A common word that keeps popping up around SharePoint deployments is “Governance,” as if it will help you avoid chaos and have a more successful deployment. The answer is, when executed properly, it can. Governance consists of rules and guidelines for designing a service offering. Its goals aren’t to shut down a deployment and make it take forever, but, rather, to find balance in user flexibility while providing for IT oversight. Here are 10 key steps to help you be successful in designing your SharePoint deployment.
1. Confront Reality
Understanding where your company is in its maturity of SharePoint can better help you understand the next steps, as well as the challenges your corporate culture will face. Confronting reality is something that can be done at any time during a deployment. Often, it isn’t a greenfield deployment; there is already something in place, and that current solution may or may not be working. Why?
An assessment of your Intranet, collaborative platforms, file sharing platforms and usage scenarios will help you understand where to begin. It’s time to wake up and see that there are better ways to do things, and you may need resources to accomplish this.
You will find that making any changes will affect the balance of empowerment for the business, and give up some control from IT. It may feel unnatural at first. Doing this with the out-of-the-box deployment is often where companies start with SharePoint. They find that giving the business site collections to create projects, workspaces and team sites makes them very happy.
The balance can get out of control when the business is left with a default install. The default install has faults. There are no quotas enabled, and all data goes into one content database that continues to grow until it fills the drive. Auditing is off, versions aren’t enabled and chaos can reign quite easily without some forethought about the answers to these questions. One mistake is to decide to figure out many of these things later. Later comes too late, when the environment is down or, worse, never backed up. Again, it’s something that by default isn’t automatically configured. Backing up the drives isn’t good enough. The data is in databases, and the binaries and development assets are on the disks, while the
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This article from Microsoft TechNet describes how to uninstall Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Remove SharePoint Server 2010 by uninstalling it from Control Panel. When you uninstall SharePoint Server 2010, most files and subfolders located in the installation folders are removed. However, Web.config files, index files, log files, and customizations that you might have are not automatically removed when you uninstall SharePoint Server 2010. Also, Microsoft SQL Server databases are detached, but are not removed from the database server. If you uninstall a single server that has a built-in database, Microsoft SQL Server Express is not removed. When you uninstall SharePoint Server 2010, all user data remains in the database files.
Before you perform this procedure, confirm that you have uninstalled any language packs that you might have on the server.
Uninstall SharePoint Server 2010
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Here’s the last in the series (for the time being) that’s aimed at SharePoint end users. We want everyone who uses SharePoint to get the best from it. As SharePoint experts we’re always happy to pass on hints and tips to you.
A Document Workspace is a Microsoft SharePoint 2010 site created for document sharing. The site enables you to share files, update them and keep people informed about their status. When you open your copy of a document that is stored in a Document Workspace, you can get updated versions of the document with the click of a button, eliminating the need to manage document revisions manually.
You can create a Document Workspace from a document, or create an empty site and add documents to it later.
Note: If the Create Document Workspace option is not available, ask the site owner to give this permission to you or to create the workspace site for you.
To create a Document Workspace site based on a document:
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Here’s the fourth in the series – help promote yourself with “My Site”
My Site is a personal site that gives you a central location to manage and store your documents, content, links and contacts.
Use the Ask Me About feature to describe your projects, responsibilities, and areas of knowledge. These keywords will appear in the Ask Me About section on your profile, and colleagues can click on a keyword to ask you a question with your Note Board. By default, this information displays to everyone and privacy categories cannot be applied to it.
To edit your Ask Me About section:
The details in your profile create a list of properties that is generated by everyone in your company who has entered values. This allows you to determine whether the items are already in the company list.
1. Do one of the following:
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Here’s another in igroup’s series of tips for SharePoint end users.
Using Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and OneNote 2010, you can capture ideas and thoughts with coworkers during a brainstorming session – on the same notebook, at the same time.
To collaborate on a notebook using OneNote:
- post your OneNote 2010 content to a SharePoint 2010 site
- co-authoring is automatically enabled when multiple individuals open the document for editing at the same time
- as you and others edit the same notebook, your changes sync automatically in near real-time. When someone makes an edit, their alias will show up next to the highlighted section they are editing
- when you save and reopen the notebook, all edits will appear with the author’s alias next to it, allowing you to follow up with each author. You can even search content by who authored it
For the very best in SharePoint consultancy, call us now.
igroup want your SharePoint experience to be the best possible. We love it and it’s our mission to make sure that everyone has a good experience. We’ve put together a few tips which may help.
Each My Site has a My Content section where you can add different types of content, such as documents, blogs and other pages.
To add documents to your My Site:
- Visit your My Content page by doing one of the following:
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There’s no doubt that the world, Microsoft included, is moving more toward the “cloud.” However, while cloud solutions offer a great number of advantages, they also have limitations and potential downfalls. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages with Microsoft Office 365 and the cloud-based SharePoint Online.
Pros:
- · reduce your cost – you no longer have to run and maintain your service so could save a substantial amount each month
- · Microsoft keeps your privacy intact by allowing you to create group-facing intranet pages
- · there are several areas of improvement, especially when it comes to Silverlight visuals
- · employees can share and access group documents even more easily, from wherever they are
Cons:
- · you lose control – while you may be paying less for the maintenance of your servers, they’re also no longer your servers
- · you can’t implement farm-level solutions; absolutely everything has to be made in the sandbox
- · your entire staff will face a learning curve as they migrate to the new system
- · Microsoft’s servers aren’t completely free from errors
Do the pros outweigh the cons? That really depends on where you’re coming from. For many groups, the decreased cost is well worth sacrificing a bit of control and learning to use the sandbox for site customisation. For others, however, their current version of SharePoint resolves all their needs with ease and facing the new learning curve and potential problems is an unnecessary hassle.
If you’d like to discuss your options in more detail, just call igroup – All We Do Is SharePoint – we’re the experts you can trust to give you impartial advice.
The question of “What are the differences between SharePoint Online and hosting my own SharePoint?” comes up all the time, and it’s usually in the context of SharePoint Online being much cheaper. So – what is it that you don’t get? Here are a few answers for you:
1. Briefly……
There is very little difference, certainly none that the average user/power user would notice. Developers however will notice a difference as there are restrictions on what and how you can SharePoint Online can be customised. This is essentially because it’s a shared platform. For those who try to avoid customisation wherever possible, this could actually be considered an advantage.
2. Slightly more depth……
Within a typical medium-sized organisation, these are all details that it would be useful to be aware of.
| Feature | SharePoint Online | SharePoint 2010 Server | Impact |
| Business Connectivity Services | N/A | Supported | One less way to connect SharePoint to databases in your organisation |
| SharePoint solutions | Sandboxed solutions | Farm solutions/ Sandboxed solutions | Some third-party web parts will not work in SharePoint Online |
| InfoPath forms and workflow | Sandboxed solutions forms | Sandboxed solutions forms/Administrative forms/Farm workflows | Slightly more complex to set up web forms and workflow |
| Records Centre | N/A | Supported | No site available for managing records. Other records management features are available |
| Query suggestions in search | N/A | Supported | No “Did you mean?” in search results |
3. The works……..
Here’s a link to Microsoft’s own site:
As in on-premise SharePoint 2010, all the 6 primary capabilities are available in SharePoint Online: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and, Composites. You should note that not all the features in SharePoint 2010 are available in Office 365 SharePoint Online.
Office integration
SharePoint Online works with familiar Office applications. Office documents can easily be created and saved directly to SharePoint Online, or documents can be co-authored with Microsoft Office Web Apps. Access important documents offline or from mobile devices and set document-level permissions to help protect sensitive content. With one click you can communicate in real-time with colleagues, customers, and partners from within SharePoint sites.
Some highlights of the new functionality in Microsoft Office 2010 that interoperate with SharePoint Online include:
- · Backstage View: The Microsoft Office Backstage™ view allows users to manage their documents and related data – they can create, save, and send documents; inspect documents for hidden metadata or personal information; set options such as turning on or off AutoComplete suggestions; and more.
- · PowerPoint Broadcasting: Presenters can broadcast their slide shows to people in other locations, whether or not they have PowerPoint installed.
- · Document Co-Authoring: With new co-authoring capabilities, multiple users can edit the same document, at the same time, even if they are in different locations. Users can even communicate as they work, directly from within the desktop application.
- · Outlook Alerts: Users can sta
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