Welcome to Kraft Kennedy

Join Kraft Kennedy’s Rich Westle for an ILTA webinar entitled “Leveraging SharePoint 2010 and Microsoft Office to Expedite Proposal Development”.

When:Friday, February 10, 2012

Time:12:00 – 1:00 Eastern

Register: Click Here to Register

ANSOR Legal Marketing and Experience Suite helps law firms of all sizes maximize their Microsoft investment while accelerating the proposal development process. ANSOR Proposal Generation Center built on the power of Microsoft Office and SharePoint delivers a robust set of Legal Marketing Components that allow your firm to develop, manage, and deploy approved marketing content. The webinar will focus on how firms can quickly generate unique, high quality proposals and marketing content as well as delivering new capabilities in collaboration, workflow, and access to experience content.

Presenter:
Rich Westle. a management consultant with Kraft Kennedy, leads solution development and product strategy for ANSOR Software, and has been involved in leading teams to deliver SharePoint based solutions to the legal market since 2004. Rich has been a featured speaker in the area of developing law firm experience management systems, most recently at the LexisNexis Redwood Analytics conference and Gensler Legal Market Summit.

Join Kraft Kennedy’s Joe Hoegler for an ILTA Webinar entitled “Exchange 2010 Ecosystem”. The webinar will focus on the native features of Microsoft Exchange 2010, including high availability, disaster recovery, antivirus and antispam functionality, unified messaging and more. You’ll also hear guidelines and tips on integrating Exchange with SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and Lync Server 2010.

When: Friday, February 24, 2012
Time: 12:00-1:00 Eastern
Register: Click Here to Register

Presenter BIO:

Joe Hoegler is the Practice Leader of Kraft Kennedy’s Infrastructure and Enterprise Systems Practice Group. He provides technical leadership and strategic guidance on client engagements involving a broad range of law firm technologies and is responsible for directing technology strategy and providing technical management at the firm. As of December 2011, he has led or advised over 35 law firm clients totaling over 35,000 users on projects related to Exchange 2010, ranging in size from 30 to 6,000 users. Joe is a Microsoft Certified Master on Exchange 2010, one of only approximately 50 people worldwide who hold this certification.

SharePoint Designer 2010 allows you to easily create a new edit or display form (as an aspx page) for a list or document library.  You just browse to a list or library in SharePoint Designer, and then click the “New” button next to Forms.  You’re then given the option of what type of form you want, and which content type to use it for.

This works great with lists, as the new form is populated with all of the fields from the content type, and you can easily modify the XSL to choose which fields are displayed, as well as the layout.  However, the form will be a lot more empty if you try this with a document library.  For some reason, the new document library forms include the data view web part for the library, but do not start off with any of the fields included.  But the fix for this is pretty easy.  Just follow the steps below to get the data view web part to include all of the available fields:

1) In Designer, create a new edit form and pick your content type

2) Click the form to open it

3) Click to the right of the “created at” field.  This should show “Data View Tools” in the ribbon.

4) Open the Design ribbon, and check “Sample Data.”  That should be it–that puts all the fields into the form.

After that, you should be able to modify the layout, as well as the fields in the XSL.

Depending on the configuration, users are sometimes prompted for credentials when opening Office documents from SharePoint, even when Windows integrated authentication is turned on, and the SharePoint site is in trusted sites or the local intranet zone (and auto logon is enabled).  Often, the user can simply cancel the authentication prompt, and the document will open just fine.  Other files, such as PDFs, also open without a prompt.  The reasons for this are complex, and you can read a good background on how Office opens documents from a web server in this KB article:
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We recently came across some strange issues with virtual machines in a domain, where the SQL and SharePoint Servers were joined to the domain, however they were not authenticating regular domain users correctly.  Domain users could log onto the machine, however the SharePoint people picker, SharePoint managed accounts, and SQL itself could not authenticate anyone except the administrator account.  You could browse to SharePoint locally from the SharePoint box, but could not get past the authentication prompt from any remote boxes.  We also saw the following error in certain places in SharePoint:
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Kraft Kennedy is pleased to announce achievement in 8 Microsoft Gold and Silver Competencies (and counting!) for 2011.

The requirements to participate in the Microsoft Partner Program have recently evolved to help differentiate technical and business capabilities among participants; Kraft Kennedy has risen to the challenge by quickly exceeding the goals set forth by the program.

Each competency requires specific individuals with deep technical skills, Microsoft verified customer references, and challenging certification exams to be completed.  This commitment demonstrates our breadth, deep specialization, and proven expertise across a range of Microsoft technologies.

About Kraft Kennedy

Kraft Kennedy provides business and technology-related consulting services to the legal community. By combining outstanding technical skills with an intimate knowledge of our clients’ business and information needs we tailor solutions that enhance attorney productivity, effectiveness, and client value.

We focus on the business needs of the client and ensure that technology is used to enhance, not inhibit their business. KK’s talented staff of strategic consultants, project managers, and network consultants have years of experience with hundreds of projects for firms from small to large. Our services portfolio includes advanced infrastructure projects, business continuity and data center consolidation, desktop deployment, network design and implementation, storage design and replication, and messaging systems migration among others. Our Microsoft specialties include: Desktop, Server Platform, Unified Communications, Portals and Collaboration, Search, Systems Management, Virtualization, and Small Business Specialist Community.

Workflow functionality in SharePoint Designer 2010 has been significantly enhanced over 2007.  I’ve had mixed feelings about the process in 2007, mainly because of the difficulty in customizing task assignments and because workflows could only run in the security context of the item submitter.  This security limitation was a huge annoyance when building more complex workflows that queried several lists, because we had to make sure that the submitters had appropriate rights on each list.  In some cases, we had to come up with strange workarounds when we dealt with HR lists, such as vacation days, that we needed the workflow to update, but users to only view.  Luckily, both of these issues are resolved in SharePoint 2010.  In fact, we’ve been able to enhance and simplify our vacation request and new matter intake workflows by using these new features.
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Recently, I decided to purchase the new MacBook Air. Until this year, I was a long time PC user, so Apple products are still relatively new to me. I wanted something that I could do more work on than the iPad but still be small and light. I wanted something I could use on the train as well as use in meetings while in the office. I originally purchased the iPad as a personal device for casual email and web browsing at home. It works fantastic for that, but when I tried to use it at work to take notes or draft lengthy emails, I found the on-screen keyboard of the iPad lacking. This is why I decided to purchase the MacBook Air.
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SharePoint 2007 lists use aspx forms for new item, edit item, and view item forms.  These forms can be modified to customize the look and feel of the forms, and add additional functionality.  For example, you could add client side javascript to do additional validation or to show and hide sections based on where a user clicks.  You could also add javascript events to list items, such as onchange and onclick events.
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