Introduction to SharePoint 2013 with Videos

Now the SharePoint 2013 is out some good learning material has started to appear. A good set of videos on SharePoint 2013:

1. Introduction to Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 Development

2. SharePoint 2013 app model for developers

3. SharePoint 2013 developer tools

4. Create hosted apps in SharePoint 2013

5. Create cloud-hosted apps for SharePoint 2013

6. SharePoint 2013 client object model (CSOM) and REST APIs

7. OAuth and application identity in SharePoint 2013

8. Develop SharePoint 2013 remote event receivers

9. Workflow changes and features in SharePoint 2013

10. Business connectivity services changes in SharePoint 2013

11. Search features and changes in SharePoint 2013

12. Enterprise content management changes in SharePoint 2013

13. Social features in SharePoint 2013

14. Office services in SharePoint 2013

15. Create mobile apps for SharePoint 2013

Crawled Properties And Managed Properties

Crawled Properties and Managed Properties are very basic SharePoint concepts but they are core to SharePoint Search. Many times I have seen people are not clear with this so I will try to explain them in a simple manner.

As we all know that SharePoint can crawl data from different sources. The data in these various source system have metadata which can have different name but it refers to the same information. As an example different systems can store the information about the Author in various system with the name as Author, Created By, Writer, Owner, and in case of emails it stored in the field From. But all these field represent the same information which represent who has created this.

Now when SharePoint crawl these various system all these properties become Crawled Properties. In SharePoint we can group all these Crawled Properties under one Managed Property:

The below figure will help you to understand the above:

Also one crawled property can be part of multiple Managed Properties.

Now this Managed Property can be used in scopes, refiners etc. This simplifies the whole management of the Metadata with SharePoint search. 

Integrating LinkedIn with SharePoint Sites

These days LinkedIn is one of the most important social networking site for professionals. It has got some very useful information and now it is easy to display this information in the SharePoint site.

LinkedIn site provide plugin which we can utilize to display information from the site. The LinkedIn plugin are available @ https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins

The few plugin which are available are:
Apply with LinkedIn: Make it easy for candidates to apply for your jobs using their LinkedIn profiles.
Share on LinkedIn: Enable users to share your website with LinkedIn’s professional audience, and drive traffic back to your site.
Member Profile: Bring LinkedIn member profiles to your site to help users discover common professional connections.
Company Insider: Enhance your content and show rich personalized insights about companies featured on your site.
Company Profile: Bring LinkedIn company profiles to your site to display key company information at-a-glance.
Full Member Profile: Bring full LinkedIn profiles to your site to display a person’s professional background at-a-glance.
Recommend with LinkedIn: Enable users to recommend your products and services to LinkedIn's professional audience, and drive traffic back to your site.
Jobs You May Be Interested In: Boost site engagement with personalized job listings.
Follow Company Plugin: Make it easy for prospective customers, job-seekers, and business partners to engage with your company.
Sign In with LinkedIn: Make it easier for people to sign in or register with your site by using their LinkedIn identity.

Now I will use the Company Profile Plugin and display the information on the SharePoint Site. To do this we will the following steps:

1. I will get the code by clicking on Get It Button.

2. Once we click on the Get It it allows to select the company name and change the few properties:

I have selected the company as Microsoft to show the information. Now we will get the code by clicking the Get Code button.

3. Once we have the code we will copy this in a notepad file and save it in a document library.

4. Now we just need to insert a content editor web part in any SharePoint Page and refer the link in the web part. With this it will show the information like below:

Shallow Copy with RBS in SharePoint 2010 SP1

As we all know SharePoint 2010 allows the use of RBS (Remote Blob Storage). RBS allows to store unstructured data (Documents, PPT etc) in File System while the structured data (metadata, list data) is stored in SQL Content DB thus allowing to effectively manage the large system. Generally the unstructured data is a major portion of total data in any SharePoint deployments (up to 80%) so RBS becomes a very effective tool when we need to manage a large SharePoint deployments.

But with RBS we can face a problems when we need to migrate Site Collection from one Content DB to another. A new feature with SharePoint 2010 SP1 allows to move the Structured Data (stored in SQL DB) from one Content DB to another Content DB without really migrating the Unstructured Data. This requires that both the Source and Destination Content DB uses the same Blob Storage:

The below figures explains the Shallow Copy with SharePoint 2010:

The advantage of Shallow copying is that it is much faster. It is quite seamless and you can move the site collections between Content DB's without much hassles.

There is another one kind of migration with RBS which is there. That is called Deep Copy. In that the Unstructured Data also moves between the BLOB stores:

 Hope you find it useful :)

Good Collection on How To Videos on SharePoint 2010

Good Collection on How To Videos on SharePoint. Each video shows a small practical tasks which we need to perform in day to day life of SharePoint:

SharePoint 2010 Central Administration:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/video/sharepoint-2010-central-administration

Backup and Restore a SharePoint 2010 Site Collection:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/ff679932.aspx

Configure an Alternate Access Mapping in SharePoint 2010:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/video/ff679917

How to Enable emails in SharePoint 2010 Lists:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/video/ff679958

Using the SharePoint 2010 Managed MetaData Service:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sharepoint/ff394027.aspx

Outlook and SharePoint People Search:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/video/danstolts-sharepoint-and-office-2010-part-i-an-inside-look-at-outlook-and-sharepoint-people-search

PivotTables and SharePoint BI Integration:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/video/danstolts-sharepoint-and-office-2010-part-ii-an-inside-look-at-pivottables-and-sharepoint-bi-integration

SharePoint-PowerPoint-Word:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/video/dan-stolts-sharepoint-and-office-2010-part-iii-a-glance-at-sharepoint-powerpoint-word

Identifying the Site Template for a SharePoint Site

I was doing a migration project where we need to analyse a quite a few sites and we did not have much information. We need to find the type of template which was used to create the SharePoint site. One of the easiest way which I could find which does not involve any code is looking the source code of the site.

Once we open the source code then we need to search the parameter g_wsaSiteTemplateId. SharePoint stores the site template name in this variable:

This template name is the internal name of the Template. There is a mapping between this internal name and the name shown on the UI while creating Site Collection. There is a comprehensive list of all the SharePoint site templates available @ Site Templates in SharePoint 2010

India on Top in Google for searching SharePoint

Found an interesting thing, India is in the top position among all the countries for all the searches on SharePoint originating from Google. Also from the data taken for last 12 months top four slots are taken by Indian Cities which are Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai and Pune:

See some interesting trends @ http://www.google.com/trends

Good Collection of SharePoint Sites

Found a good link showing the collection of SharePoint sites on Internet:

http://www.wssdemo.com/livepivot/

Learning Resources for InfoPath 2010

I am consolidating few good resources for learning InfoPath 2010.

Getting Started:

What's new in InfoPath 2010

Basic tasks in InfoPath 2010

Introduction to designing a form in InfoPath 2010

InfoPath 2010: Menu to ribbon reference workbook

Videos:


Customize a SharePoint List Form using InfoPath 2010

Create tabbed navigation using picture button controls

Introduction to Sandboxed Solutions - Sort data in repeating tables using managed code

Create a SharePoint list using InfoPath 2010

Lab: 

Customizing SharePoint List Forms in InfoPath 2010

Classes:

An Introduction to SharePoint Applications using InfoPath 2010

Building SharePoint Applications with InfoPath 2010

Form-Driven Mashups using InfoPath and SharePoint 2010

InfoPath 2010 - Best practices in Form Design

Few Tips to improve Business Productivity with SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010

As we all know that SharePoint and Office Product very well together and you can improve the efficiency with the following tips. If you co-relate these tips where SharePoint is used as Project Management Tool, we can better visualize the scenario and these tips. For these tips I am using SharePoint 2010 with Office 2010.

Tip#1 Business Users create lot of document in Office Products and then upload them in the Document Library  and then fill the metadata associated with the document. This is a multi step process. This can be simplified in 1 step with the following:

So relating to our Project Management Sample, users create status report every week based on a defined template and then upload them in SharePoint and apply the metadata. This can be simplified by creating a Content Type with the proper Template and metadata (represented through Site Columns) and then associating it to the document library for Status Reports. Now once this is done Business Users simply needs to go to the Document Library and click on the Connect to Office Button and select the Add to SharePoint Sites Option.

This will add that document library in the Word 2010 and when users needs to create a Status Report they will click on the icon shown like below:

This will show all the Content Types which are associated with that Document Library and for our specific need will select the Status Report Template.

This will open the associated template and also the metadata which can be filled.

Now once the user saves these reports, they will be directly saved in the document library.

Tip#2 For managing the projects we use Calendars, Contacts and Tasks which are OOB features of a SharePoint Site. Now if a user is working in multiple projects it would be difficult for him to go into these various sites and track these. SharePoint 2010 provides excellent integration with Outlook 2010 and these things can be surfaced directly in the user Outlook.

So now I will demonstrate that the tasks created in SharePoint and then surface them in the Outlook. To do so simply the user needs to click on the Connect to Outlook button as shown:

This will give 3 alerts which the user needs say Yes and with that all the tasks will be surfaced in the Outlook:

This will show all the tasks irrespective to whether they are assigned to current user. Now a view also can be created where user can see the tasks which are assigned to him.

Tip#3
If we need to create presentation frequently from a set of defined set of slides Slides Library can be a good option which allows the business users to create Slides in a simple manner. SharePoint 2010 has introduced Slide Library as a new type of document library. When we upload any presentation with multiple slides it stores all of them as separate slide, later a user can select a specific set of slides and create presentations quickly. Also if later these slides are changed in the slides library and a presentation is created using these slides users will be notified for the changes in the original presentation. 

Refreshing the WebParts Automatically on a Regular Interval

I was working on requirements to create a Dashboard kind of functionality for the Application Admins where data from several Lists and Document Libraries needs to come. Since this application involves high transactions so all these lists keep updated frequently. On this dashboard we are showing the data from these various lists using the list view web parts. The requirement was that we need to refresh these Web Part on a continuous basis automatically so that the users do not need to refresh the pages manually.

This is possible to do OOB with the List/Document Library Web Part in SharePoint 2010 - a really amazing feature. Now these Web Parts supports Ajax Feature with that we can refresh only these Web Parts without refreshing the whole Page. We can also configure these Web Parts to refresh automatically on a set interval without refreshing the whole page on which they are placed.

Below is all the new options which we have with these Web Parts:

To enable these web parts to automatically load the data we need to work with the two properties highlighted in the above picture.

The Enable Asynchronous Automatic Refresh option allows the web  parts to refresh at the interval which you can configure from the Automatic Refreshing Interval field. By default this value is set to to 60 Seconds but you can change this value as per your needs.

The other interesting thing is Show Manual Refresh Button. This allows you to have a additional refresh button on the web part allowing you to refresh only the Web Part manually rather than the whole page.

We can also improve the initial page load time with the option Enable Asynchronous Load. If we have multiple web parts on the page this is good option to be enabled. Once we enable it the Web Part will initially be displayed without any data in it. But once the page is loaded, the Web Part will asynchronously get the data and display. So all this data will be loaded once the page is loaded decreasing the initial page load time.

Step by Step Learning for Workflow using SharePoint Designer 2010

Helpful links to create workflow using SharePoint Designer 2010:

1. Understanding Workflow Conditions in SharePoint Designer 2010

2. Understanding Workflow actions in SharePoint Designer 2010

3. Introduction to designing and customizing workflows using SharePoint Designer 2010

4. How to create an approval workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010

5. Understand approval workflows in SharePoint 2010

6. Using Task Process Editor for approval workflows

7. How to transfer workflows between SharePoint Designer and Visio

8. Publish globally reusable workflows in SharePoint Designer 2010

9. Customize workflow forms using InfoPath 2010