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Kraft & Kennedy, Inc. provides technology and strategic consulting services to law firms, corporate legal departments and financial services firms. We can help you analyze, plan, implement and manage business and technology solutions to optimize your organization's functionality and processes.
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There’s lots of information online about setting up extranets in SharePoint 2010, but there’s not so much information on how to actually manage your forms based user accounts once the extranet is provisioned. Most documentation tells you to manage user accounts in IIS or with a membership seeder tool, both of which require admins to manage everything and have bare-bones interfaces. Luckily, the SharePoint FBA open-source pack, which was fabulous for SharePoint 2007 extranets, has finally been ported to 2010. This tool gives you a web page in central admin where admins can manage all of their user accounts and reset passwords, as well as web parts for users to manage their account themselves–such as password changes and password requests.
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Microsoft Project Server 2010 is tightly integrated with SharePoint 2010. There’s many articles on deploying Project Server 2010, but not so much information on configuring it as an extranet, with external users. However, this can be one of the best uses for Project Server, since you can build project schedules that include members of your own organization as well as external parties, and allow everyone to collaborate and manage the tasks and schedule in one central place.
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SharePoint 2010 comes with many new social features that can help lawyers keep track of what others in the firm are doing, and can help with finding the right people with the right skills. These features can be leveraged even if SharePoint is not your document management system.
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Being able to drag and drop emails and attachments from Outlook into a SharePoint folder is one of the things that’s clearly missing in SharePoint and Outlook 2010. The lack of this functionality is a non-starter for any law firm that wants to manage emails and is considering SharePoint as their DMS. There’s a number of good solutions from third-party vendors to address this shortcoming, including Colligo, MacroView Wisdom, Accola DMS4Legal, and some other products that we’ve been beta testing. But what if you don’t want to spend any additional money, and are looking for a real basic solution? Here’s two ways to keep it simple, and be able to get your email and attachments into SharePoint…
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The Search Centers in SharePoint 2010 use “minimal.master,” which is a very basic layout without navigation. While this might be fine for the search center, it doesn’t work well for a corporate intranet, where users expect to navigate between many sites. With the default search center, once a user goes there he’s stuck there, since there’s no easy way to navigate back to another site.
- Search Center with Default Master Page
You might expect to be able to just switch the master page to one with navigation, but doing so causes the search box to disappear. So you end up with a search site with your custom branding, but no search box.
The reason for this is that the search control is actually located in the breadcrumb navigation, which only works for minimal.master. The associated page layouts also contain controls to hide what’s in the search area of the master page, so that you don’t end up with two search boxes.
You can fix all this when you use a custom master page by just modifying the search layout pages with the following steps:
1) Open SharePoint Designer 2010 to your site, and click the “Master Pages” object
2) Check out the following pages: SearchMain.aspx, SearchResults.aspx, and PeopleSearchResults.aspx
3) Find the following section and delete it. This removes the control that hides the search area from your master page.
<asp:Content ContentPlaceHolderID=”PlaceHolderSearchArea” runat=”server”>
……
</asp:Content>
4) Check-in, Publish, and Approve the pages.
Note, if there’s anything else from the breadcrumb navigation that you want to appear on the page, you would have to add it back into ContentPlaceHolderMain.
At that point, your Search Center should take on the layout from your custom master page, and it will use the same search box as the master page.
- Search Center with Custom Master Page
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SharePoint 2010 can be easily deployed to a single box with local administrator accounts using the standalone, out-of-the-box install, but this forces you to use SQL Express 2008 (which comes with SharePoint). What if you want to do a complete farm install on the box, but stick with local accounts? Then this becomes a lot more tricky.
The complete install, using the configuration dialogs, will not let you enter local accounts, and will force you to use a domain account. The best practice seems to be to promote the server to a domain controller, and use domain accounts, however this might not be possible or desired if you’re working in a DMZ, or on a development machine. Also, you might want to do the complete install so that you can leverage the 10 GB data limit and remote BLOB storage in SQL 2008 Express R2, rather than being stuck to the earlier version of SQL Express which comes with SharePoint. Luckily, there’s some ways to bypass the domain account requirement by using PowerShell scripting to set up the environment. I found two helpful blog posts below which get you part of the way there, and I’ll help clarify some of the missing pieces.
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In SharePoint 2007, menus in some master pages opened behind page content and Flash animations. However, there was an easy fix which was to just locate the css style for the dynamic menus, and change the “z-index” property to a high number. This same fix does not work in 2010 however, and to make matters worse, the menus on the default master page in 2010 always open behind Flash videos. (The built-in Silverlight web part in 2010 does not have this problem, but I suspect there are still many people who will have home pages with Flash content.)
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When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to 2010, you’ll need to upgrade your master pages (if they’re customized) to take advantage of the new features in 2010, such as the ribbon. The first question is to decide if you want to keep the current master page and add all the new controls in, or to start with a new 2010 master page and customize that. We decided to start with a new master page based on the 2010 master page, v4.master, and customize that. Here’s some resources I found useful when creating the new custom master page for our site.
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When designing the layout and branding for new SharePoint 2010 sites, some people may wish to hide the left-hand navigation and only use top navigation. Hiding the left-hand navigation allows for more space for content and a possible cleaner looking interface. In SharePoint’s Site Settings, you can turn off the quick launch and tree view, however that still leaves the navigation bar on the page with only a recycling bin. In order to entirely remove the bar, you would need to either modify the master page or CSS linked to the master page.
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The single-server out of the box SharePoint 2010 installation uses SQL Express, which comes with a 4 GB limit. This is in contrast to SharePoint 2007 which used the Windows Internal Database, a version of SQL Express with no size limit. If you’re upgrading an existing environment or planning to import a bunch of files, you may easily hit this limit.
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