The SharePoint Business Application Specialists
IT decision makers are under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. At the same time, many are struggling to cope with a backlog of applications awaiting delivery. A strategic approach to the delivery of business applications is therefore required to help decision makers achieve their goals. This paper from PointBeyond explains why SharePoint 2010 should be seriously considered when defining an application strategy.
Download your free copy from the PointBeyond website here
I’m looking forward to talking about quickly delivering business applications on SharePoint 2010 at The International SharePoint Conference London 2012 in April. I’ll be co presenting with one of our customers.
When the tools available in SharePoint 2010 are used appropriately, it can be phenomenally productive. In my session, we take a look at how it was possible to build a fully featured business application, with forms, workflow and reporting in a matter of days – and without writing any code. Using Purchase Order management as an example, I’ll review the business requirements and explain why SharePoint was chosen for the application, before getting hands on with some demos and looking at how SharePoint capabilities were leveraged to quickly deliver the application at an engineering company.
Full agenda of speakers can be found here. It’s shaping up to be another excellent event!
Click here to regsiter: http://www.internationalsharepointconference.com/Pages/Register.aspx
I’ve been speaking with IT directors/CTOs at two different large organisations in the past week. Both are in similar positions in that they are considering moving to SharePoint 2010, and need to decide whether or not to go for Standard or Enterprise edition.
One of the big challenges that they both faced was knowing the capabilities of each product. One of them was seriously considering purchasing an expensive BI solution even though they have quite modest BI needs. They and their teams were simply unaware that there is BI capability within SharePoint 2010.
The second challenge was around the departmental versus organisational view of the world. What do I mean by that? In both organisations, departments were commissioning their own business applications. Most of the time these applications were custom coded, and although they sometimes integrated with SharePoint, the integration only meant display of the custom application within a SharePoint site. There are several problems with this approach:
In this situation a decision to move to SharePoint 2010 standard would have been a bad strategic decision. It would have resulted in business applications being delivered more slowly, at higher risk and cost, and with less consistency and integration with each other.
So when making the decision between Standard and Enterprise it is essential to have all the facts to hand. In particular:
If more investigation is needed, it is worth knowing that a 180 day evaluation copy of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise can be downloaded from the Microsoft web site. This can be used for a pilot before committing to licence purchase. We have helped several organisations with this low risk approach.
Companies are increasingly looking for efficiency gains with New Product Development and yet struggle to find a tool that can accommodate their supporting business processes. This is because each company’s culture is different and only a set of tools that can quickly adapt to support their unique Business Processes and ways of working can add benefit.
New Product Development is the art and science of bringing products to market, from idea generation through to prototyping and the first production run, and can be considered from two viewpoints – Strategic and Tactical. Project Server which is built on the SharePoint Enterprise platform is an ideal choice for meeting both the Strategic and Tactical requirements of a New Product Development system
Strategic:
The strategic viewpoint looks at the selection and approval process to ensure that products with the best potential are brought to market as efficiently as possible.
Project Server is ideally suited for the development of a Strategic New Product Development Framework offering the following features out of the box:
Tactical
The Tactical viewpoint concerns the day to day practicalities of introducing a new product to market, and includes activities such as packaging /design workflows and the set up of design workshops.
For the tactical activities, SharePoint (which is part of a Project Server installation) has many features which enable the rapid creation of a New Product Management System including:
The Content Type Hub (CTH) brings fantastic new functionality to SharePoint 2010, functionality that anyone who has delivered or administered SharePoint 2007 will have been crying out for and no doubt welcomed with open arms.
The CTH can be a complex beast with settings located in lots of different places; Central Administration, Site Collections, sub-sites and the CTH itself.
Chances are, by the time you get to using content types from the CTH in document libraries way down in the basement of your SharePoint site structures it’s been a long time since you set up the Managed Metadata Service and the Hub – or perhaps you are an Information Manager and didn’t set it up in the first place.
So my question is: Where would you start to look if your content types in sub-sites and lists refuse to update properly?
Now I’m presuming here that you have correctly published the offending content type in the Hub, have run the 2 timer jobs in Central Administration and that the Site Collection you are trying to push the content type to is consuming the CTH.
In fact, I’m assuming you have one or more content type from the hub on your consuming Site Collection and have added them to document libraries – but now you’ve decided you need a new column on one of the content types.
You go through the same process described above (publishing the content type in the Hub, running the CA timer jobs etc.) but when you come to check the document library there is no new column.
To reassure yourself that you’ve done everything correctly, you look at the content type gallery in the consuming Site Collection and can see the new column. Very strange!
You’d be forgiven for thinking “this must be a setting in the document library”, or perhaps you forgot to tick the ‘Update all content types inheriting from this type?’ check box in the ‘Update Sites and Lists’ section of the content type in the Hub.
So you check and you check to no avail. You may even have tried running some PowerShell scripts to force the update. Nothing!
So what to do?
Turns out it’s simply the way the Managed Metadata Service Connection has been set up.
There are four useful little tick boxes, which you’re only likely to see at the point you create the service, two of which have a huge effect on how the Content Type Hub functions.
To get to them go to Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications > Highlight the ‘Metadata Service Application Proxy’ (click anywhere but the title) > Select ‘Properties’ on the ribbon (see screen shot below).
This should bring up the ‘Edit Managed Metadata Service Connection’ window.
Here you can see the four options I was talking about.
The first two are firmly aimed at the Term Store, but the last two have a huge impact on the CTH functionality as I mentioned. The last one is clearly what we’re after so let’s tick that box!
You should now see your document libraries and lists updating from the CTH without a problem.
As you can see, this can be a difficult problem to track down because the Site Collections are getting the content type updates as they should be, just not in the lists – but as ever, there’s just one more check box!
This script looks through all documents stored in a SharePoint site collection and finds duplicate files based on document contents rather than document names. This script has been written for SharePoint 2010 but should find duplicate documents in SharePoint 2007 as well with very little modification.
Over time, it is quite possible the same document will be uploaded to numerous SharePoint libraries. Keeping track of duplicate content spread across multi libraries can be practically impossible.
Building on the article here http://blog.codeassassin.com/2007/10/13/find-duplicate-files-with-powershell/ that details duplicate checking on fileshares, the following PowerShell script scans all your document libraries with a site collection for duplicate content by calculating an MD5 hash of the file contents. The script groups identical hashes and produces a list of all duplicated files, detailing the full url to item and the file name.
To run the script, copy the contents to notepad and save as a .ps1 file on one of your SharePoint servers. Then launch a PowerShell console and run the ps1 file.
PowerShell Console Output
The function returns the full path of all duplicated content.
This information could be piped back into SharePoint, or exported to Excel for analysis. You could even set this as a recurring job. In a future article, I will package this functionality into a timer job feature.
At present, the script stores all results in memory while it is running. If you are running this over a large site collection this may not scale very well. It may be worth streaming the results into a SQL table or similar. Also, at present this script will only evaluate content on a site collection basis but could be scoped to a web application or a whole farm if required.
Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
function Get-DuplicateFiles ($RootSiteUrl)
{
$spSite = Get-SPSite -Identity $RootSiteUrl
$Items = @()
foreach ($SPweb in $spSite.allwebs)
{
Write-Host “Checking ” $spWeb.Title ” for duplicate documents”
foreach ($list in $spWeb.Lists)
{
if($list.BaseType -eq “DocumentLibrary” -and $list.RootFolder.Url -notlike “_*” -and $list.RootFolder.Url -notlike “SitePages*”)
{
foreach($item in $list.Items)
{
$record = New-Object -TypeName System.Object
if($item.File.length -gt 0)
{
$fileArray = $item.File.OpenBinary()
$hash = Get-MD5($fileArray)
$record | Add-Member NoteProperty ContentHash ($hash)
$record | Add-Member NoteProperty FileName ($file.Name)
$record | Add-Member NoteProperty FullPath ($spWeb.Url + “/” + $item.Url)
$Items += $record
}
}
}
}
$spWeb.Dispose()
$duplicateHashes = $Items | Group-Object ContentHash | Where-Object {$_.Count -gt 1}
foreach($duplicatehash in $duplicateHashes)
{
$duplicateFiles += $Items | Where-Object{$_.contentHash -eq $duplicatehash.Name}
$duplicateFiles += “————————————————————”
}
}
return $duplicateFiles |Format-Table FullPath
}
function Get-MD5($file = $(throw ‘Usage:Get-MD5[System.IO.FileInfo]‘))
{
$stream = $null;
$cryptoServiceProvider = [System.Security.Cryptography.MD5CryptoServiceProvider];
$hasAlgorithm = New-Object $cryptoServiceProvider
$stream = $file;
$hashByteArray = $hasAlgorithm.ComputeHash($stream);
return [string]$hashByteArray;
}
Get-DuplicateFiles(<your sharepoint site>)
Given our focus on delivering business applications using SharePoint, we are particularly excited to see this latest whitepaper from Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=18768
An independent study by Mainstay Partners evaluated the implementation of the Microsoft SharePoint platform at three companies with the goal of understanding how they use the SharePoint technology to build and manage critical business applications.
This white paper explores how the three organizations deployed SharePoint capabilities to develop and manage essential business applications. While the deployments involved unique applications and content, each sought to achieve similar business goals – namely, to simplify and streamline IT environments, to increase business and IT flexibility and scalability, and add new capabilities to improve service levels and control costs.
PointBeyond have also created a new Linkedin Group – SharePoint Business Applications – to encourage discussion and knowledge sharing on this subject. Please click here to join.
The team at PointBeyond are always keen to demonstrate their technical abilities and have recently turned their attention to developing a QR code web part for SharePoint.
Once installed, user profile information is automatically displayed on SharePoint MySites in the form of a QR code digital business card. This business card can then be instantly saved to a mobile phone using the phone’s camera. An example of how this might look on your MySite is shown below. Navigating to your colleague’s profiles will display their QR Code.
To download our free web part follow this link to our website.
We have created some videos on collaboration in SharePoint 2010, Records Management in SharePoint 2010 and PerformancePoint in SharePoint 2010.
These can be found by following the links below:
Collaboration in SharePoint 2010
Records Management in SharePoint 2010
PerformancePoint in SharePoint 2010
Ian
Few software products have the capacity to improve and transform the way organisations work in the way that Microsoft SharePoint does, and in November Microsoft releases a beta version of SharePoint 2010. This will be the fourth version of SharePoint, and the product is showing its maturity with a lot of improvements from the 2007 version. Indeed, whether or not you currently have SharePoint, 2010 is worth a serious look, and in this article we take a look at what SharePoint 2010 will deliver.
As a UK based SharePoint specialist, a question I frequently get asked is “what is SharePoint?” and that question is surprisingly difficult to answer, as SharePoint covers a breadth of functionality that isn’t really matched by other products. According to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is “The Business Collaboration Platform for the Enterprise & the Web”, and it helps you to
To help explain in more detail, the functional areas of SharePoint have been split into six areas. So let’s drill down into each of these areas:
So how should this upcoming release influence your SharePoint strategy? Clearly, if you have SharePoint 2003 or 2007 there is little point in investing further in it until you have assessed SharePoint 2010 and decided whether or not to upgrade. You may find that the functionality you require comes “out-of-the-box” in SharePoint 2010, or that the business solution you need can easily be built as a composite solution. If you are thinking of deploying SharePoint but have not yet done so, then it makes no sense to embark on a 2007 based roll out now unless you have a really compelling reason to do so.
Of course there is the question of cost to consider, and licence costs have not been announced yet. However one thing you can be sure of – SharePoint 2010 will deliver more functionality at a far lower price than attempting to deliver a similar solution through a “mix and match” approach to software vendors.
