Monthly Archives: July 2013

End User, Javascript and jQuery, MOSS, Nicki Borell, Office 365, Site Manager/Power User, SPF 2013, WSS

SharePoint: I am following

8 Comments
You may also be interested in: Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Nicki Borell is a SharePoint Evangelist & Consultant for Experts Inside. Follow him @NickiBorell.

A new feature in SharePoint 2013 is „Following“. Users can follow nearly everything in SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately you can only get an overview of WHAT you are following using your MySite. The Web Parts / Lists used to store and aggregate that data are not usable in any Team Site etc.

My first thought was that the new and hyped SearchDriven technique could be the way to aggregate all the content a person followed including outside the MySite. FAILURE. The content, for example, stored under “Site contents -> Social” in every MySite cannot be found using search. Also, the suggestion part of the Following Feature is not based on Search Analytics. More details about Suggestions in the context of Following can be found here: https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/SharePoint-Online-2013-Suggested-Sites-to-Follow.aspx

The facts that matter are:

<!-[if !supportLists]->· <!-[endif]->Sites that are being followed by your colleagues.

<!-[if !supportLists]->· <!-[endif]->Sites that are being followed by people you’re following will tend to be recommended to you.

<!-[if !supportLists]->· <!-[endif]->Sites that are being followed by a large number of people in your organization.

<!-[if !supportLists]->· <!-[endif]->Sites that you have modified recently.

To get information about what a user is following we need to use a REST API call. MSDN documentation which can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn194080.aspx

Using, for example, that method:

GET http://<siteCollection>/<site>/_api/social.following/my/followed(types=15)

You get a JSON result set with information about which documents, persons and sites the user who fired the query is following.

Using this JSON result and some jQuery magic we can generate a Web Part containing this information in a list view:

2013-07-30-SharePointIAmFollowing-01.jpg

Or the same information in METRO style:

2013-07-30-SharePointIAmFollowing-02.jpg

For the jQuery Script to create that list, go to: https://iamfollowing.codeplex.com//. The solution works with SharePoint 2013 only, on-prem or with O365 / SharePoint Online.

You can use other REST endpoints to feed the jQuery script to get other information’s, too.

00037ffeab621624@live.com, End User, General Knowledge, MOSS, Social Computing, SPF 2013, WSS

What is a SharePoint 2013 Community Site

1 Comment
You may also be interested in: Scinaptic OnePlaceMail - Enterprise Email & Document Management for SharePoint

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Chris Clark is the Marketing Manager for Creative Sharepoint. Follow him @chrisclark005

In the words of Microsoft, “a Community Site is a new site template that provides a forum experience in the SharePoint environment”.

There are 4 main components to the SharePoint Community Site that will be familiar to users of any forum:

Feature Description
Discussions Members can post an opinion or question to start a new discussion. Other members can reply to and like the post. The member that started the discussion has the ability to mark a chosen response as the ‘Best Reply’. Moderators have the ability to mark a chosen discussion as a ‘Featured Discussion’.
Categories Members can create categories to organise their discussions. When a new discussion is posted it can be assigned a category which other users can filter by.
Badges and Reputation Moderators can assign badges to members to indicate their status within the community, e.g. Subject Expert. Members can earn reputation by posting in discussions and through recognition by other members of their posts (e.g. when their content is liked or marked as a best answer).
Members A list of all members, including their badges and reputation earned, is held on the community site. Community Sites can be set to allow any new users to join or an approval process can be set to manage new members.

For more technical information on Community Sites I recommend the following TechNet article.

The general benefits of a Community Site, much like other social features, are clear. Again, in Microsoft’s words, “communities promote open communication and information exchange by enabling people to share their expertise and seek help from others who have knowledge in specific areas of interest.”

However, without structure or purpose, communities will fail regardless of the underlying technology. Those that go down the “build it and they will come” route risk damaging the credibility of social technologies within their business when adoption falls flat on its face because users have no idea of where to start.

The purpose of this blog article is to provide 3 use cases of the SharePoint Community Site. In each example, you will see how the SharePoint Community Site template (enhanced by other SharePoint features) can be used in typical business scenarios. Each use case includes actual screenshots of the solution.

Having read the article, you will have:

  • A better understanding of what the SharePoint Community Site is
  • More ideas around how the SharePoint Community Site can be used in a real-world scenario
  • Three, easy to implement, SharePoint Community Site solutions to get started

SharePoint Community Site Use Case #1: Customer Feedback Site

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-01.png

Customers like to share their opinions and organisations can gain value in listening to them. This community site provides customers with a forum to discuss their ideas for your product, a channel to offer feedback and a convenient location to access up-to-date product information.

Features used (in addition to the Community Site template):

  • Promoted Links App (and App Part)
  • Announcements App (and App Part)
  • Survey App
  • Custom List App
  • Document Library App

Sharing product ideas

Clicking on “Share your product ideas” opens a new discussion modal, where customers can start a discussion around an idea for a specific product.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-02.png

Taking the product survey

Clicking on “Take our product survey” opens a new survey modal, where customers can provide feedback on products, value for money, customer service etc. Customers can only view their own responses.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-03.png

Checking product FAQs

Clicking on “Check our product FAQs” takes customers to a FAQs page, where they can find up-to-date FAQs grouped by specific product.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-04.png

Viewing product documentation

Clicking on “View our product documentation” takes customers to a product documentation page, where they can find up-to-date documents (e.g. product manuals) grouped by specific product.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-05.png

SharePoint Community Site Use Case #2: New Starters Site

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-06.png

On boarding can be a stressful experience for new starters, and an expensive and time consuming one for HR. This community site provides new starters with a forum to introduce themselves, meet and network with their peers and ask questions to designated mentors.

In addition, it holds a range of material for company orientation and automates some generic administrative tasks associated with joining a new workplace.

Features used (in addition to the Community Site template):

  • Promoted Links App (and App Part)
  • Video Snippet
  • Document Library App
  • Custom List App
  • Contacts List App (and App Part)

Introducing yourself to colleagues

Clicking on “Introduce yourself to your colleagues” opens a new discussion modal, where new starters can start a discussion around their new job role, previous experience, hobbies and interests etc.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-07.png

Reading the employee handbook

Clicking on “Read your employee handbook” opens the document in the browser (through Office Web Apps), where new starters can read the document or download it for offline consumption.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-08.png

Completing the new starter form

Clicking on “Complete your new start form” opens a new form modal where employees can provide basic information about themselves, such as name, address and emergency contact details. Once completed, the form will trigger a workflow for HR to approve.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-09.png

SharePoint Community Site Use Case #3: Sales Support Site

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-10.png

Sales teams rely on other departments (e.g. marketing and product development) to support their engagements. This community site provides a sales team with an interface to interact with the rest of the organisation. Salespeople are able to request information and other employees can involve themselves in up-coming engagements and events.

Features used (in addition to the Community Site template):

  • Calendar App (and App Part)
  • Photo Library App (and App Part)

Attending an event

Clicking on an event in the sales and marketing calendar opens a page with more details and a link to a related discussion where employees can register interest.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-11.png

Uploading a photo

Employees can drag and drop photos from the events they have attended which can then be used for promotional purposes by the sales and marketing team.

2013-07-29-SharePointCommunitySite-12.png

Conclusion

As I warned at the start of this blog, communities without structure or purpose will fail.

Simply providing your employees with an out-the-box SharePoint Community Site and expecting social collaboration to ‘just happen’ is not only unrealistic, but destructive, in that it undermines the credibility of social technologies.

Finding a specific use case for a community, and providing additional functionality to supplement the Community Site Template, will ensure better adoption and higher business value.

00037ffea2837964@live.com, 2010, End User, General Knowledge, Libraries and Lists, MOSS, WSS

SharePoint: High Tea in a Team Site

19 Comments
You may also be interested in: fpweb.net

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Ellen van Aken is an experienced intranet adoption manager. Follow her @EllenvanAken

Earlier I had shown you some examples of external business partners being able to read (New packaging requests), or edit (CRM) list items in a Team Site. This time I would like to show you an example where an external partner creates the new item. Not because that is technically very impressive (although it means a lot of testing from a home PC and a test account with no admin rights), but because it shows once again that you can do this type of thing in SharePoint, without having to invest in another tool with a different interface, different support model and what not.

What was the opportunity?

Since this was a new process rather than an existing inefficient process, let’s use another header text2013-07-26-SharePointHightTea-02.gif.

The company I worked for was exploiting coffee & tea stores. It was a logical step to use an External Team Site for communication between central management in the company and store managers and employees.

We started with sharing information top-down, such as manuals, promotion information, recipes etc. Later we asked store managers to confirm (in the Team Site) that they had received their promotion supplies and we installed a discussion board for all employees to add recipes and other suggestions etc.

Next was a promotion where consumers could enjoy a High Tea in our stores. Since stores had limited capacity for High Teas the consumers had to make a reservation, and that was done via an external call center. And guess where the call center collected these reservations? Indeed, the same Team Site.

It was meant to be a temporary solution. Management did not want to invest in dedicated software before knowing if promotions which included a reservation would be a success. And while using the Team Site, everyone involved could learn what they really needed from a reservation system, allowing management to prepare a much more realistic briefing to software vendors.

What is the solution?

We used a Custom List to capture store, customer name and telephone number, number of visitors, date and time. We created a number of views, such as grouped by Store Location and a list of Today’s reservations. We added a sum of the visitors so the call center knew how many places were left on any given date and time, and the store employees knew what they could expect that day.

Central management set an Alert (Added Items, Daily Summary) to keep track of the reservations, and therefore of the success of the promotion.

2013-07-26-SharePointHightTea-03.gif
New Reservation Entry Form

2013-07-26-SharePointHightTea-04.gif
High Tea Reservations (Today and later, only), by Location

What are the benefits?

  • The promotion was a big success, and while that was of course not due to the Team Site, it meant there were many reservations being entered into the system. The call center did not report one single issue with the “reservation tool”.
  • Store employees had a good overview of the number of reservations, so they knew what was expected of them. They could also see other stores’ reservations, so they knew how succesful the promotion was. This transparency was much appreciated.
  • Central management could monitor the reservations as they were added, and was able to do a good analysis on the preferred locations, dates and times, which helped them plan new promotions.

This might have come as a pleasant surprise for them, but not for us. We know how easily these things can be done in a Team Site2013-07-26-SharePointHightTea-05.gif!

2007, 2010, Branding, End User, General Knowledge, Marcy Kellar, MOSS, WSS

Top 5 UX (User Experience) Articles of the week - Week 6

30 Comments

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Marcy Kellar is a SharePoint Strategist and User Experience Designer. Follow her @marcykellar

2013-06-20-TopUX-Part02-01.pngLast summer, Marcy Kellar began a weekly series of her top picks of UX articles for that week. Marcy is going to pick up the series again so we’ve gone back to publish her original articles.

Here are the top 5 UX articles on branding this week:

1 - Are You a Right-Brained or Left-Brained Designer? | Design Shack

Colors, pictures, creativity; designers are quite obviously a group of people that tend to gravitate towards using the right sides of their brains… right? Or is this simply a stereotype that doesn’t necessarily ring true? Is design exclusively artistic talent put to productive use or is it possible that the industry is equally full of analytical problem solvers?

Marcy Kellar: I’m an analytical person in a creative field and cringe when someone asks me to make something pretty. I prefer to work within conventions and science to solve problems. That’s what I do as a designer. This article gives you insight into the stereotypes applied to designers and is a great read. So I’m interested, which kind of designer are you? Right or Left Brained?

2 - Why It’s Important to Sketch Before You Wireframe - UX Movement

Have you ever had an idea for a website or application? It’s easy to come up with the idea, but the hard part is understanding how that idea will take shape in user interface form. This is where sketching is useful.

Marcy Kellar: When asked what UX tools I use, I answer "pen and paper first." It’s a good practice to be in when you begin to mold an idea into a UI. This article provides you all the reasons to not jump immediately into wireframing. And I’ll let you in on a secret, if you start with paper, they stop asking you to "make it not look like SharePoint" — at least for a little while.

3 - Beyond Wireframing: The Real-Life UX Design Process | Smashing UX Design

There’s a lot of talk about wireframing, but what does our work look like beyond wireframing? Was I the only one with a simplified approach? What can we do to create successful designs? What does the process beyond "the poster" look like? Is there a pattern that works well for the majority of designers?

Marcy Kellar:A second article on wireframing gives you an in-depth look into ideal practices and process for managing the user experience and where the UI fits into that process. These are process often overlooked in SharePoint branding and UI design. Are there any ways you might improve your approach to the SharePoint UI based on these articles?

4 - Clean CSS - A Resource for Web Designers - Optmize and Format your CSS CSS Formatter and Optimiser/Optimizer

css, clean css, css formatter, css optimizer, css optimiser, web design tools, web design tutorials, css tutorial, clean design, clean graphics, graphic design, macromedia, adobe, dreamweaver, flash, frontpage, html, javascript, ajax, php, asp, best css, best web design, css cheat sheet, css code, xhtml, html tutorials, dreamweaver tutorials, flash tutorials, photoshop tutorials, illustrator tutorials

Marcy Kellar: Use this application to clean up the formatting or size of your CSS. Copy your CSS from SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio into this app for a little scrubbing. You can use it to format CSS. It doesn’t validate your CSS, it only optimizes and formats it but it is a step I use prior to transferring my CSS to another designer or prior to putting it in production. There’s even a setting to keep your comments. I use this every week at least once.

5 - The Designer Will Make It Pretty | Smashing Magazine

I am sure that my day job as a designer has a lot of similarities to that of the entire Smashing community. I create wireframes, mockups and concepts. I craft HTML and CSS using methods that I hope are fluid and adaptive.

Marcy Kellar: Please please please stop saying the designer will make your garbage site "pretty." The article is a little long and sometimes the author stretches to make a point but definitely worth it. It gives you some insight into why designers cringe when asked to "make it pretty" and what actually goes into making a site attractive. Make sure you check out the author’s examples of successful, usable eye candy sites.

00030000b6b950ab@live.com, 2007, 2010, Collaboration, End User, General Knowledge, MOSS, Workflow, WSS

SharePoint Workflow Solutions to Drive Workforce Productivity

1 Comment
You may also be interested in: O’Reilly - SharePoint 2010 at Work

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Himanshu Sharma works at Trigent Software Inc.

2013-07-23-SharePointWorkflow-01.pngToday many organizations still rely on obsolete practices to manage their day to day operations. These approaches have an adverse impact on workforce productivity in terms of wasted man-hours required to perform a simple task. With the rise in competition and service industrialization, top enterprises are seeking ways to become more efficient in optimizing time for production of goods or services that conform to quality norms. These enterprises strive to develop automated workflows with state of the art automation technologies to achieve better output.

While process automation has been around for some time now, there are not many takers for it as companies still prefer to carry on with the legacy approaches for managing day to day operational activities to save a few dollars.

How workflow automation helps?

Managing workflows require effective collaboration among workflow participants. Consider a simple example of an approval process for updating a set of content on a website, where an employee’s content suggestions are reviewed first by his manager and then by the team head followed by the technical head. The employee, the manager, the head, the technical team are participants in the content approval workflow. They communicate via emails, phone calls or by manually following up with each other. Besides, there are a lot of reminder events that consume a lot of time. This is a simple process which requires effective coordination between departments and internal teams. To expedite the process one needs to scale up the process and automate it so that once each workflow participant performs its task, the next participant gets an automatic update instantly. A unified communication platform can go a long way in easing the process. In this example, once the content has been approved by the manager, an alert will be sent to the head for the next round of review followed by the technical head’s review. Similarly, there are thousands of processes that run across organizations and communicating through emails and phone calls becomes tedious and time consuming.

SharePoint workflows to support your business operations

SharePoint workflow solutions help organizations by automating manual processes and help workflow participants become more efficient and productive when working with documents, forms and libraries in SharePoint. Using SharePoint, an employee can start a workflow on a document and easily accomplish his task. SharePoint facilitates automated workflows across various operational scenarios. Some of these scenarios are collecting feedback, collecting digital signatures, document translations and group approval processes. These workflow solutions can help organisations save man-hours and effectively utilize their resources.

2010, Branding, CSS, End User, Mark Miller, MOSS, Site Manager/Power User, WSS

SharePoint and Beginning Branding: CSS is the Key

You may also be interested in: Documentation Toolkit for SharePoint

 

A few months ago we conducted a series of branding workshops with Heather Solomon and Dustin Miller. One of the sessions with Heather, Customized Branding Solutions in SharePoint 2007/2010/2013, confirmed for me that CSS is absolutely the way to go for power users who want to update their SharePoint sites. The session started with an overview of browser tools that are essential for site developers and how they can be used to "discover" the various components to update a page.

I think "developer" is the wrong word here, however. When I think of a developer, I think of some code geek buried up to their elbows in Visual Studio. With CSS, any site manager can make some very effective updates to their site without access to the server. In the case covered during the session, Heather walked us through taking a bullet list menu and updating it into a full fledged horizontal, customized set of buttons, all with CSS.

From there, she tackled the Quick Launch by turning the headers into a gradated background and adding library icons to each.

2013-07-23-SharePointBeginningBranding-01.png

All of this was done in real time, in the browser as a way to prototype a new solution without having to bring down the site or make changes to the existing site.

Dynamic, real time prototyping is a great way to be able to experiment with a new look and feel in SharePoint while getting client buy in for a new concept. If you haven’t tried it, download FireFox and install the FireBug plug-in to get started. It’s as much fun as starting all over again. Here’s a quick tutorial on FireBug. It’s talking about WordPress but you can use the same techniques to play around with the SharePoint interface.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=956IDvJ2Aa0

Alexandru Dionisie, Document Library, End User, MOSS, Office 365, SPF 2013, WSS

SharePoint: How to Use SkyDrive PRO to Sync Document Libraries

30 Comments
You may also be interested in: Creating insightful dashboards in SharePoint - Collabion Charts for SharePoint

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Alexandru Dionisie is an Internet Professional and Technical Writer. Follow him @AlexDionisie

SkyDrive Pro is the replacement application for SharePoint Workspace which is no longer included within Office 2013. SkyDrive Pro is intended to take its place when working with SharePoint 2013 and provide offline document synchronization.

SkyDrive Pro is separate to any consumer SkyDrive subscription with the Pro version being used only to store work related content.

This is great for offline access and management of files from all your devices.

How to sync a document library

  • Above every document library there is a SYNC button; click on it;

2013-07-22-SharePointSkyDrivePro-01.png

  • Next, we must configure SkyDrive Pro:
    • choose another path;
    • choose a document library;

2013-07-22-SharePointSkyDrivePro-02.png

At this point , the folder has been created. The folder is actually a mapped drive of a SharePoint document library.

We can copy-paste different files which then will be synced with SharePoint.

2013-07-22-SharePointSkyDrivePro-03.png

The result:

2013-07-22-SharePointSkyDrivePro-04.png

00037ffea2837964@live.com, 2010, Document Library, Document Management, End User, Libraries and Lists, MOSS, Site Manager/Power User, WSS

SharePoint: How to Win Space and Not Alienate People - Part 2

1 Comment
You may also be interested in: Simple SharePoint Migration Tool - Content Matrix by Metalogix

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Ellen van Aken is an experienced intranet adoption manager. Follow her @EllenvanAken

2013-07-14-SharePointSpace-Part01-01.jpgHere is the first part of this post, ”How to win space“.

HOW NOT TO ALIENATE PEOPLE

1. Talk to your site and content owners.

Contacting the site owner about their content is always a good idea. As said before, they may not even know

  • that they own this content
  • that versioning is enabled and in which way
  • how versioning works
  • that their workflow actions are logged in files which may grow very large
  • what the policies are

It is also a good way to

  • get to know them
  • let them know that you are willing to help or train them
  • inform them about your guidelines and policies

In general, I have found most site owners to be quite accomodating to my proposals to delete or archive content or reduce versioning. As long as I explain why this is necessary, and help them to do this as painlessly as possible, we always find a satisfactory solution. Sometimes that solution is putting the word “archived” behind the site title, or leaving things as they are for the time being so they have time to think. But it shows them that their content is being monitored, and that generally sets them thinking.

Only in a few emergency sitations have I deleted versions or an enormous history log file without informing the site owner beforehand. (But I exported the log file into a spreadsheet before deleting it, so the history of the process was kept)

Of course it is better to prevent storage issues than to fix them. Here are some tips to do that:

2. Design new sites for the future.

When setting up a site, ask the owner how their content will grow over time, so you know if they (and you) are likely to run into problems. Perhaps you need to set this up in a new site collection, or limit versioning from the start, or teach them how to clear their log files on a regular basis. Your site owners will be grateful for your “planning ahead”.

3. Have a content management vision and policy.

It helps if there is a clear content and content storage vision. How long do you store content before archiving it? Do you allow video’s and “raw” pictures in your document and picture libraries? In which format do you store documents that need to be archived for a long time?

This will help you guide people to the best possible solution. However, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum recently found that more than half of major organizations do not have a content strategy in place.

4. Promote your SharePoint intranet as a dynamic working tool, not as a static archive.

This means you have to keep instructing users on how to manage their content and how to decide when something has to be archived elsewhere. I have heard from peers that any team site that has not changed in 3 months is auto-archived. Everyone in that organization knows that SharePoint is for collaboration and projects, only. That needs communication, policy … and an archiving solution of course. It may need to be on your list for the next version of your SharePoint intranet!

How do you manage your site collection for sufficient storage space? All tips and tricks are welcome!

2007, 2010, Branding, End User, General Knowledge, Marcy Kellar, MOSS, WSS

Top 5 UX (User Experience) Articles of the week - Week 5

10 Comments

 

Editor’s note: Contributor Marcy Kellar is a SharePoint Strategist and User Experience Designer. Follow her @marcykellar

2013-06-20-TopUX-Part02-01.pngLast summer, Marcy Kellar began a weekly series of her top picks of UX articles for that week. Marcy is going to pick up the series again so we’ve gone back to publish her original articles.

Here are the top 5 UX articles on branding this week:

1 - PixelWindow

PixelWindow is a simple, light-weight, cross-platform application for measuring things on your screen. It creates a transparent window that acts like a pixel ruler with its width and height reported in the center. Just drag it around and resize it to measure whatever you want.

Marcy Kellar: PixelWindow is an easy to use, light-weight application that helps you measure anything on your screen. A transparent window overlays other windows to assist in measuring pixels. It’s come in handy for me when using applications like Mockflow or when implementing branding in SharePoint.

2 - Why Topic Pages Are The Next Big Thing

Chronological and real-time consumption of content just doesn’t work anymore. It’s time for topic pages to add a layer of organization on top. In last week’s post, 5 Reasons Why Web Publishing is Changing (Again), we explained why online publishing is going through another sea change.

Marcy Kellar: This article asserts that Chronologically based content is on it’s way out and Topic pages are on the way in. Topic pages provide top level organization grouping all sorts of content into one place based on a topic…. It’s an interesting concept that screams SharePoint Metadata and Web Content Management to me. Who knows, maybe we will soon see a trend to use SharePoint Metadata to drive topic pages. What do you think?

3 - Tunnel Vision and Selective Attention (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 27, 2012 Summary: Users don’t see stuff that’s right on the screen. Selective attention makes people overlook things outside their focus of interest. How can people overlook something that’s right there on the screen? If you’ve ever observed a usability study, you’ve probably had many occasions to ask yourself this question.

Marcy Kellar:This article by Usability Giant Jakob Nielson provides research based direction on content placement so that web users will see it. As you design your SharePoint pages and web parts, remember that content placed outside of a users "tunnel-vision" will likely not be seen. Take advantage of the research and design around user behavior.

4 - 6 Popular Content Presentation Design Patterns

Content is what is considered the "meat" of a website. Content should be usable and displayed in a manner that makes it efficient to read and act on. Now that we have discussed website navigation design patterns, let us now explore popular design patterns for displaying content.

Marcy Kellar: Oh how often I am called in to apply simple branding only to discover that the content presentation is the primary agenda. If you are doing SharePoint branding, you will need to understand content design. This article provides a summary of a few design patterns that can be implemented using lists/libraries coupled with Content Query Web Parts, Dataview Web Parts or Custom Controls/Web Parts.

5 - The mistakes killing your conversion rate | Webdesigner Depot

You probably pride yourself on being a great web designer, right? But did you know that some elements of your website designs might actually be lowering the conversion rate and revenue of your website without you knowing it? These are often just simple mistakes that can easily be fixed, yet have huge impact on your conversion rates.

Marcy Kellar: The title of this article will mislead you into thinking the article content isn’t relevant to SharePoint Branding. For this audience, the title of this article should be "Big Mistakes when Designing a SharePoint Page." These mistakes are commonly seen in SharePoint solutions even before branding is part of the equation. Every bullet point is appropriate guidance to help you design a better SharePoint page (except the bullet about Variations. You can skip that).

2010, Book, End User, HTML5, Javascript and jQuery, Mark Miller, MOSS, Navigation, Site Manager/Power User, Web Parts, WSS

A New Concept in SharePoint Collaboration: Self-Publishing Books

5 Comments

 

2013-07-18-SharePointBlackMagicSolutions-02corrected.pngA team of crack writers (that means “very good at what they do”, not “pipe smokers”) from EUSP have been heads down for two months putting together a new type of book: self-published, multiple author SharePoint book. Instead of one person slaving over a hot computer for 9 months to a year, we decided to split up the chores, allocating one chapter per author. Instead of one person proofreading for accuracy, we had 90+ volunteers reading daily, making suggestions and commenting on how to improve the solutions.

Thus was born: Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint.

How We Did It

We used SPYam as a platform to help us organize the first stage of the project. By using a private channel in Yammer, we were able to hash out ideas, agree on deadlines and exchange the resources that were needed to get started.

A private channel was setup on Yammer for each chapter. A call for community volunteers was made and we were overwhelmed with responses (over 200). Each author was allocated 20 reviewers, who had access to their chapter’s private SPYam channel and could participate in the day-to-day writing and review of the content.

In retrospect, this was one of the smartest things we did. By having input from the volunteers after the initial draft, each chapter had multiple feedback loops that greatly improved the content.

The End Result

The book is in its final stages of production and will be available in the first part of August. I’m very proud to announce pre-sale pricing for Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint. If you’ll support us by purchasing the book before its release, we’ll treat you right. We’re selling the electronic version of the book for $12.95, but for those that trust in us, believe in us and what we’re doing, we’ll get it to you for $7.95.

So run over to the purchase page, punch the “Buy” button and let’s get this party started! Over 140 of your friends already have.

Thanks in advance for your support.

Table of Contents

  • Preface – Mark Miller
  • Forward – Mark Fidelman
  • If a Brit stumbles in a jQuery forest, does anyone hear his cries? – Dave Coleman
  • Building Solid Script Libraries for your Enterprise – Marc D. Anderson
  • Build a Content Slider Web Part: Dynamic Display of Pictures and Text – Wendy Neal
  • Build an HTML5 Video Gallery – Ben Tedder
  • Modify Your SharePoint 2013 Navigation Menu with a jQuery Plugin – Eric Overfield
  • Creating a Mobile-friendly SharePoint Blog with jQuery Mobile – Josh McCarty
  • Create a Team Site Solution for Running Agile Projects – Paul Tavares
  • Acknowledgements


    • Pre-publication price: $7.95