Create custom views in SharePoint 2010
By Jeff Taylor
By now, everyone should be familiar with creating custom views in SharePoint 2010. It is a great way to speed up the process of finding the items or documents that you need without scrolling through pages of unnecessary content. For instance, I send reports on a weekly basis to several clients with information that I get from many different lists. All of the lists and libraries that I use have custom views that give me the exact content I am looking for.When I first began to do these reports a few years ago, I was relatively new to SharePoint. I would spend hours filtering and scrolling through pages to find the information that I needed. It did not take me long to figure out that I could create a few simple views that would cut my time spent on these reports in half. I felt as if I had just cracked some secret code in the SharePoint world. These custom views would display my content in exactly the way I wanted, which made my job much easier and put a smile on my manager’s face.Now I have set up a demo library and filled it with Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word documents. Let’s create a custom view that will only display word documents so you can see how easy but beneficial it is to have these custom views. Let’s get started:1. I will begin by opening my “Testing” library.2. This library has both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word documents.3. Notice that by default libraries have an “All Documents” view.4. It is now time to clean this up and get organized.5. At the top in the “Library Tools” section I will click Library.6. Once the ribbon has opened, under “Settings” I will click Library Settings.7. Scroll to the bottom. Again you will notice that under “Views” there is only one view by default, which is the “All Documents” view.8. I will click Create View.9. Notice all of the different choices that I can select when creating views. For the sake of simplicity, I am going to click Standard View.10. I will now create a view to show all of the Word documents in my library. 11. Under the name section, I will be descriptive but brief: Word Documents.12. I can choose whether or not I want this to be my default view, and check this box.13. In the “Columns” section, the only additional column I will click is Document Type.14. In the “Sort” section, I will sort by Document Type.15. In the Filter section, I am going to check the box that says “Show items only when the following is true:”16. Under “Show the items when” column, I will click Document Type.17. I will leave the second drop-down as is equal to. 18. Then, in the last box, I will type Word.19. Take notice of all the other settings I could change, but I will not be changing any of these in this example.20. I will scroll to the bottom and click OK.21. I am now taken back to my testing library, and I will be able see that the default view is “Word Documents” and only my Word documents are showing up here.22. Not to worry, the Excel spreadsheets are not gone, they are just in my “All Documents” view. 23. To switch views back to “All Documents,” I will click Word Documents at the top.24. Then I will click All Documents.25. All of my Word documents and Excel spreadsheets in this library are being displayed again.26. I could simply change a few of these steps to create an Excel spreadsheet view just like my Word documents view.This is just a simple example of what a custom view can do in your SharePoint2010 environment. You can see that within seconds I easily created a view that sorted all of my Word documents from my Excel documents. So now whenever I leave this library and need to come back for any reason, this will be the first view that I see. This could be extremely beneficial to you if you are constantly looking for documents. The best part is that there is no need to filter or sort manually; any word document added to this library from here on out will show in this view. So I advise you to start creating your own custom views to see for yourself.Jeff Taylor is a consultant with SharePoint911, a Rackspace company.
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Three ways to recognize if you are over-architecting your sites
By Peter Serzo
Have you seen a picture of singer Kenny Rogers (“The Gambler”) in the last few years? He is almost unrecognizable. How about Barry Manilow? Or I could go right to the poster child of plastic surgery, Joan Rivers, to make the point: Take a look at these high-profile stars, and it’s clear that the too much work done on their exteriors.Can we talk? Because there is a parallel to be made when we look at our website’s exterior. How much work has been done? Has the site been architected through many iterations and now you no longer recognize its face, the brand? Many times I walk into a customer’s business and they are so close to the site they don’t recognize that the site has lost its focus or become too complicated. Other times, that is exactly why I am brought in.How can you tell if your site is over-architected? Before you answer that question, my definition of over-architecting goes deeper than what the site looks like. I look at three components and then make a determination if the site is over-architected. This is only a guideline as space limitations restrict me from providing a comprehensive guide.BrandingOn the surface, this component is deceptively simple. I first review the sites and determine if they have a uniform look. Does the site make use of a branded master page or pages? Are subsites allowed to use themes to further the brand? I am not a fan of letting subsites use their own themes as things can quickly get out of hand, and quickly you will find your site has become a mishmosh (that is the technical term) of colors and text.I determine who is allowed SharePoint Designer access. As a free component, it is a great tool to use to do a variety of things such as page layouts, workflows and master page branding. But things can go wrong very quickly if many folks have this tool. The term “governance” comes to mind. I look at the SharePoint Designer options in Central Administration and in the sites and subsites (under Site Settings) if applicable.I then look at how branding is being applied. Are there modifications to the hive? Is the publishing feature being utilized? Are site pages being employed along with publishing pages?Finally I look at the home page and some other pages and determine if there are Web Parts that are hidden. The way to do this is by typing ?contents=1 after the URL. While this is not branding per se, it is a component on the pages, and it leads me to my next topic.#!TechnologyFrom a technology standpoint, I love to look at what Web Parts are being utilized. There are three categories: out-of-the-box, custom and third-party. Each has a significant role to play in how a site is architected and how it performs.There are two out-of-the-box Web Parts I immediately look for: Content Editor and Content Query (CQWP). Utilizing the Content Editor is analogous to hard-coding as a developer. I immediately home in to determine if the Content Link is being utilized (I hope so!) or if all code/HTML is embedded.The CQWP is more insidious. What many folks don’t realize is that every time this Web Part renders, it is a query being run on the SharePoint SQL Server instance. Therefore it is important to understand the data source. How many lists is the CQWP querying? How many fields (columns) are being utilized? The number of columns in a list multiplied by the number of lists will give you an idea of the amount of data being returned. If you export the CQWP and open it in a text file, you will see there are many overrides that can be utilized to reduce data returned. I look to see if these are populated.Looking at custom Web Parts, I ask for the code to review. Are proper coding conventions being utilized, such as Dispose methods? How many custom Web Parts are there? Are the Web Parts all server-side? What about scope, such as event receivers and their functionality? A new option in SharePoint 2010 is the Client Object Model. Is this being utilized, and if so, how? Utilizing Silverlight? JavaScript? REST?Lastly, I like to see if third-party solutions are in place. I start by looking at the Web Parts: Are free ones being employed (not a huge fan, but they have their place)? How many? What is the support from the vendor?#!User experienceBy far the best way to determine if your sites are over-architected is talking to the folks who are using the site. But before I talk to these folks, I ask for a taxonomy plan. If there is none, a flag is raised. If there is one, I immediately know that there has been some thought into the design of the site. The best-architected sites have card sorts and usability testing. These test are not taken by the folks who are creating the site, but by the intended audience.When I am with users, I ask them to show me how they navigate to their sites. I look at how they put information into their sites. I look at what other technologies they are using (i.e. Excel) and if they are trying to integrate it with SharePoint in some manner.Inevitably I will hear things like SharePoint is not user friendly or, worse, SharePoint sucks. The majority of these opinions are not based on SharePoint but are based on usability. SharePoint has the capability 95% of the time, but time must be put into properly architecting the user experience. Many times, in our haste to just get something out there, we forget that it is the user that will make the site a success or not.As a culture, we could see Michael Jackson have his plastic surgery done incrementally. He changed over time. That is how we work on our sites. We are too close, and it is helpful to take a step back and review the three areas on which I have elaborated. Only then can you make a determination if your site has been over-architected.Peter Serzo is a published author of the “SharePoint 2010 Administration Cookbook,” a founder of the SouthEastern SharePoint group, a speaker, and SharePoint Architect for High Monkey Consulting. Peter has been in the IT industry for 20 years. He has extensive experience with SharePoint implementing business solutions for several enterprise organizations over the past seven years.
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Use the SharePoint 2010 theme engine
By Ryan Keller
With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft introduced a theme engine with greater capabilities than were available in the 2007 version. But how many of you have actually used it beyond changing the colors of the default, out-of-the-box SharePoint look? If you haven’t, it’s time to look at this again, as it is a rather powerful tool and offers up a lot of potential when used correctly.When it came out, my first reaction to the theming engine was that it was lacking, that it didn't give a whole lot of control over what changed, and that there weren't a lot of options for using it. It's definitely true that the engine doesn't allow for the level of customization that the 2007 version did, but if you think of how the themes work and what you can do with them, you can start to see a lot of the power behind the change.Take the default look of an out-of-the-box SharePoint 2010 site. I think we can all agree that it's pretty bland. Apply a theme to it and take note of the changes. It definitely adds a little spice to an otherwise basic-looking site. (Of course, you could argue that some of the out-of-the-box themes add a little too much spice, but that's a topic for another day.) The colors of most of the elements of the page have changed: the header color, the navigation bar color, font colors, even the Site Actions menu has been recolored in some way. Generally speaking, the 2010 theme engine is all about color replacement (and font substitution too, though that is more subtle).Let's take this one step further. The same concept that recolors the bland out-of-the-box SharePoint site can be used to recolor a custom branded site too. But why would you want to do that? Say you have a carefully crafted custom design for your company's SharePoint site. You want to maintain a consistent look across the site, but you also want to allow each department to have its own identity without having to create a completely new master page and styles for each one. This is where the theming engine can come into play nicely. What about other uses? Here are a couple other areas where SharePoint themes could come in handy: A school district could use themes to apply school colors to each individual school site, or a company with different branches could use themes to color each branch's site differently.As you create the CSS for the site, take note of which elements you'd like to be recolored. Maybe it's the background of the site, or the Web Part header color. Maybe the navigation bar and quick-launch colors will differentiate the various departments. You can even use themes to recolor or tint images used in the site design to blend in with the rest of the theme if necessary. The theming engine gives you pretty granular control over the colors in a site. Custom themes can be created directly in the browser, or created using Office 2010 products and uploaded to the SharePoint 2010 site. Theme colors are chosen for several different categories, such as Accent1, Accent2, Dark1, Light1 and so on, and those categories are called in by the theme engine to recolor aspects of the page.In addition to your standard style sheet, you will be creating a secondary style sheet that the theming engine will use to recolor the selected elements as the page is rendered. This style sheet, called themed.css, will go in the Style Library within a directory called Themable, and will need to be referenced in your master page file along with any other custom CSS files.In the themed.css file, you will use specific comment tags that the theming engine will read, and then replace the style immediately following the tag to items on the page with the class applied. For example, your site with no theme applied could have a background color of #DDDDDD. When a theme is applied, you want that background color to change to one of your accent colors, so your CSS would look like the following:.customBackground {
/* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:"Accent3")] */
background-color:#DDDDDD;
}When a theme is applied, the page element with the customBackground class will have its background color replaced with whatever color is set as Accent3. This is just a simple example, but hopefully gives you a good idea on where you could use the power of the 2010 theming engine to keep a consistent look and feel throughout your site, while at the same time being able to easily differentiate between areas of the site with the use of themes. By using SharePoint themes, you can make a big impact without a whole lot of effort.Ryan Keller is a SharePoint branding and design consultant with SharePoint911, a Rackspace company.
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Defining SharePoint taxonomy for work management success
By Eric Riz
Designing your taxonomy is the hardest thing you'll have to do for your SharePoint project. The correct definition will inevitably mean the difference between success and failure, and alignment between your corporate road map and strategic objectives is critical. As your standard business language, your taxonomy must be all encompassing but provide a strong foundation for corporate growth. A question that comes up early and often in a project is that of taxonomy: What is it, how does it work, and how do we “get a good one”?Taxonomy should be very straightforward and is easily understood across business lines regardless of your position, role or department. Taxonomy is the common business language that logically classifies and categorizes information and data across your organization.For example, if I were speaking to 200 people and said the word “coffee,” everyone in the room would understand what I meant. Therefore, coffee could be a term in your taxonomy because it is commonly understood and accepted. From that single term, many other variations could be made regarding a favorite drink or method of making it, but the foundation would never change. For all you Starbucks lovers, even a venti-2 splenda-blonde-misto is still coffee, it just has some additional metadata elements attached to it.When it comes to a business-level discussion, there are so many different perspectives on business vernacular that defining taxonomy is difficult. To complicate the issue, Microsoft hasn’t done much to offer predefined taxonomy, leaving companies up to their own devices.At Concatenate, we have created our RealTime Starter Kit as a solution to true out-of-the-box taxonomy at a work management level. This article will provide some insights into that process, and give you some tips to creating your own taxonomy to establish work management success. The process of creating your taxonomy takes a great deal of time and effort to complete. In fact, a 2010 white paper stated that it takes approximately 500 hours (or US$200,000) to engage a consulting firm to create a business’ taxonomy with proper definition. When developing your taxonomy, my suggestion is to do so with a technology-neutral approach. This will allow the focus to be put on your business objectives and the creation of taxonomy at an enterprise level. When working with clients on this definition, there are four questions that should be asked: How do you work as a department, as a company and as a business? What does everyone in the organization do the same way? What best practices do you follow? What common work processes do you have in place?Designing the right SharePoint taxonomy for your business begins with defining standard business rules. Bring your business leaders together and hold a meeting to define your intentions. This will serve as the basis for your information architecture and provide the input necessary to form your governance plan for both the implementation and buy-in long term. With the right people together, begin defining your core work processes, and what you already know you do well and often.Our project management taxonomy and content types were defined by analyzing our methodology and mapping those processes to each department, department content type, and finally department document set. Obviously, each of these categories is intertwined as they build on each other, which is why the definition of your core business and process is critical. You will also want to be sure that diligence has been completed in order to protect against any issues in the future. Be sure to review and analyze the taxonomy schema to resolve any potential gaps or issues once you have made the initial definition.SharePoint has many content types and formats to create and choose from when designing your taxonomy. These include documents, images and media, wikis, blogs and discussions, people records, business data, and events. With all of these elements residing in a single system, you have to create and manage these items through a common process. From a management perspective, assigning a librarian or custodian to your taxonomy is strongly suggested. This will be the individual who ensures that your structure is monitored and maintained for consistency. Also, remember that content types are searchable through SharePoint’s search engine, so locating information will always be possible so long as you know how the information was tagged.Eric is the EVP of Systems Integration for Concatenate, a software firm focused on maximizing SharePoint through product innovation and systems integration based in Toronto. You can reach Eric by e-mail at or on Twitter at . Read his other SharePoint thoughts on his blog at www.ericriz.com.
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Customizing SharePoint 2010 My Sites Navigation
By Randy Drisgill
In many ways, customizing SharePoint 2010 My Sites is a bit of a mystery. This is probably because there isn’t a ton of documentation available on the topic today.One question I get a lot is about changing the navigation and/or the top bar of the My Sites UI. The good news is that changing that Global Navigation and Sub-Navigation links for the My Site host is very simple, as long as you are logged into the My Site host from an account with Site Collection administrator access.Here is an example of the Global Navigation bar:You can easily change the links here by clicking Site Actions > Site Settings > Top link barHere is an example of the Sub-Navigation Links:You change these links just as simply by clicking Site Actions > Site Settings > Quick launchSo that covers adding and removing links, but what if you want to do something more with the top bar like add a logo or some other navigation control? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t nearly as easy. This area of the page can’t be edited just by changing a setting or even by changing the master page. If you open the mysite.master master page in SharePoint Designer, you would see that this area is controlled by a delegate control named “GlobalNavigation.” Behind the scenes, by default, this control is loaded from the 14 folder on the server. The exact file is: 14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\MySiteTopNavigation.ascx.If you are on a development server or a local virtual machine, you could edit this file and see the changes appear immediately in your My Site Global Navigation area. You can add a logo, rearrange the items, add a new control, or pretty much do whatever you like.However, editing out-of-the-box files in the server 14 folder is not a good idea for a production environment. Instead, you should make your changes in a copy of the MySiteTopNavigation.ascx file and use it to override the default delegate control through the use of a custom Feature. Creating a feature like this is beyond the scope of this article, but there are plenty of resources on the Web that show how to override the GlobalNavigation delegate control with your own content.Randy Drisgill is a consultant with SharePoint911, a Rackspace company.
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