Tag: SharePoint

SharePoint and Office 14 for web

I watched this video this afternoon, and there was one specific sentence that drew my attention (around 3:20″): “Customers can run these (web versions of Office) on the SharePoint servers in their enterprise”. 

Very interesting! So in the future, we won’t even talk about a tight integration between Office and SharePoint, it might just be the same thing. Client applications that today run on top of SharePoint to keep users away from the browser and on their familiar desktop will be useless. Offline use of SharePoint will be a non-issue, you need to be connected all the time. 

Have a look at the video yourself (requires Silverlight).

Groove sync error with SharePoint

Today, a colleague had an interesting issue with Groove and SharePoint: he had synced a document library to a Groove workspace, but when he created a new folder in Groove, syncing with SharePoint failed with an error indicating that the folder already existed. The actual error was “Synchronization completed with errors”, and the detail: “The file “Shared%20Documents/xxx” could not be located: It may have been deleted, renamed, or moved.”

It took me a while to figure this out, but it has something to do with the default document library view in the SharePoint library. If this one has the option activated to hide folders (Show Items without folders), syncing with Groove fails. If you turn the folders back on in SharePoint, all goes well. Life is easy, isn’t it? Have a look at the screencast below for more info.

Why “SharePoint for Dummies” is not enough for your end users…

Very often, I talk to IT-people about providing end user training for their SharePoint implementation. Recently, on two separate occations, two IT managers made the same remark: “Just give them the “SharePoint for Dummies” book and they will be fine.”

I really hate it when people talk about “dumb” end users. But this set aside, I want to make clear why this is not really a good solution for end user training for SharePoint:

  • A SharePoint end user training should always be a custom training: the SharePoint feature palette is so vast that while books discuss most of the features, companies only use their 20% of the functionalities. So why bother giving information about the ones you do not use?
  • There is more to it than just SharePoint functionality: very often, the implementation of SharePoint brings changes in work methods, procedures, information sharing… Those are specific for your organisation.
  • You need to sell your SharePoint solution to your internal audience. People are resistent to the change in their work habits, even if it is an improvement. Giving a book is not a very good sales pitch.

Microsoft released some interesting material to accomplish this. Very good material, but don’t make the same mistake: don’t throw this at your end user “as is”. Customize, customize…

Use one Site Collection or multiple Site Collections?

Some important concepts:

  • a site collection is a unit of information belonging together; if information should be isolated/secured, it could be a separate site collection;
  • having multiple site collections might require some additional development (e.g. packaging content types or site columns that you want to reuse in different site collections in features);
  • a lot of built-in web parts only work inside a site collection, not across site collections;
  • it’s good to have separate site collections for a corporate, governed intranet and the wild wild west of collaboration 🙂

What people are saying… Definition extraction

Today, I noticed a SharePoint Search feature I did not  know yet: I was looking for the meaning of an abbreviation using the SharePoint Search center, and at the bottom of the first page of my search results a link showed up: What people are saying. After clicking the link, it showed me a perfect definition, and links to the documents were it was found. Cool!

discovered-definition.JPG

This is what I can find in the Microsoft documentation: the Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

This means that during the crawling, the MOSS indexer is checking content for sentences like “X is ….”, and recognises them as a definition. It does not seem to be very configurable, but you can turn it off in the settings of the Search Core Results web part. Just uncheck Display Discovered Definition.