Last day. Great conference. Great weather. Looking forward to last few sessions and getting ready to head home to write even more cool solutions for SharePoint.
SharePoint Connections: Day 4
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Monthly Archives: March 2012
SharePoint Connections: Day 3
Jumping around a bit today – going to attend some of the other tracks in SQL, HTML5, and Visual Studio. Look for me in CJQ201, VFN04, and VFN03. Hope everyone is having a great time. Lots of hits on the blog this week – appreciate the comments and look for me at the conference – will talk all things SharePoint.
SharePoint Connections: Day 2
Sticking to the SharePoint track this morning: HMS01, HMS06, and HMS03. After that may browse other sessions.
SharePoint Connections: Day 1
Beautiful day here in Las Vegas. Got invited to a pre-conference session – ‘Cloud computing with Windows Azure’ so I will be doing that from1-4PM today and then onto the Keynotes this evening.
SalesForce Chatter Web Part
You asked for it – the Chatter for SharePoint web part is now available! Download it right now and try it out in your SharePoint farm. The evaluation version is good for 15 days and will demonstrate all of the features of the web part – with only the minimum of nagging and annoying restrictions.
https://marcrdavis.wordpress.com/chatter-for-sharepoint/
Site and Farm-wide System Messages
9/5 UPDATE: The System Messages solution is now available for download! Click here for details.
So what the heck does that title mean? If you’ve been following my blog you already know what we’re talking about – SunGard’s SharePoint Intranet and all the cool things we are doing with SharePoint. This is the next installment – broadcasting informational and/or critical alerts to our Intranet users.
Useful for a variety of reasons: Alert users when a system or service is down; a new feature has been deployed; a new flavor of coffee is available in the kitchen on the 4th floor; the possibilities are endless.
So this was fairly simple, thanks to SharePoint 2010’s native status messaging API – SP.UI.Status. We created an interface for site or farm administrators to set and control messages:
The setting of farm-wide messages is managed through Central Administration:
Administrators can then set the message text (supports embedded URLs), the alert type, and if the alert is visible:
The settings are stored in a property bag and picked up by code in our master page:
(Example above is incomplete for brevity – missing executeQueryAsync call and related code)
When alerts are active – they show up on the site pages (or farm-wide):
Informational:
Warning:
Critical:
Another simple feature that leverages and extends the native functionality of SharePoint by allowing us to broadcast messages to our Intranet community. There’s more to come – we’ve hardly scratched the surface on what we’re doing with SharePoint. Hope you found it interesting. Be sure to look for my tweets and blog updates from the SharePoint Connections Conference starting March 26th.
Managing and Identifying SharePoint Site Owners
1/26/2019: Site Owner Manager 2.0 is now available! Download it today!
The purpose of this solution is to help resolve a longstanding issue in SharePoint – Who owns a given site? Let’s start with defining who an ‘Owner’ is. While SharePoint has the concept of Site collection administrators (users with highly elevated permissions) it has no concept of who has responsibility for the content or upkeep of an individual site. In some cases they may be one and the same, but in many cases they are different people and with different levels of permissions on the site. Sites invariably have many users with Full Control permissions – but who is the single point-of-contact out of those people? There is the concept of the Site Author/Creator – but that is not exposed anywhere in the GUI – and that value is unalterable. Over time it may not represent the person responsible for the site they created.
This solution introduces the concept of a Site Owner. The Owner would be the primary point of contact for a site – and their name would be prominently displayed on each page of the site for easy identification. An owner can be identified at time of site-provisioning, in advance or through analysis of site content and permissions. Administrators can manage and assign site owners though an easy to use interface as well as quickly identify sites with missing owners and stale or inactive owners that need updating. Administrators can define if the owner is an individual or a SharePoint Group.
Requirements
- SharePoint 2013/2016/2019 Server (Standard or Enterprise)
- SharePoint 2019 compatibility limited to Classic Experience sites
- This will NOT work with SharePoint Online
Download Links
Click here to download the Site Owner Manager User Guide
Click here to download Site Owner Manager for SharePoint 2013/16/19
The product will run in Evaluation Mode for 15 days after it is first installed. During the evaluation only the first 5 sites in any web application will be scanned.
You can also buy a license and activate the full version of the product. The solution is licensed per-farm (not per user or front-end like a lot of other solutions).
Site Owner Manager License $499.00 USD
Site Owner Manager License + 1 Year Maintenance/Support $749.00 USD
Original Article Below
If you’re like us you have struggled with this at one point or another: Who ‘owns’ a SharePoint site. We define the owner as the main business or technical contact for the site – the user responsible for the overall content, permissions, and management of the site. This is another area where SharePoint is lacking – sure there is an ‘Owners’ permission group – but that could have many users in it. It really does not identify the single point-of-contact we want to manage. When we set out to design our new templates one requirement was that we collect and display the site owner in the footer of every page so visitors had a way to identify and contact the site owner without a lot of difficulty or calling the helpdesk to inquire.
Our Site Owner control is deployed at the site collection level and is built-in to our site definition (you can also feature-staple it into existing site templates). Code in the master page renders the footer with the Site Owner stored in a property-bag:
When our users provision a new site, they are prompted to specify a Site Owner. The site cannot be provisioned without making a choice here:
Site Administrators can easily update this property at a later time via the Site Settings page:
Now this is all nice and good – users can identify the site owners and we reduced calls to our helpdesk and SharePoint support teams. But here is the cool bit. With a little PowerShell, we can instantly produce a report of all of the site owners (along with their site data) and marry that back to Active Directory to see if any of the users are disabled or deleted. This way we can make sure the Site Owner values are correctly populated and active users are managing these sites. Also great for sending out bulk-emails to the Site Owners when maintenance is required or changes are being deployed into their sites:
So there is our take on displaying and managing SharePoint Site Owners. Hope you found it interesting. Be sure to look for my tweets and blog updates from the SharePoint Connections Conference starting March 26th.
Download the free evaluation of Site Owner Manager Today. Click here for details!
Exchange/Outlook Integration with SharePoint
Ok I know what you’re thinking, SharePoint 2010 already has web parts that can talk to Exchange and render your inbox, calendar, etc. right on a page. Why change them? Because, for the most part, we found that trying to shoehorn OWA functionality into a web part is not what our users are looking for. We have rich-clients (Outlook) and a good remote experience (OWA) so why try to shove all that onto a SharePoint page (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turducken). We also ran into usability issues: They require integrated authentication to work properly for starters (which is an issue for us with external access secured by UAG forms authentication) and the branding does not work well with our designs. I am debating the wisdom of why you would want to have your inbox or calendar in a web part anyway – it’s not very functional. On the other hand, rolling up your inbox, calendar, and tasks data into a web part is appealing – and allowed us to demonstrate how to integrate other systems into our SharePoint Intranet.
This web part began as an exercise on how to 1: Integrate external systems into SharePoint. 2: Demonstrate how to present that data. And 3: Serve as a test-bed for future web parts using features like Ajax (which we used to develop the SalesForce Chatter web part, described in an earlier post). Our criteria for the web part was simple: rollup data from a user’s Exchange mailbox and present total number of unread messages, next scheduled meeting/event, and top 3 open tasks.
Above: The My Outlook web part.
The web part was surprising simple to build – thanks to Exchange Web Services (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb204119). The only hiccup we had with the design was authentication. EWS can use the default credentials of the user – but the double-hop condition from the web server to Exchange will render that option useless. So we created an account that has read-only permissions on user mailboxes so the web part can gather the information on the user’s behalf. You can also use Kerberos delegation with EWS if you have SharePoint setup to use it.
Each of the items is also a hyperlink to the respective page on OWA – so you can access your inbox, calendar, and tasks – but without trying to fit it into your page layouts.
We have more plans for EWS too – including a free/busy timeline in a user’s My Site profile – so colleagues can easily check each other’s availability.
Keep checking back – greater things to come. Also – be sure to look for my tweets and blog updates from the SharePoint Connections Conference in March.
SalesForce Chatter Integration to SharePoint – Part 2
UPDATE: Click here to download the Chatter for SharePoint solution.
So we just finished the second phase of our SalesForce Chatter integration efforts – the displaying of feeds and basic wall-functionality: Posts, Comments, Groups, Tags, and Likes.
Here’s what it looks like:
I described the basic workings of the web part in an earlier article (https://marcrdavis.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/salesforce-chatter-integration-to-sharepoint/) so please check that out for the details. I think it worked out very well. We added the ability to cross-post to your SharePoint profile when updating Chatter, nice. We also added properties to control the number of feed items returned, the cache and refresh timeouts, and options to produce debugging information per-user so we can trace issues in production.
Users who have authorized our intranet on their Chatter profile get the full experience above – they can post, like (or unlike), and comment on items. If they have not done the authorization step yet (or it was revoked), then users will get a read-only view of the All Company feed (which is done by adding a SalesForce API-enabled account in the web part configuration). Read-Only users are invited to authorize the app so they can get the full experience:
Clicking the link starts the authorization process:
The biggest challenge we had with the design was the Chatter API rate-limit of 200 requests per user, per application, per hour. We had to get creative with caching so we would not run over the limit – especially for the read-only view.
The goal here was not to reproduce Chatter or all of the Chatter features – but rather bring the feed data and the basic social experience into our SharePoint Intranet. Links, hashtags, and attachments are redirected to a new browser window that opens to the full Chatter web application. SalesForce has been working on a version of this web part for some time – but it is still in beta and not widely available. The version we tested also had a requirement of SSL on the SharePoint front-end servers. Since we offload SSL on our load-balancers, we could not use their web part properly. Ours does use SSL to talk to SalesForce (so the feed is secure) but we don’t need to have SSL on the web applications. Our web part is also not encumbered by the SalesForce branding – so it fits in perfectly.
The next phase will continue to integrate the platforms further, with indexing Chatter so it can be returned in SharePoint search results. We may also look to embed the wall-experience in the user’s profile page.
That’s it for now – look for more on this soon. Be sure to look for my tweets and blog updates from the SharePoint Connections Conference in March. Take care.
SharePointAdept 