Disabling SharePoint Designer for Site Collections in 2010

A nice feature in SharePoint 2010 is the ability to manipulate how SharePoint Designer is used by site collection administrators. You can access the settings by going to Central Administration > General Application Settings > SharePoint Designer.

SharePoint Designer Settings in SharePoint CA 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

What this allows you to do is allow your site collection administrators for a particular site collection to use SharePoint Designer in limited ways. You may have an site collectin admin that you think would have the skill to create workflows, but you don’t want that person messing with Master pages or page layouts.

What I wish that it offered was the ability to get more granular with the people instead of using site collection admins. There are times that you may want to give workflow ability to a single person, but not the site collection admin.

Below is the message your users will receive if you completely turn SharePoint Designer off for the site collection admins. What is not indicative in the SharePoint Designer settings is that these settings go for the Farm Administrator too, not just the Site collection admin. Another area where granularity of permissions would be nice.

SharePoint Designer

SharePoint 2010 Sys Requirements

There are a laundry list of items to install on your server prior to installing SharePoint 2010. The really cool thing is that the upgrade checker will actually connect to the web and download these for you pending any firewall or anti-virus settings that are blocking you. Here is a list of the pre-reqs.

The 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Standard with SP2 (I would add Windows 2008 Server R2)
Web Server (IIS) role
Application Server role
Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 SP1
SQL Server 2008 Express with SP1
Microsoft “Geneva” Framework
Microsoft Sync Framework Runtime v1.0 (x64)
Microsoft Filter Pack 2.0
Microsoft Chart Controls for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
Windows PowerShell 2.0 CTP3
SQL Server 2008 Native Client
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services ADOMD.NET
ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP2

More here

Our Company Collaborates…just not with our Developers

I want to preface this entry by being up front with you and letting you know that I am not a collaboration expert. My collaboration writings are based on my experience and readings and discussions with others. I also want to make clear that I would not have a job without developers and that developers get a bad rap. In the words of Steve Ballmer, “I LOVE DEVELOPERS!”

Many companies have great open dialogue and teamwork amongst teams. There are many great managers who inherently have this ability to unite people. I believe we have some of these types of managers where I work. These great managers are able to reach some people who, if left to themselves, would sit at their desk all day and work. They do share ideas and address project concerns amongst their peers, This is oddly enough true in many IT departments. More specifically, developers. It is very easy for IT folks to share ideas with their teams about projects and systems, but never venture out to other people in the areas and divisions and collaborate. In fact, some managers hide these types of personalities from their customers. I often hear, “Well, this person doesn’t interact with customers well” or “Sometimes this person says some things that are off the cuff and not well received by the customers.” So, the manager hides these people and keeps them happy in that dark cold cave area of the IT department routinely feeding them Red-Bull to appease them.

This doesn’t mean that some IT folks are incapable of conversing with the business units, but they do need guidance. It bugs me when someone recommends that I not invite a certain IT person to a meeting because they may make fools of the IT department and loose our credibility with a division or team. The honest answer is that they fear the person may make a fool of them, not the department. Whether or not you invite these folks to meeting or include them in on collaborative discussions should not be based on what you think about their personalities and certainly not about what it may do to your reputation or credibility. If there is the likelihood that what your IT person says could offend or dissolve the credibility you have with a department then you have deeper relational capacity issues. A manager should be excited to take these folks in to meeting with them and teach them how to conduct these meetings. Their skill-set may not mean that they’re going to lead projects and discussions with business owners, but they will still add value to collaboration.

Which brings me to my point. Collaboration is all about three things as outlined in Morten Hansen’s book, Collaboration, 1) Better Innovation 2) Better Sales 3) Better Efficiencies. If your teamwork or conversation isn’t focused on one of these three areas then it may be productive, but it’s not collaboration. I engaged in collaboration with a developer and two other IT managers just this week. It started of with an me and another IT manager and I felt that not all of the correct constituents were represented. Now, this was just IT. No business stakeholders were involved. It was purely an IT decision that needed to be made. I was so pleased that I asked our developer to be in the room. He gave such great insight that I was blown away and invited him to a meeting with our business owners. We had that meeting already and I am again blown away. We never would have known this if we hadn’t given this developer the opportunity to meet with the business owners and collaborate.

So, involve your developers. Each developer has a unique personality just like every other person in the world. If their the quite type, that’s okay. Don’t force them to speak or talk. Listening can be good, but follow up with them after the meeting if they’re silent and give them feedback on how they can participate in the next meeting. If they’re the outspoken type, then you’re going to have to meet with that person before hand and let them know how they are going to have to control their tongue. Also, if you have the relational capacity with the business members let them know that you are going to invite this person and that you’re trying to help them bust out of their shell to help them get to the next level of their career. If you have a great developer with amazing personal skills then you’ve got an amazing employee. If you’re their manager, it’s your job to get them their. Let me re-iterate, without developers my job would be non-existent. So, hats off to all your amazing developers’. You make my rock’n world go round.

3 Principles for Participation in Enterprise Content Management

How do you get your users to buy into the importance of tagging documents to create a good ECM strategy? This is a battle that is not won overnite and it a war best not waged alone. In a presentation, ECM for the masses, Ryan Duguid talks about 3 principles for participation using SharePoint 2010 tools. I did not attend this session at the conference, but really wanted to come back and view it. I did so this morning and was really impressed with SharePoint 2010’s robust ECM tools. So, here is my recap and my thoughts on the tools in SharePoint 2010.

Although you cannot rely on technology tools to create good collaboration in your community, Microsoft has done a phenomenal job of building enterprise ready tools to allow the technology to be seamless in SharePoint 2010. Duguid states that the 3 principles of participation in enterprise content management (ECM) are:

Payback

Transparent Process

Simple and intuitive technology

Payback
In order for users to see the value of entering in metadata for a document they must see the payback. They must know why their filling in all of those fields. The question or misunderstanding I generally see is that users want to create a folder hierarchy in a document library. I then ask them what value that provides as opposed to their file share. They tell me that it’s online and that provides value. I then tell them that email can do that. They rebut with the fact that there is only one copy. I then tell them that that’s what their file share provided. At this point, they’re usually stumped and I’ve talked them into using the file share. I then ask them how many documents they’re going to expect to publish. If they say that it’s dozens or hundreds or even thousands I can usually start showing them the metadata that I would apply to a document and then show them how keeping them in a single document library can offer the consumers of the information to filter and sort quickly based on the metadata they append to the list item. SharePoint 2010 cuts down on many of the views you used to create for every way you wanted to slice the information because it provides these views based on the metadata. Using the new metadata sevice store (MSS) you can create, site wide, site collection wide, farm wide or even cross farm meta data. I’m not going to bother with the different terms that were tossed around at the conference as I do not know that Microsoft has agreed on all of the terms such as Term Sets, content types, metadata store, metadata service store, etc.. I heard them used interchangeably throughout the conference last week and I don’t believe everyone has the same usage of these terms. I’ll simply refer to them as metadata and the metadata store which is where they are housed. By the way, there is a separate database for the metadata store which allows for it to be shared as a Service Application (replaced Shared Service Providers) across farms.
Because of the new Service Application model and the ability for this metadata to be stored across farms it is very easy to show how their data will be searched for, rated and findable across the farm. No longer does a person have to know what site collection and site to go to find the information.

Transparent Process
The second complaint I hear from my users is that they think it takes way too long to enter in the metadata for a single document and it’s intrusive to their workflow. In SharePoint 2010 many of the uses of the metadata are visible and you end up wondering how it manifested itself without any intervention from the user or IT. You will find Office 2010 to be even more aware of SharePoint than Office 2007. A new feature that I am looking forward to digging into is Office Backstage, which shows all of the properties and metadata on a document. Your Office 2010 documents will now be aware of the SharePoint document libraries that you interact with and appear in the Backstage. One of my favorite new features in document libraries is the use of unique identifiers for every document. This ID is one of the columns on the list so there’s no CAML you need to know in order to find a document id. It’s very legible makes SharePoint 2010 a great option for document imaging solutions.

Simple and Intuitive
It doesn’t seem like the meta data process is less intrusive to a user’s workflow as much as it invades all of the other areas where users work. Instead of a user taking time to go to SharePoint to make changes they can do it from their Office application, from SharePoint Workspace (Groove’s replacement) or from SharePoint. I wonder if this is Microsoft’s plan. That is, to consume the majority of the information worker’s time within their product lines. Once they do that, then they can bring it all back into one application (SharePoint) where information workers will live. I have heard time and time again that SharePoint will be Microsoft’s operating system….eventually.

Metadata comes in many forms and it doesn’t have to be an either/or scenario anymore. It can be a both/and scenario where a user is required to fill in some of the metadata from the MSS, but they can also classify it with their own tags. So, you can use the corporate taxonomy while still allowing a folksonomy to take place. As you see commonalities in the folksonomy, SharePoint 2010 allows you to take those keywords and work them into the corporate taxonomy. Because taxonomy has to be flexible, SharePoint 2010 allows you to create new terms, deprecate old terms, copy terms, reuse terms, move terms, merge terms, and delete terms.

Top 5 Features in SharePoint 2010

Well, SharePoint conference 2009 is over, but the memories live on. I can’t explain all of the coolness that SharePoint 2010 includes. In my opinion these are the best features from an enterprise IT Pro’s eyes. I’ll give you my top 5 here and then expand on them in subsequent posts.

Top Five
1. Enterpirse meta data store – allows the sharing of content types across web applications. This may make real life information architects look at SharePoint in a different light
2. People Search and social relevance - the social capabilities are amazing in SharePoint 2010. If allowed, it will go through a user’s Outlook and find common phrases and people and develop your expertise area
3. Contextual editing for everything - no more 12 clicks to create a single list view
4. Digital asset management and video streaming
5. Ranking – documents, list items can now be ranked on a 5 star scale

Bottom of the barrel
1. Database happy – I wasn’t able to count all of them, but it looked like there are 20 to 30 databases that the SharePoint install creates on setup.
2. Kerberos – somehow Kerberos manages to be even more difficult to setup
3. Complicated Licensing - One area they did not cover at the conference was licensing and I suspect that’s because Microsoft marketing is still trying to figure out how complicated they can make it. As best I could discern, SharePoint is now 7 to 8 different products. Check it out yourself: http://sharepoint2010.microsoft.com/product/editions/Pages/default.aspx

Meet Trevor and Sam

Bit Locker
Up all Night
Russinivich

I saw this on Viddler.com today and had to repost it. I thought it was genius. These kids are great actors too….do 10 year olds really know this much about computers?

Live Blogging at SharePoint 2010 Conference

Well, I signed up to blog on each of the sessions I attend at the SharePoint 2010 conference, but now I am feeling somewhat inconsequential compared to some of the others that are blogging. I looked at some of their sites and see that most of them are SharePoint MVPs and they have their own consulting companies. No worries though, you will see my blogs here as well as on EndUserSharePoint.com.

I will do my best to relate each of my blogs to collaboration and team work.

SharePoint 2010 and Multimedia Support

I could only hold them off for so long. I kept telling them that it’s coming, but not yet. Well, it looks like SharePoint 2010 isn’t going to arrive soon enough to meet their demands. That demand was multimedia. We knew SharePoint 2007 wouldn’t support multimedia natively and that a 3rd party product would need to be purchased to piecemeal together a solution. The customers have different audiences, internal and external, different authentication methods, and different security requirements. But they all have one thing in common. They want to reach our customers via video.

Instead of purchasing another product that introduces another portal product to our illustrious lineup of portals we already offer our customers, I want something that ”seamlessly” integrates with SharePoint since this is our portal of choice. I just want SharePoint to do it all. But it doesn’t….currently.

Enter SharePoint 2010. I am excited to hear about 2010 at the SharePoint conference next week. In particular, I am excited to learn about it’s support for video. Is there a built in Silverlight player? Can users tag video with content types and site columns? Can users upload their own videos? Can it accept any type of video format and re-encode it to mpeg4 so we have a standard video format?

In the meantime, while we’re waiting for SharePoint 2010, how do I appease my customers who are racing to Best Buy to purchase Flip cameras and start posting best practices? Some of this can be posted to You Tube because it is not sensitive by nature. Other video will contain student information which must be kept secure and is for parents eyes only. But I want to keep all of our video assets in a single place. The last thing I want is another portal and another shared drive scenario where nobody knows how to find anything and videos become less effective because the information is not readily accessible.

Here are my thoughts and this is where I’m asking for help. We are a heavy Microsoft technology adopter and want to leverage our current investments as heavily as possible. We have 61 sites with each site having dual T1’s connecting them back to our main office. From the main office we have dual T3’s to the cloud. The dual T1’s have been bottlenecks for a remote office when trying to watch video. That is the scenario for our internal users. For our external audiences we have close to 100,000 external customers. By no means will they all be accessing video simultaneously.

Each remote location has two Microsoft 2003 Servers.

So, what I’m looking for are ideas to support the publishing and viewing of video for the internal and external audiences in this environment. I look forward to any ideas you may have.

Where does iGoogle fit in to the Enterprise?

In the midst of our SharePoint upgrade to 2007 I remember hearing from many of the people that we interviewed about their love of iGoogle. In fact, many had switched to iGoogle as their home page in IE or Firefox. Of couse, being our SharePoint admin I was taken back. “You mean, the site I created isn’t your absolute favorite?” “You can’t get everything in life accomplished through our intranet?” So, with this chip on my shoulder I decided to dive into iGoogle and see what all the commotion was about.

What I really intended to do is determine if our company is using the wrong to for content personalization. The real question is, can SharePoint’s My Sites offer the same features that iGoogle can? Simply, the answer is no and yes.

You really have to evaluate your needs and then decide which product works the best based on your needs. In talking further with our SharePoint traitors I found that the real draw to iGoogle was that it was their page for organizing their information. Because the portal was unorganized and information was scattered everywhere they used iGoogle to bring it all together for them on a personal level. Essentially, they were creating their own micro portal that was tailored to meet their needs.

RSS, links, email, and a task list was all they were looking for. And iGoogle provided that easily. Of course, iGoogle isn’t going to offer integration into back office systems, but it is a good alternative to My Sites if you’re pinched for time or cost. iGoogle is easier to use than  My Sites and offers quick creation of a personal portal. 

When you plan to manage content on everyone’s personal portal and push personalized content to them then My Sites shine. Portal personalization is only going to get better in SharePoint 2010. Microsoft is going to have to make the My Site the 1st stop in everyone’s browser if they want to compete in the world of portals. When an individual can customize and tailor their site with the information they need to work then they will use it. Until then, the business can continue to use the push method and guess what all users will need, but they’ll never be 100%. Only each individual user knows what information they need to do their job and how they gather, complile and use that information. The business can’t determine that for them.

So, go My Sites! But don’t lock them down. Let  your users control the content.

Page Performance

I was reading Andrew Connell’s blog this morning about his presentation at Code Camp in Jacksonville, FL. I skipped over to his presentation to read it and was surprised to find the level of granularity that he delved into about page payload and how it affects page speeds. He also gives some great examples to speed up your pages. I appreciate his level of detail and research that he did to display these nuggets of knowledge. But, reducing a page size from 500k to 250k is not that big of a deal to the UX when I have the basic cable or dsl speeds. This would definitely affect the UX of someone with dial-up, but I cannot devote that much time into researching the advantages of reducing a page size by 250k when there are more pressing needs in my business.

Taken from http://articlet.com/article791.html. “According to Nielsen Claritas Convergence audit, 67% of American homes with a PC have access to high-speed Internet service. Around 11% of them are subscribed to dial-up connection.”

I believe that you can test each of the page loads from dial up and dsl and gauge the acceptance of page load speeds. If they’re slow maybe you can use IIS Compression and the coding techniques that Andrew mentions.

Read Andrew Connell’s slides: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blogcontent/speaking/20090829.JaxCodeCamp.HighPerfSharePointServer2007.xps