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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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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
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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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.
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&q=' + this.value + '&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&q=' + document.all.Google.value + '&btnG=Google+Search','_blank','')" onmouseover="this.style.cursor='hand'">
</P>
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