Archive for October 2010

SharePoint 2010 Adoption and Usage Best Practices

October 23rd, 2010
Posted by: admin

By Jay Atkinson
AIS Network CEO

SharePoint 2010 adoption concerns fall into two categories: technical and non-technical.

Technical adoption hurdles include concerns about logical architecture, physical architecture, network bandwidth and content database size, among other issues.

Non-technical adoption hurdles include concerns about getting your SharePoint 2010 solution accepted and used by those within your organization and whether or not your users have the knowledge they need to use SharePoint effectively in order to get the most out of it.

Leading SharePoint experts Scott Jamison and Susan Hanley cover these issues thoroughly in two best practices whitepapers published by Microsoft. You can locate them in our SharePoint 2010 FAQ section.

The “SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper” guides you in creating an adoption strategy and training plan to encourage SharePoint usage within your organization. The white paper tackles questions such as:

• How do I get my employees excited about using this new collaboration technology (champions, incentives)?
• How do I ensure that all employees within my organization understand and feel comfortable using SharePoint 2010?
• How do I ensure that SharePoint 2010 fits into existing business processes and makes people’s jobs easier?
• How do I manage the behavioral change required to integrate SharePoint 2010 into the way people work?

The “SharePoint 2010 Usage Best Practices White Paper” offers solid best practices for using SharePoint every day. Questions tackled in this white paper include:

• What collaboration methods and site templates are most appropriate for which types of situations?
• What should I ask myself before setting up a SharePoint site?
• How should I manage content?
• What should I think about when tagging?
• What is the proper etiquette for social interactions?

For further guidance, Jamison and Hanley, along with Mauro Cardarelli, have also published a book entitled, Essential SharePoint 2010: Overview, Governance, and Planning (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series, 2nd Revised Edition). It approaches Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 from a strict business value perspective, covering the essentials of how to plan and implement SharePoint solutions to achieve superior business results. It’s worth checking out.

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Solving the SharePoint Foundation 2010 “Search” Dilemma

October 21st, 2010
Posted by: admin

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

Here’s a little goodie that I discovered recently. It’s related to the “Search” capability in SharePoint Foundation 2010.

All versions of SharePoint 2010 run a variety of background processes in order to do a variety of things. One of these processes is called “Crawl.” Basically, it crawls through content in a Web site and builds search indices, enabling people to do searches of sites to find documents and data.

In SharePoint Foundation 2010, there are limits on the type of documents which can be scanned for content. For example, scanning a jpeg image wouldn’t yield any searchable criteria so SharePoint doesn’t allow scanning jpegs. SharePoint Foundation 2010 has built-in scanning abilities for only plain text files and all the Office documents. Some other documents — like pdfs and AutoCad drawings — may contain text which would be of value for Search, but SharePoint Foundation 2010 doesn’t have the native ability to scan them.

Previous versions of SharePoint allowed software manufacturers to generate their own scanning methods and install them as components into SharePoint. These are called iFilters. For example, Adobe and AutoDesk previously built iFilters for their documents. We have installed them for several clients using MOSS 2007 and WSS 3.0.

I discovered that SharePoint Foundation does not allow iFilters. Therefore, pdfs cannot be scanned and cannot be included in Search. This is going to be a major bummer for some people.

Fortunately, solutions involving SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Search do exist. As you may know, both these products are not free, and there are some constraints about where and how Search can be installed.

After quite a bit of research on the “Search” dilemma, I’ve been successful in discovering the solution to the problem for SharePoint Foundation 2010 clients. It cannot be found in the SharePoint 2010 manual and it was by no means easy.

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Using Web-Based Marketing/PR Tools to Increase Efficiency

October 19th, 2010
Posted by: Laurie Head

Love new tools that will help grow your business and make it more efficient? There is a plethora out there and it’s tough to stay on top of what’s new.

I love tools that create a culture of sharing on a frictionless basis – tools like Microsoft SharePoint 2010, which we host. When paired with a Web 2.0 application such as NewsGator Social Sites, which effectively makes your office “even more social,” SharePoint 2010 can become an incredibly powerful collaboration platform – leading to greater efficiencies in all aspects of the workplace. What communications professional wouldn’t appreciate that?

But, to do my job, I also rely heavily on a number of Web-based tools that lead to even higher marketing/ communications efficiency. For example, I use Google Insights, Google Analytics and Google Trends on a regular basis to measure all aspects of our online presence. If you aren’t using these at your company, you should. Also, they’re free.

While attending the international conference for the Public Relations Society of America this week with 3,000 other communications professionals, I learned about dozens more useful tools – most of which are free or available for a small fee. Here are half a dozen that strike me as worth checking out in the coming days:

www.compete.com: Use it for free competitive intelligence that will help you with your online marketing strategy. Compare your Web site’s traffic and engagement metrics with that of another site – a competitor, perhaps.

www.kadoo.com: Simply upload your files once to their cloud and use them on Kadoo.com and/or anywhere else — from mobile and Web applications to Web sites and services. You can do it without sacrificing your right to privacy or file ownership.

www.hootsuite.com and www.postling.com: Need a digital dashboard to monitor social media mentions about your company and spread messages by updating multiple social networks in one step? These sites may be for you.

www.submityourarticle.com: Consider yourself an expert with something to say? Have you considered article marketing? Write an article about almost anything and, for a small fee, get this site to distribute it across the Web to sites that crave content. It’s a 100% automated article distribution service.

www.tweetcloud.com: What’s being said about your company? Use this site for a glimpse across the Twittersphere through an intuitive interface (a cloud).

By the way, if you are tweeting, then please follow us @ AIS_Network.

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