I am newbie to SharePoint. Can anyone explain when to use what?
Team Site
Blank Site
Group WorkSite
Document Workspace
thanks
How we roll at my company:
A blank site is a good place to start out clean and empty. Use when no other site provides any clear benefit.
A team site is a blank site that ships with a calendar, task list, document sharing, and a few other goodies. It is good when you would plan on setting up the like anyway.
We don't use a group work site, really.
A document workspace is useful when collaborating on a single document, such as a contract or a proposal, if the intent is to have a heavy process for the document, including meetings, calendar events, tasks, and so on. They tend to be sub-sites in our environment.
Related
I want to use SharePoint lists and workflows to improve some internal processes that our company is currently handling with Excel and email. I have a working user knowledge of SharePoint, but I am not a SharePoint developer.
There are 2 specific questions I've been trying to find a solution for. Having not found an answer after a fair amount of searching, I wonder if I'm not asking the right questions or if perhaps what I'm wanting to do is just more advanced (or not possible?) than I'd hoped.
I'd like to have 2 SharePoint sites in our production environment, but one would be the "dev/test" site and the other would be our "production" site. As we make changes to the lists or workflows over time, I'd like to be able to make the changes in "dev/test" site, and then after we verify the changes somehow move those to the "production" site.
I've looked at the list template, but that seems to only be usable for creating a new list, not updating the columns, views, etc. of an existing list.
Is there a way to move list changes (but not data) from one site to another?
Can the data in specific lists be automatically backed up and restored independently of a full SharePoint server backup?
I am currently working in a SharePoint 2019 Server environment and appreciate any answers or guidance you all can provide.
Thanks!
We're starting a new development project using on-premise TFS 2018, git and Visual Studio. In the past we've followed the Agile model of creating epics and user stories and putting the requirements/ui mockups and other details directly in the user stories.
After living through that approach, we don't want go back down that road for the following reasons:
1) Once that feature is shipped, it becomes extremely difficult to locate the info. Who remembers what feature was done in what user story?
2) No centralized place to store feature documentation. Of course, we all don't want take the waterfall approach of spending 2 years writing feature requirements, but there is something to be said of having a centralized place organized by feature area that contains the relevant documentation.
3) Have you ever tried to read an extensive user story with requirements acceptance testing through either the web interface or through Visual Studio? It gets old pretty fast having to read through a 8 line window.
What we would like to do is do a hybrid of documentation and reference a link to the doc in the user story. The user story exists for sprint tracking, but the details are stored in the document. After the feature/user story has shipped, we can refer to the doc.
Therefore the question becomes how to store this type of info in TFS and link to it so it can open with a link in the user story. We know we can do this with SharePoint, but is it possible to do in on-premise TFS?
Currently, this is not directly possible in TFS with outgoing with some 3rd party vendors like Modernrequirements which will be paid services.
You could always use the CMMI template which is used for creating and managing requirement Workitems, but not for storing a huge set of requirements as you typically stored in requirement documents.
As you mentioned there are other ways like Storing the documents in
SharePoint, one drive etc., and link to the user stories
Creating a
markdown
in the user stories itself.
Check-in those documents in the version control(Git,TFVS)
Refer to this similar SO in order to understand it better.
I am building a publicly facing website that does the following.
Users log in.
And then view a list of their customers.
They click on a customer to view their past purchases, order them, change them etc.
This is not a shopping site by the way.
It is a simple look up tool.
Note that none of the data accessed by the website is in anything other than a SQL database - no office documents. Also, the login does not use users Windows credentials on a VPN or something like that.
Typically I would build this using a standard ASP.NET MVC website.
However the client says they want to use Sharepoint.
As I understand it, Sharepoint is used for workflow and websites that are collaboration tools such as the components you can see here http://www.sharepointhosting.com/sharepoint-features.html
Here are my questions:
Would I be right in saying that WSS is completely inappropriate for this task as it comes with an overhead that provides no benefits?
If I had to use it, would I need WSS or MOSS?
If I had to use it, would I be right in saying the site would consist of :
List item
a) Web Parts
b) And a custom site layout. How do I create one of these?
Addendum:The book Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development looks like a good start
1.) I agree that SharePoint would be quite inappropriate for this task. A few reasons:
It costs thousands of dollars to license SharePoint for use on the open Internet
SharePoint will use a lot of resources (SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory...) that are unnecessarily demanding for your task
SP will give you very little flexibility to develop a solution in your way -- it sounds like you would need to create a database-connected Web Part in ASP.NET anyway (so that could be entirely independent of SP)
SharePoint has it's place--it can be remarkably helpful as a company's internal document management, intranet, and workflow/approval system--but it is not well suited for custom code nor Internet use.
2.) I believe MOSS would be required for the Internet license (as in the link above).
3.) SP development is not like typical relation database systems (for example, it uses flat, unnormalized tables). If your SQL matched the SharePoint way of thinking, you might be able to connect to your database as an external List using SharePoint Designer. More likely you would need to use Visual Studio to create a custom Web Part in ASP.NET.
Hopefully this'll be a few reasonable arguments you can use to help the customer see how SharePoint is inappropriate for the task... In fact, I expect just the first point (the cost of licensing) will turn them.
You can technically use WSS for this task but MOSS has more features aimed at building public facing websites. The publishing infrastructure comes to mind. It has has the CQWP which enables you to build custom interfaces which perform well in SharePoint. With SharePoint there are potentially challenges around scalability. If you know the platform well then doing something like what you have suggested would be a pretty quick task. If you don't know SharePoint and the underlying system well you could face challenges.
You do not want to approach building the final application with SharePoint Designer. It has behavior which can cause major problems with scalability. You want to create a SharePoint Solution comprising a number of features which can be easily deployed to SharePoint. Going this route does not alleviate performance problems but you are going to be closer to the right solution. You can package up the custom user interface elements as CQWPs or write Web Parts. I personally prefer to write Web Parts.
You do the overall site design in a Master Page. Pages within a site are then inheriting from this. If you have MOSS then you can create what are called publishing pages which contain your Web Parts. These are not available in WSS which is why people recommend against it for public websites.
To decide whether SharePoint (any version) is worth it, you need to find out if they are going to use any of the core features. If everything is going to be custom and you are not going to make use of any workflow or document management features in your deployment then I would stay away. To see whether you want to go further with SharePoint from a development perspective, take a look at the WSS developer labs. I recently ran an intro course at my employer using the materials from that site. They are dated, and need more info on best practices but they provide a quick way for you to dip a toe in the water and decide whether you want to go any further.
1) For the core functionality as you describe it SharePoint isn't going to add anything, BUT if you build it on SharePoints premisses it allows your client to add a lot of functionality outside the core for "free" like:
They can add Content Editor WebParts to pages where they can add descriptions, and messages
They can add lists where the customers can enter requests/comments/... and automatically have new entries mailed to anyone in the organisation subscribing to changes
The functionality you develop can be reused on their intranet
Any future small "web apps" can be included in the same site
...
So all in all unless you have a better framework to use then use SharePoint
2) WSS is all you need for now
3) Your main deliverable for now would be:
a feature with some Site Pages and a few Web Parts
a feature with a custom masterpage and corresponding css
True. Well not inappropriate but it doesn't add anything either.. but maybe in the future?
WSS is enough
You'd need web parts to expose your data, yes. The custom site layout is not necessary. If you want your own look and feel a SharePoint Theme may suffice. Even if you want some real custom layout tweaks you probably don't need a site template but you can get away with using just SharePoint Designer to edit the pages or master page.
We are researching the various options that exist in our environment to create an Employee Directory. We have a SharePoint portal, AD and recently moved from Lotus Notes to Exchange. Our current employee search is a custom Notes DB that has since been retired.
Since moving to SharePoint an year ago, we've used a custom list using SharePoint Profiles that are updated from AD. But the simple list interface isn't very user friendly and is very slow. Sone of the requirements include type-ahead, pictures, and details of skills/certifications and other demographic information etc. We are considering building an ASP.NET or SilverLight application that can consume the information in the SharePoint list. With the introduction of Outlook and the Global Address List, we are now wondering if it might be easier to build something within Outlook.
Has anybody traveled a similar path and what would you advice us to do?
Microsoft has a huge set of offerings for Collaboration and Social Computing in Sharepoint.
See this document, pages 8 and 9 for information about features related to an employee directory, including details of skills/certifications and other demographic information.
A la carte availability of individual features (such as People Profiles and People Search) and pricing may be an issue, but you may want to look into buying something rather than building it (if you can get the pieces you want for a price you can afford).
Sharepoint can connect with Outlook to keep the lists synchronized if you want to use outlook. And there are definitely a lot of different ways to change the way the lists are presented in the Sharepoint portal to make them more user-friendly. Having those details on the portal will certainly be a boon when combined with the powerful search and indexing features in SharePoint so you can identify employees based on their profile details easily.
We use the people search for this pretty effectively. We populate data in AD, then connect profile properties to AD attributes. That's only if you have MOSS, though. If you're working with WSS, you'll have to build something more custom.
One gotcha, though, is that the People Search out of the box doesn't easily do partial searches (i.e. searching for "john" doesn't match "johnson"). That's a big downer in my mind. You can use Ramon Scott's approach of a Content Editor Webpart with a form and some Javascript to work around it, and you can also get there via the advanced search box (albeit indirectly), but it sure would be nice if it were easy to make the default search box do partial name searches.
I recently just discoverd a somewhat easy visual basic script that draws information from the active directory where you can specify which OU to draw from where it displays all user information in a simple .HTM page. it includes a search bar, recognizes patterns (address) (company telephone number) etc... If you would like i can post it for you. you only need to fill in a few sections (display name for directory, OU, OU display, and tags) and you can always change the way things look too.
This should be taken care of by using the My Site feature that's available within SharePoint. You will then be able to search SharePoint users by skills, certifications, projects, and educational qualification.
Please refer to the SharePoint Planning and Deployment material on TechNet for more info.
SH.
We have had SharePoint where I work for a little while now, but we've not done a lot with it. We have an intranet with hundreds of ASP/ASP.Net applications and I'm wondering what kind of things can be done to integrate with SharePoint to make a more seamless environment? We put documentation and production move requests and so on in SharePoint now, but it pretty much feels like it's own separate system rather than an integrated tool on our intranet.
I've searched around to see what other people are doing with SharePoint but I've been finding a lot of useless information.
A great idea for you would be move your most used asp.net apps to run within the SharePoint site. Each app can be added either as a control directly on a pagelayout or integrated into a webpart (use the webpart to load child controls).
This would allow you to use the flexible moss interface to move the asp.net app into a unified information architecture so people can find the app easily.
SharePoint is really easy to roll out something that works, but creating a seamless intranet does require a bit of thinking outside of SharePoint itself (i.e. what should go where, which users need to see what, navigation structure...)
That is really a lot of work and requires lots of input from people outside the IT area.
A typical intranet portal segments functionality by department. Each department will probably have some custom web-based apps that you might have historically implemented in ASP.Net, and linked to from the intranet portal. With sharepoint you can start bringing the useful bits of those custom web-apps in as modular parts, so that the business owner of the portal can have more control as to how information is structured and displayed to his/her users.
Think dashboards, populated with custom metrics that only make sense to individual departments. That's one of the most obvious places to start. HR, accounting, IT, they all have metrics they want to track and display. They all have legacy systems that they might want to correlate information from. All this can be done in reusable web-parts. Since Sharepoint gives the end-user the control over layout, display, audience control, etc, you don't end up reinventing wheels all day.
SharePoint was designed to be a collaboration portal and document repository. If you have other business processes wrapped up in other internal web sites, you may not get much benefit from converting these sites into SharePoint sub-sites.
However, if there is signifcant overlap in your applications (contact lists, inventory, specs, etc.) you may want to make the investment to combine.
If you have InfoPath, you can create online forms. You can share your docs and edit them online. You can start an approvement workflow on these docs. You can create polls. You can create work groups.
Basically SharePoint is a giant and robust document store, but you can do anything what you can do in any ASP.NET web application. You can create e.g. custom workflows to automate business processes. We've worked for several customers to create corporate intranets and sometimes internet sites, so it really works. :)
But sometimes it's very hard to implement the requested features (a lot of workarounds).
Really its an intranet in a box. We pretty much run all of our day to day development tasks off of it. We keep documentation, track defects, manage people's time off etc. You can migrate your asp.net and asp applications to run under the sharepoint site. In the adminstration section you can set up web applications to run under the same site, but outside of sharepoint's control. That would probably help with the "feel" of it being completely seperate.
Sharepoint is really a shift in the way people have to think about web development and that's the key. You're no longer developing a standalone application, you're adding on to an existing framework. I would put it akin to having "silos of data" vs. a centralized database system which houses all the company's data. Once people realize that everything is connected, it will feel more like a seemless integration. My advice is to actively try and create applications in sharepoint and think about how to migrate existing apps on to it.
How about BI and reporting from an ERP?
When we know IE is uncapable to handle a page with 10000 table rows (without pagination)
Many don't realize but the success of a reporting tool depends on the performance of the grid object used - Excel and the SpreadSheet obj from the defunct Office Web Components are still the #1 in user's (accountants, managers, ceo) choice.
I think it depends on your environment. In our environment, we setup each department with their own pages and we use it for basic information, surveys, and the employee's homepage. We've built Google/Live Search and Weather.com widgets and roll RSS feeds using Tim Huer's RSS control.
One thing you can do is to create web parts to provide access to data from existing applications. Initially they could simply be read-only views, but depending on your experience they could be fleshed out to allow writes.
Another idea is to add links between SharePoint and your applications (assuming they're web based); that will at least allow a flow between them.
I haven't done it, but you could also theoretically skin SharePoint to look like the rest of your intranet.
Create libraries
Form libraries, documents libraries, slide libraries
Create standard or custom lists
Standard lists - announcements, tasks, contacts
Custom lists - suppliers, contractors, inventories, orders
Setup secure team discussion areas
Build shared team calendars
Create simple workflow processes on documents and lists