Starting SharePoint solution and planning your documentation

Just found a beautiful post regarding “Starting SharePoint solution and planning your documentation” by ‘Michael Nemtsev’. Copying the whole post here for my future reference and to spread the thoughtful thinking – all credit goes to Nemstev.

“When a new SharePoint project is about to start I use the following steps to design and plan solution

1. Creating Vision/Scope
2. Site structure and Navigation
3. Use Case Scenarios
4. Data Flow scenario (create the infomation "map"  - where it locates and how it's used. Usually you either consume or produce information from/to 3rd party sources - network folders, sharepoint lists, incoming emails, BDC connections  and etc. To plan you taxonomy and build good information structure you need to visualize all information on the single page, with direction where it flows. It helps you understand what happens with existing system)
5. Content location (this is very close to the previous point, but you concentraces on actual location - where information stored, and the way to access it - file or network paths, IP and credentials to access external information)
6. Site Collection Boundaries
7. List of required features and site definitions
8. Security: Roles and Permissions
9. Page Wireframes: layouts and content types
10. Targeting (how all content will be targeted  - metadata information, filtering. I usually use Personas to create several scenarios for content targetting)
11. Search strategy (define search scopes,  define all external sourced,  defile "best bets" for the targetted content)
12. Infrastructure Plan 
13. Disaster Recovery
14. Deployment plan

Take into account that SharePoint SDLC differs from standard development, and not all projects require those steps.

PS: consider building SharePoint Roadmap before starting the development phase.”

Ref: Michael Nemtsev's blog post

How To tag a document to show in OOB Tag Cloud Web Part in SharePoint 2010

 

Probably this is going to be one of my shortest blog post:

• Select a document which need to be tagged (add tick mark).
• On the top ribbon, you can find "Tags and Notes" . Click on that. Add the necessary tag.
• The tags gets mapped to the document.

After crawler runs, this tags will be visible inside the OOB Tag Cloud Web Part present under the same url.

Cheers,
Avik

Technorati Tags: Tag a Document,Tag Cloud,SP 2010

How to make use of Document Set feature available in SP 2010

Document Set feature is a cool concept introduced in SP 2010 for content management purpose and they are much more powerful than the ‘Folder’ based content management.

Document Set enables users to group multiple documents, that support a single project or task, together into a single entity. All documents in a Document Set share the metadata and the entire set can also be versioned.

To use Document Set, the first thing we need to do is to Activate the ‘Document Set’ feature at the ‘Site Collection’ level:

Once you activated it, go to the Document Library where you want to use this beautiful feature. Next follow these steps:

• On the Ribbon, click on the Library Tools > Library
  
• Select the Library Settings
  
• Click on Advanced Settings

• Select Yes for the Allow management of content types setting, then press OK
  
• Go back to the main Document Library Settings page

• Click on the Add from existing site content types link

• Add the Document Set content type to the current document library
  
• Once the content type has been added, you can begin to use Document Sets in your document library

Once the Document Sets feature has been enabled for your document library, you can start to create new items based on this content type.

• Select the document library, click on the arrow next to the New Document icon in the ribbon, and then select Document Set:

Next the wizard will ask for the Document Set name and Description as shown below:

Once you select OK, the document set will be created and inside that you can upload multiple documents which will be treated as a set.

Cheers, Avik

Red: Enabling Document ID feature within a SharePoint Server 2010

Checklist for WSS 3.0 to SP 2010 Migration using Detach–Attach Method

Today we completed migration of around 200 sites from WSS 3.0 platform to SP 2010 platform. There are mainly two basic ways to do the same:

• In-place upgrade
• Database attach upgrade

Before starting the upgrade process, you need to determine the upgrade approach. Following TechNet documentation provides excellent comparison between the different upgrade process and helps you to plan and prepare for the upgrade process:

Determine Upgrade Approach @ TechNet

In our case, we selected Database Attach Upgrade method. And there is one excellent check list available from Microsoft in TechNet. We just followed that and in a bang we migrated good amount of WSS 3.0 sites to SP 2010 environment. From the following url you can access the checklist:

Checklist for Database Attach Upgrade @ TechNet

Cheers,
Avik

Site Quota Usage Reports in SP 2010

At the time of MOSS 2007, Administrators were used to go to “Site Usage Reports” link that was present inside the “Side Administration” group in the “Site Settings” page to find out the details about disc space usage by specific sites. But, to achieve the same in SP 2010 you need to do the following things as there is no “Site Usage Reports” links available in the site settings:

Navigate to the site.

Select Site Actions >> Site Settings

Then Select the highlighted option

Then on the left hand navigation option, select the highlighted one and you are done

Alternative option for experienced users:

After the site name delete rest of the url and add the following "/_layouts/usage.aspx" and select Enter.
Site quota usage report will be displayed in the browser.

PAGETYPE Enumeration in SP 2010

 

Many time we need to direct user’s from custom pages to SharePoint’s OOB list or library specific view, edit, display, dialog pages. In those scenarios developer needs to create the navigating url from the code using some logics like URL = Site Name + Page Type + List/ Library ID + Item ID …
This parameters usually passed in the form of query string. For better understanding, open the Edit form of a list/ library item and study the url.
While you can retrieve Site Name, List/ Library ID or Item ID programmatically, you need to know the Page Type value for constructing that url. Following table lists all the Page Type values available in SharePoint 2010 platform:

Member Name	Description
PAGE_INVALID	Not used. Value= -1.
PAGE_DEFAULTVIEW	Default view. Value=0.
PAGE_NORMALVIEW	Normal view. Value=1.
PAGE_DIALOGVIEW	File dialog box view. Value=2.
PAGE_VIEW	View, including both default view and normal view. Value=3.
PAGE_DISPLAYFORM	Display form for list items. Value=4.
PAGE_DISPLAYFORMDIALOG	Display form for a file dialog box. Value=5.
PAGE_EDITFORM	Edit form for list items. Value=6.
PAGE_EDITFORMDIALOG	Edit form for a file dialog box. Value=7.
PAGE_NEWFORM	New form for list items. Value=8.
PAGE_NEWFORMDIALOG	New form for a file dialog box. Value=9.
PAGE_SOLUTIONFORM	Solution form. Value=10.
PAGE_MAXITEMS	Not used. Value=11.