Welcome to Kraft Kennedy

Simultaneous editing for collaboration is one of the most hyped features in Office 2010, however it’s only supported over the web in the Excel 2010 web app.  For Word and PowerPoint simultaneous editing, you’ll need to have the full client versions of the Office 2010 products.  This will likely be a disappointment for people who were hoping to collaborate on documents from kiosks anywhere in the world.

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When you click “New Item” in any SharePoint list or “Upload” in any document library, SharePoint sends you to a standard form for creating the new item.  Behind the scenes, SharePoint also passes in two parameters to let the form know where to post the item and where to go after the item is posted.  By leveraging these two parameters in the URL, you can make a link anywhere that posts data to any list and sends you someplace else when finished.  This has come in handy for us when creating intranet home pages, as we can create a list of links to post data to custom lists, which sends the person back to the home page afterwards.  Otherwise, the person would end up in the root of the list or library they submitted the item to.  So we were able to easily meet a requirement that the person be directed back to the home page after submitting the item.

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In a previous post, I discussed some useful free web parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.  In this article I’ll discuss two more very helpful solutions for building extranets in SharePoint and for building more advanced workflows in SharePoint Designer.
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Most of the information in an employee’s MySite profile comes from the Active Directory profile import, which is set up in the SharePoint Shared Service Provider.  However, this can be tricky with employee photos since links to photos are not normally stored in Active Directory.  An easy way around this if you don’t want to store the links in Active Directory, is to simply create a picture library in SharePoint and upload all of the employee photos to the picture library with a standard name, such as username.jpg.  Then you can write a script to update each MySite profile and associate the photo with the person.
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The SharePoint 2010 Beta has finally been released, and this article will just give a few tips to make the installation smoother if you decide to install.  The first step is to choose which version to install.  It’s being released as two versions–An Internet facing version, for organizations that will use it to create public web sites and extranet sites, and an Intranet version, for internal corporate intranets.  Both versions will support and incorporate all of the features available in SharePoint 2010.
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Autonomy iManage and OpenText eDocs both have protocol handlers for SharePoint, which enable the SharePoint Enterprise Search engine to index documents stored in the DMS, while keeping the documents in the DMS.  Many people haven’t been aware of this and thought you had to migrate all of the documents into SharePoint to search them, or to use an enterprise search engine provided by the DMS vendor.  However, these protocol handlers can provide the best of both worlds by allowing you to continue managing documents in the current DMS, while taking advantage of Microsoft’s FAST enterprise search indexer to index the DMS content, SharePoint content, file shares, web sites, Exchange public folders, and other enterprise systems.  Security trimming is preserved by the protocol handler, so users will never see documents in the DMS that they don’t have access to.  The protocol handlers both support Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

More information on the OpenText eDocs SharePoint integration and protocol handler can be found here:

http://www.opentext.com/download/livelinkdownload.html?path=product/microsoft/ot-clmsp-edocs-po.pdf

More information on the iManage SharePoint protocol handler can be found in their partner portal, by filtering the list of products to “SharePointProtocol Handler.”  Note that you need a partner login account to download the documentation and release notes.

http://worksitesupport.interwoven.com/WorkSite/scripts/portal.aspx

Both vendors also offer a comprehensive set of web parts to drop into a SharePoint environment to view and manage their documents from within a SharePoint site.

I recently had the good fortune to attend the SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas, which outlined the new features in SharePoint 2010.  Below are some of the things I took away.  I think this will be a huge improvement over the current version, and will offer a lot of very compelling new features, and a lot of good reasons to make the upgrade.

General Comments

The Beta will be released in November.  Final product will be released in the first half of 2010.

Microsoft is focusing on making the upgrade and updates easier.  You can upgrade the back end, while still keeping the master pages (look and feel of sites) the same.  Then you can upgrade the master page at the site level to test and get all of the new features.

Everything is 64 bit.  It requires SQL 2005 / 2008 64-bit, and Windows 2008 64-bit.  The server must have at least 4 GB of RAM.

A level 1 browser is required for users (IE 7 or 8, or FireFox 3) plus SilverLight for the best experience.

WSS is now called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, and is still free.  SharePoint Designer is still free.  SharePoint Server still has Standard and Enterprise CALs.

There’s a limitation on data storage now if you don’t have SQL… The basic install uses SQL Express now (rather than Windows Internal Database in the old version), which has a 4 GB data limit.  So we should keep this in mind for small projects, and typically recommend SQL Server.

SharePoint has emerged as an entire platform, and Microsoft believes this will bring ECM to the masses, BI to the masses, etc.  Microsoft is also positioning this as a full featured internet-facing platform, as well as an intranet / extranet portal which 2007 was though of.

SharePoint should be evaluated along with Office 2010, since the integration is now extremely tight.  SharePoint can be the access point for all of the firm information.

The most impressive things I saw in 2010 were the workflow enhancements in 2010 and the Office web applications.  In many instances I couldn’t tell whether they were demoing things in the rich Office client or in the Office web app—the user experience is almost identical in either case!
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Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) doesn’t come with a whole lot of web parts out of the box, but here’s a few handy ones we’ve found to spice up some of the home pages we’ve built.  These are all free and work with WSS.

• Tim Heuer’s RSS Feed Reader
  http://feedreader.codeplex.com/

Only MOSS comes with an RSS reader, and even that one can display only one feed.  This web part is invaluable if you’re using WSS.  This is the best free RSS feed web part that I’ve found, and it allows you to neatly pull multiple feeds next to each other.

• Bamboo World Clock and Weather
  http://store.bamboosolutions.com/pc-55-1-world-clock-and-weather-web-part.aspx

This web part neatly displays the weather in 3 cities side-by-side and can optionally display the time if they are in different time zones.  This is a nice looking web part and tends to fit nicely on the right-hand side of a home page for a firm with multiple offices.

• Amrein MSN Money Stock Quote
  http://www.amrein.com/apps/page.asp?Q=5731

This web part displays stock quotes, company names, changes, and percent changes pulled from MSN Money.  It’s the best free web part I’ve seen to do this, and will save a lot of time over trying to follow one of the examples online for doing this with a data view.

• Matt Jimison’s Twitter Search Web Part
  http://www.mattjimison.com/blog/2009/03/04/twitter-search-webpart/

This uses the twitter search API to search twitter based on the parameters you specify in the web part, and you can download the wsp or the source code from the web page.

• Kraft & Kennedy Google Search Box
  (Code below)

We’ve had a few instances where we were asked to put a Google search box on a SharePoint page.  This can easily be accomplished by just inserting a content editor web part on the page and editing the HTML directly.  You can paste in the following code, which includes JavaScript, to open a Google results page after the person enters a search term and presses enter or clicks a button.  This is of course a simple approach–you could also federate search results in your search center to include Google–but this simple html code works well in many cases.

<P align=left>Search Google: <INPUT id=Google name=Google onkeydown="javascript:if (event.which || event.keyCode){if ((event.which == 13) || (event.keyCode == 13)) {
window.open('http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=' + this.value + '&amp;btnG=Google+Search','_blank','');
return false;}};"> <IMG alt="Go" id="btnGo" name="btnGo" src="/images1/icongo.gif" onclick="window.open('http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&amp;q=' + document.all.Google.value + '&amp;btnG=Google+Search','_blank','')"  onmouseover="this.style.cursor='hand'">
</P>

Whether or not SharePoint can be a viable DMS at a law firm has been a big point of contention in the legal community.  A lot of this comes down to the mentality and size of the firm, and the specific requirements that the firm has for document management.  With proper planning and one or two simple addins, SharePoint may be a viable DMS for certain firms that are flexible and willing to invest in a development effort.

The advantages of using SharePoint as a DMS are many:

• Being able to wrap an intranet or extranet around all of your content.
• Having basic matter management features available in every workspace, such as a shared calendar, task lists, and discussion threads.
• Having access to document workflows.
• Being able to search all of your repositories with Enterprise Search (available free with Microsoft Search Server Express.)
• Being able to integrate business intelligence dashboards.
• Providing access to web 2.0 features such as wikis, blogs, and personal sites.
• Leveraging native Word features, and not having to rely on vendors to update their software to support the latest version of Office.

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I recently downloaded the technical preview of SharePoint WorkSpace 2010, but was disappointed to find out that I couldn’t test any of the SharePoint features.  It’s only compatible with SharePoint 2010, so anyone interested in exploring all of the new features will have to wait a few more weeks/months until the technical preview of SharePoint 2010 is made public.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 is the next version of Groove, the collaboration software acquired by Microsoft in 2005.  Groove 2007 was only superficially integrated into the Office Suite, and never got a large following, as it was included in only the most expensive versions of Office, and most people had no idea what it was.  SharePoint WorkSpace 2010 will be included in Office 2010 Professional Plus, on the other hand, allowing it to expand to a wider audience.  Additionally, it will integrate seamlessly with SharePoint 2010 and other Office products.

SharePoint Workspace 2010 allows for the creation of “SharePoint Workspaces” and “Classic Workspaces.”  SharePoint Workspaces allow you to access all SharePoint site content on your computer, whether online or offline.  This is an improvement over SharePoint 2007, where only document libraries and certain types of lists could be synched with Outlook.  While you had to go into a library’s action menu in SharePoint 2007 to connect it to Outlook, you can now connect the SharePoint 2010 complete site to SharePoint WorkSpace by clicking Site Actions –> Sync to Computer.  Alternatively, you can sync to a site from inside SharePoint WorkSpace by creating a SharePoint Workspace and specifying the url.

Classic Workspaces are the workspaces that were available in Groove.  Users can create document libraries, discussion threads, calendars, and invite other users and chat inside the workspace.  Classic workspaces use peer-to-peer technology to synchronize documents and files between users.  That allows users in different companies, on different networks, to still collaborate quickly and securely.

SharePoint WorkSpace 2010: New WorkSpace Menu

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