition of the magazine is what currently amounts to a placeholder for Community, though I expect that area will be up and running in short order now that the site is live. Based on this initial outing, it looks like SharePoint Magazine promises to be a worthy addition to the existing cyber-clubhouses for the SharePoint set, so why not check it out and see for yourself?
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I had the best of intentions to report on some honest-to-goodness hands-on SharePoint learning today. Really, I did. I had intended to deliver another entry in my exciting "Pimp my My Site" series, and when I saw the "Bamboo Book Library Web Part," as a My Site option, I knew I'd found my subject. As a voracious reader, the name of this particular Web Part sang an irresistible Siren song to me. Alas, much like the unfortunate sailors of myth who heeded the song of the Sirens, I ended up crashed upon the rocks. This time, however, my failure wasn't a result of my own SharePoint limitations but was, in fact, environment-based.
Allow me to back up a little before I explain. When I came in for my interviews at Bamboo, two of the areas of the office that impressed me right away were book-related. One such area was the practically wall-sized library of books (pictured at left) on SharePoint, applications, languages and the like. I think there may have even been some boxes at the front desk from Amazon that had just been delivered that day (such Amazon shipments are a near-daily occurrence). The availability of such a library really can't possibly be overstated, and seeing this one was most impressive.
As a passionate reader (and bibliophile) of non-technical subject matter, however, there was another, separate bookshelf in the office that also attracted me. So much so that I had to exert a fair amount of willpower to not comb through its shelves on that day I came in to interview. You see, this bookcase was filled with the sort of books that line several walls in my home: mostly (but not entirely) fiction, from a variety of genres, including mystery/crime, science fiction, thrillers, and historical fiction, and more.
 Was it an accident that, on my first day of work, when directed to choose an office, I happened to choose the one right next to this latter bookcase? No, it was not.
And so, bearing all of this in mind, and given the fact that I had helped myself to a book from the library, when I saw the Bamboo Book Library Web Part, I thought, "ooh, I need this!" I was also slightly worried that I had committed a faux pas by having not "officially" checked a book out of the "library system." So I went ahead and added the Book Library Web Part to my My Site, and entered in my standard site login information (not something I'd seen before in the Web Part configuration process) as my "SharePoint account," and eagerly applied the changes to the site.
And sure enough, I had this nifty little Web Part in place on my My Site ... except all it generated was an error when I tried to use it. So I had to raise my hand and ask for help (contrary to my general inclination to blunder through these challenges on my own), and guess what? Turns out that the Book Library Web Part is an outdated Web Part ... it was built for internal use prior to the release of (and Bamboo's move to) MOSS, and its usefulness was deemed to have been outlived by the time we switched to MOSS, and so it's no longer supported.
But it does bring to mind the thought that SharePoint being, at heart, a document management system, and books being, well, documents ... that SharePoint could possibly be one heck of a killer app for libraries, no?
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Since I last wrote about this fall's inaugural SharePoint Best Practices conference, there's been a great deal of activity on that score, so it feels like it's time for an update.
First, we're excited that the last few days have seen our first two guest bloggers over in the Bamboo Team Blog. Conference speakers, SharePoint server MVPs, and authors of SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices (from Microsoft Press), Ben Curry and Bill English have each written a guest blog entry for us. Head on over to the Team Blog to read Ben's overview of the mission of the Best Practices conference, and Bill's post on the importance of strong information architecture in a SharePoint environment.
Bamboo is proud to announce that our own Wes Bryan and Jonas Nilsson have been added to the list of confirmed event speakers. A list which, by the way, has grown considerably since I last mentioned it. As well, Bamboo has joined the conference as a Gold-level partner, throwing our full support behind the notion of a best practices summit.
All of which makes me extra-salty that I won't be able to attend the conference myself (due to long-standing vacation plans). There is, however, some very exciting news which is going a long way towards taking the sting out of my not being able to attend the conference. News which will have direct bearing on the content and tone of SharePoint Blank beginning four weeks from today: I will be attending Mindsharp's three-day, hands-on SharePoint Power End User training course here in Washington, D.C.!
You better believe that I'll be blogging all about that glorious learning experience in this space.
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I mentioned last week that there seem to be more and more online SharePoint communities cropping up every day (which, to my mind, can only be a good thing). Well, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that our pal Bob Mixon (who, by the way, is a member of Bamboo's Technical Advisory Board) has just announced the launch of his new Mastering SharePoint community.
Now I should also say that Bob, who is a three-time Microsoft MVP for SharePoint, is a true SharePoint Guru and, as such, he runs with the SharePoint big dogs. Being the mere pup that I am, my own victories on the road to SharePoint mastery (um, mastery as an end user, that is) take place at a much more, let's say pedestrian pace.
Even so, I find it to be both fun and rewarding to regularly read what the SharePoint experts are blogging about, and to occasionally eavesdrop on their forum discussions. Even when the topics under discussion are almost entirely over my head, I like to think that some small amount of their knowledge gets transferred, as if via osmosis.
And so, it is in the spirit of promoting the inreased acquisition of SharePoint knowledge for all that I shall continue to drop in on, and occasionally provide shout-outs to, the true masters of their SharePoint domain within the community. And I humbly suggest that if you're interested in learning more about what makes SharePoint tick --from the folks who already know the answers, as opposed to my own fumblings around in the dark-- that you should also read widely within the SharePoint blogosphere.
Onward to SharePoint mastery!
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