eGroup’s SharePoint expert, Brad Shannon, was recently quoted in SearchContentManagement’s article covering SharePoint upgrades, “SharePoint upgrade requires sharp focus on planning, user preparation.” His advice on how to better prepare for an upgrade is pasted below.

Give the entire piece a read and then start documenting your infrastructure!

A company’s technology infrastructure also needs to be prepared for upgrading to a new version of SharePoint, and as part of that process, it’s important to document the existing features and services in a SharePoint environment as well as the new ones that will be deployed in the upgrade, said Brad Shannon, an application services engineer at eGroup, a technology consultancy in Mount Pleasant, S.C.

“If you don’t know what you have in your environment, you’re going to find out the hard way,” Shannon said, explaining that the more detailed the documentation of the current environment is, the better an organization can prepare for the SharePoint upgrade.

Companies should also start with a clean SharePoint farm, Shannon advised. “That means you don’t have anything on the farm you don’t need,” he said. Sometimes SharePoint systems will include items used for testing purposes that were never fully deployed or removed. Leaving them in place can create more work for SharePoint administrators, Shannon said.

The post eGroup Quoted: SharePoint upgrade requires sharp focus on planning, user preparation appeared first on eGroup.

So, with respect to SharePoint, driving user adoption is one of the most important, but also one of the most difficult tasks that a SharePoint architect/administrator has. You could even say that it is the single most important task when designing/deploying SharePoint. Simply because it drives everything else. If the deployment doesn’t function correctly, then user adoption will suffer. If it is difficult to navigate or understand, then user adoption will suffer.

Couple all of these factors together and it will be difficult to meet your SharePoint project success metrics. Here are some key areas that I like to focus on when planning for user adoption:

1. Familiar

In order to properly design a SharePoint deployment, you must think like an end user. And not just any end user…YOUR end users. Every corporate IT environment is unique.

How do your users access shared documents?
How do they access their personal documents?
How do they access reports?
How do they share ideas?

These are all key questions that need to be asked. A survey of a portion of your users probably wouldn’t hurt either.  The closer you can make accessing documents and information to the way your users are familiar with will help tremendously with user adoption!  For example, if your users are used to the traditional network share filled with folders, then a single document library may work best.  If the folder structure is broken out by department already, then setting up separate document libraries for each department may be best.

2. Functional

One of the biggest reasons for choosing SharePoint that I hear is for ‘document sharing’. But, why use SharePoint? Why not just use a network share or maybe even a cloud based sharing solution? These are common questions and they are completely understandable. However, it shows a lack of understanding of the key enterprise features that SharePoint offers. Here are some key features that users should be well trained on prior to deployment so they fully understand how to use the tool.

Versioning
Permissions
Navigation
Workflows
Enterprise Search
Content Types and Document Templates

These are just some examples of features that most users find indispensable. So make sure you engage and educate them prior to going live with the deployment.

3. Automation

Automation is key when implementing SharePoint as well because it makes refusing to use SharePoint very difficult to justify. Automating processes such as HR On-boarding, Capital Purchasing Approval, Information Requests, IT Help Desk Ticketing, and so much more have huge ROI potential! A simple, high-level review of ‘painful’ processes that departments have to deal with could reveal perfect use-cases for automation.

Have you deployed SharePoint in your business?  If so, what is your user adoption rate?  What could make it better?  If you haven’t deployed it, but would like to, did this post help give you a good idea on how to drive adoption? Let us know how we can help!  Contact eGroup’s Application Services Team at ApplicationServices@eGroup-us.com for more information.

The post Overcoming SharePoint’s Achilles Heel: User Adoption appeared first on eGroup.

Due to heavy load, the latest workflow operation has been queued. It will attempt to resume at a later time

This is because SharePoint has a default limit of 15 workflows that can run at the same time. If you didn’t know, there are quite a few workflows that run in the background all the time.  There are 2 main settings that you should be concerned with. The first is the WorkflowPostponeThreshold which controls how many workflows can execute at a time. The default is 15 and you can run this command in the SharePoint 2010 Management console to see what your setting is…

Get-SPFarmConfig | Select WorkflowPostponeThreshold

To change this setting, modify the number in the following statement to fit your needs and run in the same console…

Set-SPFarmConfig -WorkflowPostponeThreshold 75

The other setting is the WorkflowBatchSize which controls how many workflows can be in the ‘queue’ at a time. The queue is basically a ‘bucket’ of workflows that are waiting for the timer service to execute them. To see what your setting is, run the following command in the SharePoint 2010 Management console…

Get-SPFarmConfig | Select WorkflowBatchSize

To change this setting, modify the number in the following statement to fit your needs and run in the same console…

Set-SPFarmConfig -WorkflowBatchSize 200

This works for 3rd party workflows, like Nintex too! Be sure to monitor your servers and their performance to make sure you aren’t overwhelming your environment.

The post SharePoint: Workflow Error – Due to Heavy Load appeared first on eGroup.

• Log in to Central Administration
• Go to Manage Service Applications
• Click on your User Profile Service Application
• Click on ‘Manage User Properties’
• Scroll down the list of properties until you see the one you want to map and edit it.
• On the ‘Edit User Profile Property’ page, scroll to the bottom until you see the ‘Property Mapping for Synchronization’ section.
• If this section has the correct mapping listed then should go to Step 10.  If nothing is listed, then please proceed to the next step.
• The next section is the ‘Add New Mapping’ section.  Select the Source, Attribute, and Direction of the new mapping and click ‘Add’.  If no sources are available, ensure that you have setup the connection to your active directory instance.
• Once successfully added, click ‘OK’
• Go back to the User Profile Service Application page and start a Full Synchronization.
  • Start Profile Synchronization
  • Select ‘Start Full Synchronization’ and click ‘OK’.
  • Once the synchronization has completed, go to ‘Manage User Profiles’.
  • Find the name of the user you want to check for the imported attribute and choose ‘Edit My Profile’
  • Scroll down to the property that you imported and verify that the correct data is there.

The post SharePoint 2010: Map AD Profile Attribute to User Profile Property appeared first on eGroup.

In order for your SharePoint site to support HTML5, you need to edit your Master Page, and do the following…

• Change the DOCTYPE tag to this: <!DOCTYPE html>
• Remove the following tag: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=8″>

After doing this, you can put HTML5 specific markup tags (canvas, etc) in your site.  For an example of a SharePoint site using HTML5, check out the following link…

http://www.sharepointisawesome.com

If you view the site with a browser that supports HTML5 (IE9+, Chrome, etc), then you should see a video.  However, if you open the site in a non-HTML5 browser or put IE9 into IE8 compatibility mode, the video disappears.

Now that you know how easy it is to make SharePoint HTML5-friendly, go download the HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio 2008-2010 and start coding!

The post SHAREPOINT 2010: HTML5 appeared first on eGroup.

The Document ID feature adds a new column to all document libraries in the site where the feature is activated, and then assigns a random string to each document.  For example…

http://MySharePointSite/SharedDocuments/FolderLevel1/Subfolder 1/MyDocument.docx

becomes…

http://MySharePointSite/_layouts/DocIdRedir.aspx?ID=TESTDOC43242-1-1

If you look at the end of the 2nd URL, you will notice ‘TESTDOC’ at the beginning of the Doc ID.  This is configurable.  SharePoint can generate a completely random ID or a prefix can be defined in Site Settings.

The post SHAREPOINT 2010: PERSISTENT LINKING AND THE DOCUMENT ID FEATURE appeared first on eGroup.

• Smaller database size
• Faster databases (Especially with caching!)
• When storing the files on disk, you could utilize dedupe technology to reduce the amount of space your files take up! This is huge!

The post SHAREPOINT 2010: THE BLOB appeared first on eGroup.

With this update, Microsoft is changing how it deploys updates for all Office Server products.  There is now ONE update file for all languages and SharePoint products.  This means that if you are running WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, SharePoint Foundation, SharePoint 2010 Server, or Project…you just need to download one file.  Much more convenient!

Please note: You must have Service Pack 1 installed before installing this update.

You can get more information on this release and links to the downloads on Stefan Gobner’s blog here.

Here is a list of fixes from the SharePoint 2010 Server KB2553048 page…

• The Activity Feed displays incorrect colleague information in SharePoint Server 2010. This issue specifically occurs when the colleagues are added through the User Profile Change Job in the User Profile Application.
• Assume that you plan to configure a user profile connection in SharePoint Server 2010. However, you cannot add a new mapping for case-sensitive string type attributes.
• Assume that you plan to configure a user profile connection in SharePoint Server 2010. However, you cannot add a new mapping for print case string type attributes.
• Consider the following scenario:
  • An Active Directory group has a name that is longer than 255 characters.
  • You create an AD synchronization connection to the AD group in SharePoint Server 2010.
  • You perform a full synchronization.

  In this scenario, the full synchronization does not finish successfully.

• Consider the following scenario:
  • A user posts some comments on a Note Board Web Part in SharePoint Server 2010.
  • You delete the user profile of the user.
  • You view the comments on the Note Board Web Part.

  In this scenario, the comments that the user posted are invisible.

• Assume that a custom Activity Directory attribute is a numeric string type attribute. In this situation, the Active Directory attribute cannot be mapped as a new property in SharePoint Server 2010.
• You restart the User Profile Synchronization service in SharePoint Server 2010 after you apply the hotfix package that is described in Knowledge Base article 2536599. In this situation, an exception occurs.
• In SharePoint Server 2010, the Audience Picker tries to reload a selected security group that contains a space character in its name. However, the Audience Picker cannot resolve the security group name, and it leaves the security group as an unresolved entity.

The post SHAREPOINT: AUGUST CU 2011 RELEASED appeared first on eGroup.

The first tool you should consider are the SP Master Starter pages that are available on CodePlex.  These starter pages have comments throughout the code that tell you exactly what each section is used for and what it does.  This is extremely useful and a lot easier than using the OOB master pages!

Another tool that ties in nicely with the Starter Master pages is this CSS Chart.  This will help immensly when overriding the core CSS styles.  It will list all of the styles, tell you what they are used for, and give you a nice override key that you can use in your own CSS file.

No designer or developer would have a complete toolbox unless they had the IE F12 Developer Tools or the FireBug plugin for Firefox.  Both of these tools will allow you to select elements on a page and see the code behind them.  Not only that, but FireBug will allow you to make inline changes to CSS styles and see the changes in real-time.  This is a huge time saver!

So there you have it.  These are the 3 main tools that I use whenever I do custom design work in SharePoint 2010.

The post SHAREPOINT 2010: CUSTOM MASTER PAGES appeared first on eGroup.

Purpose built to “Save the Day” and formerly known as Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR), Symantec has an answer – System Recovery 2011. 

With the 2011 edition comes a number of new advancements not previously found in the product offering — most notably platform support and Granular recovery support for SharePoint 2010.

New features of the 2011 System Recovery Include:

With the ability to restore to dissimilar hardaware in minutes, it is no wonder the product was voted BEST 2010 HIGH AVAILABILITY / DISASTER RECOVERY AWARD by Winodws IT Pro and BEST 2009 DISASTER RECOVERY PRODUCT by Redmond Magazine (for the 4th consecutive year). 

 If your organization uses SharePoint or just needs image based backups with the ability to restore to anything anywhere, then take a good look at System Recovery 2011. Below is a video that helps illustrate its importance.

Symantec System Recovery 2011 Product Tour

The post UTILIZE SYMANTEC SYSTEM RECOVERY 2011 TO PROTECT YOUR SHAREPOINT 2010 ENVIRONMENT appeared first on eGroup.