This week is Green Week, so I thought I would post on that theme. There are growing numbers of discussions and activities in technology that are green related.
I have always felt that using technology to improve efficiency, increase the ease in finding information (ie knowledge management), managing content, and simplifying or tracking business processes made sense – and are green.
Why?
Because we can better see the impact on our society and planet when we point out and acknowledge that we are trying to act in a responsible manner.
Because when we can see the projects that do impact the planet around us it is easier to remind ourselves that we need to protect the environment that sustains us.
Because when we are sometimes so focused on ROI we miss the Social Impact; we miss the Social Responsibility; we miss the Goodwill that is often achieved by projects that DO pay attention to these things.
The other night I caught a small portion of a documentary on TV. It was about Coke in South Africa. One subtle point they made was that when apartheid violence was at its height most foreign companies moved out. Coke chose a different path. They found a multi-racial group that was willing to buy the distributorships and remain in the country. South African’s found that during this upheaval the only refreshment to be found was Coke products.
After things settled down, Coke donated to local re-building causes. The locally owned Coke distributors started expanding by “shipping” product via wheel barrel and hand carts. South African’s took note of this and have truly embraced this company and brand. Coke is visible everywhere now in South Africa. This is all due to a vision beyond standard ROI. It displayed Social Responsibility that has paid off in Goodwill in a big way…and I might venture to say it has paid off in dollars that were hard to account for in ROI.
That story has nothing to do with SharePoint directly. However, if the thought process can shift so that some SharePoint projects can move forward, allowing the technology to help solve real problems or streamline real activities …then we can see SharePoint grow as a green tool.
For more coherent information on Green technology, check out these news links:
CNNMoney.com: Green Technology Report
CNET News: Green Tech: Intel sees Opportunities in wind, electric cars
SharePoint Magazine: Go Green with SharePoint
Business Week: Green Technology Innovators
InfoWorld: Intel invests $10 million in green technology companies
Breakell Inc – Green SharePoint (General contractors building green and using SharePoint for a community website to promote green actions)
Shortcuts that can help you get to pages you need when working on your SharePoint 2007 sites.
- Save Site as Template: _layouts/savetmpl.aspx
- Jump to Settings page: _layouts/settings.aspx
- Site Template Gallery : _catalogs/wt/Forms/Common.aspx
- List Template Gallery: _catalogs/lt/Forms/AllItems.aspx
- Web Part Gallery: _catalogs/wp/Forms/AllItems.aspx
- Master Page Gallery: _catalogs/masterpage/Forms/AllItems.aspx
- Add web parts to any page: ?PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2
- Manage your Alerts (2003 & 2007): _layouts/1033/MySubs.aspx
- Web Part Page Maintenance: ?contents=1
- IISReset can get annoying, every time you deploy new functionality you hit IISReset, and you wait.
A much quicker way is to recycle only the application pool instead of issuing an IISReset. In order to recycle just the application pool, you can use the following command:
cscript c:\windows\system32\iisapp.vbs /a ”[App_Pool_Name]“ /r
Added bonus:
Oddball post, but hey it is my blog so I can do what I want! ha!
Here are some handy twitter tools -
First the good ol hashtag (#) – for SharePoint people search #sharepoint, #moss, SPSaturday and watch for postings on conferences etc. such as #spc09
Look at Trends to find other hashtags or words you may want to follow.
Other Tools
http://www.twitblock.org
http://www.tweetdeck.com/
http://www.hootsuite.com/
http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/
http://twitpic.com/
and
99 twitter tools from Smashing Magazine
Here are a few quick screen shots to see how the Help Desk template looks without modification. This site has our custom theme applied and some “demo” content added, otherwise it is OOTB (Out Of The Box).
Help Desk main page:
Fab 40 Help Desk Template
Service Rep Home:
Help Desk Service Rep Home page
Service Rep Manager Home:
Help Desk Service Rep Manager Home page
Support FAQ’s:
Help Desk Support FAQ page
If you import your User Profiles from Active Directory (or LDAP, or anywhere) into SharePoint then at some point you may want to make use of some properties available in that external system. The default import connection in SharePoint maps several commonly used properties for you, in my case properties found in Active Directory.
When you go into your Shared Service Provider (SSP) in SharePoint 2007 and navigate to User profiles and properties found under the User Profiles and My Sites section, you can View profile properties to see what is available.
When I did this, and selected Edit from the drop-down on one of the properties I noticed that I could not see any way to map the property – that is I couldn’t set the Mapped Attribute. I could see the Mapped Attribute column, and see that many of the default properties had Mapped Attributes, but could not change them. Since I wanted to create a new Property and map it to an AD Property I had a problem with this.
What I learned was that this was a permissions problem, not because of how I logged in but because of how the Import Connection was configured. So here is what you do if you have the same problem.
Go to your SSP, navigate to User profiles and properties and select View import connections to get to the ”View Import Connections” screen.
View Import Connection
Select your import connection, and click Edit, this will take you into the Edit Connection screen. Scroll down to the Authentication Information section.
The Use Default Account radio button is selected, click on the Specify Account radio button to add your farm credentials – Account and Password. This account must have at least Read access to your Active Directory and can be one of the accounts you setup to manage your SharePoint environment. Click the OK button to save your changes.
Authentication for Profile Import Connection
You will be returned to the View Import Connections screen. Navigate back up to the User Profile and Properties page and select View profile properties. This time when you Edit a property you should see the Data source field to map and Enter field to map fields under the Source Data Connection in the Property Import Mapping section.
Property Mapping
Hurray, now your work creating properties and mapping them starts. Those steps may follow at a later date.
The default Search settings within MOSS 2007 may work fine for many companies, but there is one setting that we didn’t like on our SharePoint based Intranet. That is the display of search results from the Internet. We want our searches from within the SharePoint sites to focus on internal content, and felt that it is a distraction having what some consider advertising to be displayed with every Search result.
Removing this isn’t difficult, finding the place to do it might be. If you haven’t messed with Search very much then you won’t likely know where to go to control this behavior. Additionally, you probably won’t have any idea what it is called so your Google searches may not help you very much.
Want to remove or modify the Internet Results in your Search Results display?
Here are the steps:
- Navigate to your Central Administration (or directly to your SSP)
- Select the SSP for your site from the QuickLaunch in Central Administration
- Select Search Administration, found under the Search heading on the Home page of your SSP
- Select Federated Locations from the Queries and Results section of the Search Administration QuickLaunch
- On the “Manage Federated Locations” page you should see 2 or 3 items listed on the page, we are interested in any that have “Internet Search” in their name. Notice that the Trigger column displays “Always”
- Click on Internet Search Results
- Scroll down the Edit Federated Location page to the Trigger section
- Read the information about your options, you want to choose what is best for your site. For the sake of this post I am selecting Prefix and entering “web” in the Add Prefix field
- Click the OK button
- Repeat steps 7-9 for Internet Search Suggestions (which I assume you have like I did) Your Manage Federated Locations should look like this now:
- Jump out to another browser and try searching on your site. The Search Results window shouldn’t display
Search Results without Internet results
Manage Federated Locations
Modified Federated Locations
Tadaaa, you have done it!
In this case, if anyone searches on “bozo” (for example) they will get results without anything included from the Internet. However, if they search “web bozo” they will get both results and suggestions from the Internet. That is because I choose Prefix and used ‘web’ as my prefix. In both scenarios they will always get results from the SharePoint site.
<rant >
History: we have a boat-load of documents being stored in Visual SourceSafe 2005 by project managers, product documentation staff, and engineering staff. They started storing various documents there simply because it was available (due to our developers using the tool) and because they didn’t have anywhere else available. Most wanted both version and access control.
Fast forward a few years to today. We are in the process of implementing a SharePoint based intranet. Some of the files stored on PC’s, Laptops, file shares, and VSS will move to our Document Center or some other Document Library within SharePoint. There are some files currently in VSS that the groups want to leave right where they are. Management is in agreement with this situation.
One of the goals of our new intranet is to make it easy to find files. Search is a big deliverable. The obvious question is can we perform a search in SharePoint and find files in VSS? A follow-up question is, better yet, can we integrate to some level where users (with appropriate permissions) can see the documents stored in VSS from within a SharePoint site?
The answers are yes, I think, but that isn’t really the point of this post. I spent hours searching MSDN and TechNet for information to answer those questions. That is the point of this post. My biggest complaint with Microsoft is that they seem to make it very very difficult to find any information you are looking for.
Why can’t I search on “Search Visual SourceSafe with SharePoint” and find anything related to what I am looking for? I tried various searches, with various combinations of words, no luck really. One old article talking about integrating VSS 5.0 with SharePoint 2003 (the info in that article doesn’t apply to the current versions, things changed).
I tried focusing on Visual SourceSafe 2005 – no mention of integration or interaction with SharePoint found. Then I tried focusing on MOSS 2007, nothing. It was painful, and I only found tidbits of information that were actually related to the topic I am interested in.
TechNet FAIL, MSDN FAIL. Why can’t Microsoft improve the search capability within these sites, it has been terrible for years and years? It is still nearly impossible to find anything in TechNet and on MSDN when you search for something, especially if you don’t know the “proper” keywords.
</rant>
Although there was a huge turn-out for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2009 in Las Vegas this week, there were lots of us who didn’t attend. Many reasons for that I am sure, mine was simply work schedule conflicts.
Before the conference I was depressed knowing I couldn’t go to Vegas. All of the twitter, email, and blog buzz made it The Place To Be this week of October. SharePoint MVP’s, notable authors and bloggers, as well as all of the “cool” SharePoint vendors were going to be there. How could I not be bummed?
With the Live Blogging and Twitter hash tag for the conference (#SPC09), I felt better knowing I could keep up and learn a bit about what was going on at the conference. The conference site also presented video feeds – at least for the Keynote, which lasted several hours. Other highlight videos were made available as well.
As it turned out many attendees posted photos and videos as well as blogged and twittered about the conference. As I started following things it quickly became apparent that the massive amount of information coming out of this conference was overwhelming. I had Twitter notifications from TweetDeck popping up constantly. Not one notification but 6-9 at a time. And by constantly, I mean less than a second in between.
The information was great, and there were so many folks that deserve commendations for posting such great material that I couldn’t even keep track of them all. I hit more blogs and information sites this week than I have ever before (at least it felt like it).
The funny part was that while I had been bummed I couldn’t attend, I ended up having to shut down TweetDeck and stay away from the updates. It was to much to keep up with and still get any work done. I wanted to follow along and read up on everything, but it would take all day every day. If I had that time I would have been in Vegas!
I will have to digest all the links I saved over time. It appeared that people were going 20 hours a day there at SPC09, guess that is what happens in Las Vegas!
I hope I can attend the next great conference. Until then THANKS to all that posted so much, and know that while you got tired walking around to sessions – “we” got tired just trying to keep up with you online!
Recently I had to create a couple of custom themes for an intranet, the requirements were not tough, but since I hadn’t created a theme in several months I felt rusty. I forgot a few things and had to go back and clean up after deploying. So, I thought a “cheat sheet” of sorts might be appropriate for my blog. The purpose of this is to help me remember and possibly help someone else smooth out their own custom theme effort.
Tips/Notes
- Use Themes to change colors, fonts, background images.
- Use Master Pages to move elements around on the page.
- If possible, apply an Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) theme that is similar to the color scheme you want to your work site.
- Copy that theme folder and rename it to your custom theme name.
- C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES
- Don’t forget to modify the .INF file:
- rename the file to your custom theme name
- replace the original theme name with your custom theme name everywhere inside the file
- change “codepage” to a unique number
- If you “tweak” and view using the theme in a site, don’t forget to copy ALL of your changes into the theme.css that will go into your new theme folder.
- I like to use SPD to edit the applied theme (“themename”1011-65001.css) so I can view my changes with just a Save. Once I have it completed, then I copy the css out of that file into my custom theme.css file.
- Use the developer tools in IE to find the styles that you are missing. If a style is in the Core.css, copy the style from there and place it in your css prior to modifying it. Your theme.css will override the core.css in most cases.
- Don’t just remove or comment out an image file that you don’t want used…use “none” in the image attribute to make sure you are overriding the image usage elsewhere in a SharePoint style.
- Ie: backgroun-image:none;
- Edit the SPThemes xml, duplicate a <templates> section for your theme
- C\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\1033\SPTHEMES.XML
Sample section (copy section and change the bolded items in the copy to your theme name and images):
<Templates>
<TemplateID>Lacquer</TemplateID>
<DisplayName>Lacquer</DisplayName>
<Description>Lacquer has a gray background with gray control areas and orange highlights.</Description>
<Thumbnail>images/thlacquer.gif</Thumbnail>
<Preview>images/thlacquer.gif</Preview>
</Templates>
- Place your thumbnail and preview images in the 12 hive (can be gif, jpg, or png)
- C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\IMAGES
- When your work is done execute an IISRESET /NOFORCE to make the new theme available to your SharePoint sites
RSS - Posts
SPSaturday Phoenix SharePint Options
Taking it upon myself to research online a bit, I found the following locations to be potential location options for SharePINT during the upcoming SharePoint Saturday Phoenix. Not being a local I can’t recommend any that are not larger chains. Also, since I have not seen nor heard of anyone else coordinating this, I will volunteer myself and get things rolling. If anyone out there has started down this path, speak up! I am flexible and have no desire to add stress or complexity to what should be a fantastic weekend.
This list is in rough order based on proximity to the SPSaturday hosting site. PLEASE post comments if you are attending SPSaturday PHX.
SharePint Location Options
Lobby Bar – Arizona Grand Resort
7777 S Pointe Pkwy W, Phoenix, AZ
(602) 438-9000
Phantom Horse Grill – Also Arizona Grand Resort I think
8000 S Arizona Grand Pkwy, Phoenix, AZ
(602) 431-6476
Monkey Pants Bar & Grill
3223 South Mill Ave
Tempe, AZ 85282
(480) 377-8100
monkeypantsbar.com
Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant
420 S Mill Ave # 201
Tempe, AZ 85281-2870
(480) 736-0033
gordonbiersch.com
Four Peaks Brewing Co
1340 E 8th St # 104, Tempe, AZ
(480) 303-9967
fourpeaks.com
Copper Canyon Brewing & Ale House
5945 W Ray Rd, Chandler, AZ
(480) 785-1928
ccbrewing.com
Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery
14205 S 50th St, Phoenix, AZ
(480) 598-1300
rockbottom.com
Arizona Roadhouse & Brewery
1120 E Apache Blvd, Tempe, AZ
(480) 929-9940
from → Commentary, SharePoint 2007