SharePoint Product News & Resources 

  At the Microsoft SharePoint 2011 Conference in Anaheim, California back in October, there were several hot topics presented throughout the week. Among these were several sessions on claims and using claims in SharePoint 2010 for interesting security-related scenarios like authentication.  This topic is particularly important in the identity management space right now.

For those who are just starting to learn about claims, this article will look at the basics and give you a foundation for the concept of claims, and how they can be used in various business and data governance scenarios ...

This Product Validation Report produced by SharePointReviews.com in collaboration with Joel Oleson, one of the industry’s most renowned SharePoint expert, delivers independent validation of harmon.ie for SharePoint capabilities and provides insights on how the product compliments customers’ native Microsoft SharePoint deployments. This report should not be treated as a replacement for the evaluation process that you would normally conduct before making a purchasing decision, but it will provide independent information on the product to help you with your decision.

About Joel Oleson

Joel was the first dedicated SharePoint Administrator ever.  He's been working with SharePoint nearly 11 years and worked at Microsoft in both IT and the product teams including Architecting the first rollout of Microsoft's own global search, intranet, team sites, and my sites. He managed the IT audience in the SharePoint 2007 rollout. Joel has travelled over 100 countries in his quest to connect the global SharePoint community, and spoken in hundreds of events including keynote sessions across all 6 peopled continents.

Download Product Validation Report for harmon.ie (PDF)

One of the most important words in any user adoption strategy with SharePoint is streamline, a.k.a., integrating SharePoint processes into your existing workplace culture.  I’ve been using harmon.ie for SharePoint for the last few weeks and wanted to share my thoughts and impressions.  By the way, harmon.ie is pronounced ‘harmony.’ (For those of us that get thrown off by the .ie top-level domain, it’s far from Ireland - the corporate offices are in California.) ...

In 2012, governance is a hot topic in SharePoint. New adopters may wonder what all the fuss is about, but, as SharePoint continues to see double digit growth year after year, all those new users surging onto the platform will require care, channeling, guidance, and oversight. Governance can take many different forms; but, at its most elemental level, governance is really guidance.  It not only keeps things on track, but it is an essential response to widespread adoption and a necessary component for fostering sustained growth and usage.

As you might expect, there are many competing definitions of governance. I’ve heard antivirus software described as governance. I’ve also heard site provisioning workflows described as governance. Establishing and sustaining governance programs is twice as hard if you can’t get agreement on what governance means ...

Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint is the first SharePoint add-on on the market that automatically documents all your SharePoint farm settings into a single document.

The primary use of the Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint is streightforward – automatically documenting all of SharePoint farm configuration settings into a single, properly formatted and structured Microsoft Word document. Farm configuration settings can also be viewed through the software interface without exporting them to a document, providing all relevant setting information in one place instead of having it spread out over different solutions.

Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint also enables administrators to compare farms. It supports tracking of changes within a single farm or comparing different farms. By highlighting the differences, it helps administrators find the misconfigurations and eases settings optimization. ...

Every year Windows IT Pro Magazine’s Editors validate products and services worthy of their Editors’ Best and, based on their readers votes, Community Choice awards. For the Community Choice awards the editorial team asks the community to nominate their favorite products and then release a voting survey to let everyone participate in the final voting phase.  Fair enough. Certainly, we trust the professional opinion of Windows IT Pro Editors, but here is your chance to share your opinion with the SharePoint Reviews readers as well.

There are 29 award categories, and below are the winners in the SharePoint category.  Sometimes editors and readers agree on favorite products, but most of the time they don’t.  Regardless of whether the winners were chosen by editors or readers, all these products are worth serious consideration to help you manage and improve your SharePoint deployment.

Do you agree with Windows IT Pro Editors? Would you nominate anyone else?...

Every year, since 2003, KM World releases the list of trend-setting products for knowledge management. Initially organized into product categories, now it’s a flat ‘Knowledge Management’ list of products (and companies) that includes a broad spectrum of capabilities. Knowledge management isn't an application - it’s an approach to delivering the right information to the right people throughout the entire population of users. It includes Web and enterprise content management systems, enterprise search, document management tools, etc. ...

In today's business environment, facilitating collaboration and providing ready access to important information is a necessity. For organizations that have chosen SharePoint as their enterprise content management system, extending its functionality through SharePoint/Outlook integration can drive immediate adoption gains.

While SharePoint 2010 is a step forward in ease-of-use, in some cases, users may prefer working in Microsoft Outlook to SharePoint. With effective Outlook to SharePoint integration, users can manage email with SharePoint the way they do with Outlook; for example, by seamlessly dragging and dropping email and attachments to SharePoint ...

 SusQtech recently launched their newest product - SP URL Manager.  SP URL Manager is an easy-to-use add-on for SharePoint 2010 that allows users to create simple, “vanity” URLs from the lengthy and complex default URLs in SharePoint.

According to Steve Witt, VP of Marketing and Product Development, SusQtech’s clients have asked for a tool such as this one, designed for use in marketing and communications campaigns. Having vanity URLs in campaigns makes URLs more user-friendly, something marketing professionals can surely appreciate. For example, SP URL allows you to change http://www.susqtech.com/products/Pages/SP-URLManager.aspx to http://www.susqtech.com/spurl. 

  If your company is using SharePoint 2010, your business benefits from its rich collaboration abilities and content management capacity. Departmental SharePoint sites multiply and grow, content is structured and classified, documents are shared, and collaboration and team work flourishes. You are getting great results – and then something goes wrong. Here is one of the examples: In January 2011 Delaware’s Chancery Court ordered defendants in the case of Victor Stanley, Inc. vs. Creative Pipe, Inc. to pay over $1 million in damages for the willful loss and destruction of electronically stored information ...

  There's an old adage in IT that 'nothing ever goes away'. Retiring legacy systems is a painful, often expensive process, mostly because every system has some useful information in it, but it’s hard to distinguish jewels from junk within that information. There are times when migrating all your content and cutting over to a shiny new system is the right thing to do, and there are many strong content migration products on the market. Sometimes, however, a total migration is simply not necessary nor useful.

I’m a hopeless book hound, and in my life have spent more on books than on cars. I have thousands of books. The last time we moved, we had 60 boxes of books, and my wife made me a proposition: We would unpack the five boxes that contained the books we knew we wanted, and leave the rest in the basement for two years. Over the next two years, I opened a few more boxes and pulled out what I needed. At the end of the two years we donated the rest to the local library. Needless to say, our bookshelves were much more organized, and had a lot less junk....

Creating an End-to-End Application without Code

This unique book is filled with step-by-step instructions and screenshots and has several objectives. The first objective  is to demonstrate the techniques and methodology for developing an Enterprise class application in SharePoint 2010. We will accomplish this by creating a fully functional Employee Absence Tracking application that incorporates many of the characteristics of an Enterprise application. By “Enterprise class” we mean a sophisticated application that addresses the demanding requirements of a large organization. Two significant characteristics of an Enterprise class application are complex functionality and context driven behavior, attributes that we will examine in detail at various times and places in this book.

In this book we use the designation “Enterprise Application” to describe a class of applications that are deployed in organizations that have complex procedural contingencies,  are driven by user context, and must be integrated with and access multiple information sources within the organization.  Employee Absence Tracking, when implemented robustly to incorporate the complex use case functionality required in most organizations is emblematic of an Enterprise Application. As such the exercise of designing and creating this application will be an object lesson in identifying the numerous Enterprise requirements relevant to an employee absence tracking application and demonstrating how the SharePoint platform can accommodate them effectively and efficiently...

 (Rating: 5 out of 5) Social Squared by Lightning Tools is a wonderful product. It is easy to use, manage, setup, and apply updates. I have also had great interactions with their customer service folks and they are top notch.

The only con to this product is no built-in SharePoint Search integration. Searching the forums requires the user to go to the Forum and use the search function there, the SharePoint Search indexer does not see the forum content ...

(Rating: 5 out of 5)
Javascript is a powerful client-side scripting language that allows a developer to do some great things at the presentation layer. jQuery is a robust library that allows a quasi-developer / super user to walk through the DOM with simple commands that wield incredible Javascript power.

The jQuery Library for SharePoint Web Services (SPServices) bundles into jQuery the vast methods and massive amounts of data contained within SharePoint. This space isn't big enough to mine all that wealth the last sentence contains. But, suffice it to say: everything that SharePoint knows about itself is exposed through its built-in web services. SPServices puts that knowledge at the fingertips of the user / site administrator / library maintainer...

  Why use a SharePoint migration tool when you can upgrade using the built in upgrade methods? Maybe you want to skip 2007 going from 2003 to 2010, or get out of your MOSS enterprise and move into Standard or even WSS. Maybe you want to get out of a site definition or template or from one language template to another.

Another reason to use a migration tools is if you already built a rock solid 2010 deployment and just want to get the data moved in. May be you’re finding that moving data on your own with the import or export is changing dates and making you “own” everything… Built in upgrade is designed to get from point A to B, without transformation. But transformation may be your goal. ...