SharePoint Best Practices Conference

Technorati Tags: SharePoint Best Practices Conference,SharePoint,training

I'll be at the SharePoint Best Practices Conference in Washington September 15-17. I'll be co-presenting at this even with my colleague Paul Galvin on Tuesday the 16th:

Real World Governance: "Taming the Wild West "

As well as presenting at my very first session on Wednesday 17th:

"Formula for Success" - Training your SharePoint Staff

This session will cover all roles and role based training approach.

This presentation will cover:
- Identification of the key roles involved in the usage/development/maintenance of the SharePoint Portal
- Describe the type of training each role is required to receive based on their responsibilities
- How to deliver more focused and relevant training

Audience members should gain enough understanding of the importance of delivering training to all roles involved in a successfully SharePoint implementation, and with concrete and useful information that help them to develop the right training strategy.

Stop by and say "hi" :-)

I'll see you there.

SharePoint training approaches

I've just realized that my article had already been published on TechTarget "SharePoint Training".

Let me make something clear, I am not a trainer, the reason I've chosen "training" topic is because in my experience the biggest obstacle in end-user adoption is lack of competence and general basic knowledge of the SharePoint  environment and it's functionality.  This can be addressed through delivering right training.  Take a look at this article, hopefully it will help you to define  and customize your training a well as explain different delivery methods.

Technorati Tags: TechTarget,SharePoint,training

Support me and my team (not Technology related)

Dear Friends,

I will be joining friends of my brother to walk with thousands of other people in AFSP's 2008 Out of the Darkness Community Walk to benefit the American Foundation for Suicide. As you might know this is a very personal issue to me, my brother had been missing for over 3.5 years when he left he also left a note alluding to possibility of a suicide. I would appreciate any support that you give me and our walk team for this worthwhile cause.

Some Basic Facts

• In 1996, more teenagers and young adults died of suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia and influenza, and chronic lung disease combined.

• In 1996, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among college students, the third-leading cause of death among those aged 15 to 24 years, and the fourth- leading cause of death among those aged 10 to 14 years.

Click here to read my blog dedicated to my brother Arkadiy Tashman  http://arkadiytashman.blogspot.com/ 

Unfortunately the teenage suicide rate is rising dramatically every year, Let's all do something about it.

The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention is at the forefront of research, education and prevention initiatives designed to reduce loss of life from suicide. With more than 32,000 lives lost each year in the U.S. and over one million worldwide, the importance of AFSP's mission has never been greater, nor our work more urgent.

I hope you will consider supporting my participation in this event. Any contribution will help the work of AFSP, and all donations are 100% tax deductible.

Donating online is safe and easy! To make an online donation please click the "Support This Participant" button on this page.

http://afsp.donordrive.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&eventID=634&participantID=9067

If you would like to join or support any other member on our team, you are very welcome http://afsp.donordrive.v b/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.team&eventID=634&teamID=6519

Please remember that there is not minimum donation, anything you can.

Thank you

Secondary workflow

So what is it and how does it help to have a secondary workflow?

To better depict the picture I'll start with the following scenario: there is a complicated document management system with many approval workflows etc. one of many workflows is triggered by a document upload, the workflow type is determined by some of the metadata of the document. when an approval task is created by "collect data from user" action in the SPD workflow creation, the approval task should indicate the type of the document and some additional metadata of the document such as if approval of the document is urgent, due date for the approval, etc. (you finish the list :-) All of this information is indicated by end-user during the document metadata input. But... when the task is created the next step of the workflow is not executed until user completes the task, even if I put "update item" action in the next step to update metadata of the task with document's metadata, it will do so only after the task is completed, which completely defeats the purpose of this step.

Secondary workflow to the rescue…..

When you create a workflow on the tasks list and start it on item creation.  You will update the metadata of this task with the metadata of the document and reference the document by using "Tasks:Workflow Item ID"

In the long run as soon as the task gets created it will update itself with the document metadata by finding the doc based on the following criteria "document library: ID" = "tasks: workflow Item ID"

This is applicable in any scenario where you want to reference the item that originated the workflow that had created the task.

Technorati Tags: Tasks,Document Management,workflow,secondary workflow,sharepoint designer

International Sharepoint Professionals Association (ISPA)

Technorati Tags: ISPA,International SharePoint Professionals Association,Sharepoint community

As part of the ISPA board, I'm pleased to announce launch of ISPA web site, it can be viewed at: http://sharepointpros.org

ISPA had been operational for sometime already, but without any web presence it was much harder to get our message across and reach disparate Sharepoint communities all around the world.

You can read about ISPA and it's mission in the following news release.

The International SharePoint Professionals Association, also known as ‘ISPA’, is an independent, not-for-profit, community-driven organization dedicated to support SharePoint professionals and groups all around the world. The primary mission of ISPA is to promote the global adoption of SharePoint Technologies by providing support and guidance to the SharePoint community as a whole - by establishing connections between SharePoint professionals, groups, resources, education and information. ISPA is led and supported by volunteers across the world, and will focus on bringing the entire SharePoint community closer together.

ISPA’s first offering to the community is support to user groups around the world through free WSS v3 web sites for any group that becomes ISPA-affiliated. In addition, one of the goals of ISPA is to facilitate an exchange of ideas between user group leaders that helps increase the likelihood of their group’s success. Therefore, ISPA is providing leaders of user groups with access to collaborative spaces where they can interact with other user group leaders, sharing ideas, resources, best practices, guidance, and most importantly - support for one another.

ISPA has also established Regional Evangelists - existing community leaders who have previously exhibited a strong commitment to the promotion of the SharePoint community, and who have pledged to carry the ISPA message throughout their particular region. These evangelists are key local contacts who are available to work with local SharePoint professionals and user groups throughout their region to help promote the community and SharePoint. If you are interested in starting a user group, have an existing one, or need guidance - the ISPA Regional Evangelists are great resources who are available immediately to assist you.

Finally, as everyone knows, no community is complete without a web site, and ISPA is proud to announce the launch of its official site, http://www.sharepointpros.org. While the web site is still in the early stages of development, plans for multilingual support and exciting functionality that will assist anyone involved with SharePoint are on the horizon.

If you have ideas for ISPA, would like to start a user group, or are looking for assistance, visit the new ISPA web site or contact ISPA at contactus@sharepointpros.org. Together, as the community we can achieve what was impossible as individuals - become a part of ISPA today!"

Setting an alternative home page of portal in place of the default.aspx portal home page

Over time I've heard this request coming in several times, so this is the time to share my idea on how to make it happen. so far I've found this the easiest and quickest way. I'll talk about trade offs at the end.

This technique involves a couple of steps:

1. Add Content Editor Web part anywhere on your Portal home page, this web part will not be visible to end users, this is why placement does not matter.

2. Edit content of this Web Part through the HTML editor option available in the WP.

3. Paste the following script in there

<script type="text/javascript">

var start = document.cookie.indexOf( "MyPortalHome=" );

if (start < 0) {
     document.cookie = "MyPortalHome=Something";
     document.location.href="[my desired url]";
}

</script>

4. Replace [my desired url] with the url of your alternative home page

5. Save you changes :-)

Lets see what the script does:

var start = document.cookie.indexOf( "MyPortalHome=" );

 

This way we are checking for existence of the "MyPortalHome" cookie by setting "start" variable to the index location of the "MyPortalHome" cookie.

 

if (start < 0) {

if the cookie exists "start" variable will be more than -1, it will represent the actual start position of the cookie, if it is -1 then the cookie does not exist, meaning this is the firsts time user clicked on the portal url within this browser session. if this is the case we will execute the code below.
     document.cookie = "MyPortalHome=Something";

We are setting the cookie

     document.location.href="[my desired url]";

And redirecting users to the alternative Home Page.

If the cookie exists we are doing nothing. It will indicate that user got to this page before. T

he cookie will expire as soon as the user closes the browser, next time the user goes to the portal url the cookie will be set again and they will get redirected to the alt. home page.

Gotchas:

1. if the user opens a new tab in IE and goes to the portal home, the cookie will persist and they will not get redirected, only when the browser is closed the cookie will expire with the end of the session.

2. To set the cookie in the browser you will have to allow to execute the script, you can prevent this behavior by modifying your security settings for this zone, or add this site to a list of trusted sites.

Have fun

Technorati Tags: SharePoint,Portal home page,javascript,home page redirect

SharePoint portal implementation approach

I was very excited to have an opportunity to write an article on the SharePoint implementation approach best practice topic for TechTarget. Unfortunately due to article's length limitation which I absolutely agree with (who has time to read lengthy article) I had to be very concise, but I’ve tried at least to mention the most important points.

The biggest challenge though is initial light weight approach to the SharePoint implementation project by the client. Most of the time companies view SharePoint as just another application to get their hands on. They do not understand that it is a platform which implementation demands a careful planing and design. Hopefully this message will get through to them and we will have to spend less time justifying the cost of the discovery and initial design phase and more time on building the most flexible and reliable platform.

Here is the link to the article http://searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid99_gci1317689,00.html

Technorati Tags: SharePoint implementation,taxonomy design,TechTarget