Tag Archives: Microsoft SharePoint

Foster A Culture of SharePoint Champions

The forgotten player is the success of Microsoft SharePoint is often the guy on the project team who makes SharePoint work for the team from a combination of their prior experience and seeing the potential in SharePoint to solve some sort of existing project-level problem whether it be dealing with project management, collaboration, or communications. Organizations who take a few simple steps to create a culture of SharePoint champions are going to reap the benefits in their business without a heavy financial outlay.

Here are some things organization can do to foster a culture of SharePoint champions:

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Book Review: SharePoint 2010 at Work by Mark Miller

SharePoint at Work Book CoverMy luck with picking SharePoint 2010 books is continuing because I just read SharePoint 2010 at Work by Mark Miller who assembles a veritable “Best Of” EndUserSharePoint.com writing. This book is a keeper! The book chockfull of practical SharePoint knowledge in multiple facets of designing, developing, and deploying SharePoint 2010 inside the corporate enterprise. The book is actually a compilation of articles written by SharePoint 2010 practitioners who work in the industry.

The  SharePoint Maturity Model that leads off the book  should be required reading for anybody deploying Microsoft SharePoint 2010 today. As I’ve often said, it’s not that SharePoint is bad, it’s the implementation. The SharePoint Maturity Model (by Sadalit Van Buren) homes in on one of the biggest issues I’ve encountered with SharePoint through multiple contracts as a technical writer and that is that too many times when it comes to SharePoint that organizations don’t really know what they have and focus on projects that may not bring a suitable Return on Investment. Organizations need to have a cohesive way to analyze and understand the SharePoint platform as a whole that makes this article required reading in my opinion.

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Book Review: SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real World Projects (Microsoft Press)

I am a sucker for practical technology books especially about Microsoft SharePoint so Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Creating and Implementing Real World Projects hits my sweet spot with its well paced projects that take readers through all the stages to create and implement a SharePoint project using out of the box features. It puts me in my mind of the excellent SharePoint 2010 for Project Management book by Dux Raymond Sy.

The projects based approach to this book is a real selling point especially since you don’t even need to be a fully trained SharePoint developer/administrator in order to follow them and the create the projects. The book’s projects run the gamut from a project management solution, a basic FAQ solution, to a resource scheduling solution. Project complexity grows as the book progresses but each project sticks to the format of Identifying the Business Problems; Gathering Information; Designing the Solution; Building the Solution; and Managing the Solution.

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Collaborating With OneNote 2010

One of the hidden gems of Office 2010 is that it now includes OneNote 2010 – the latest release of Microsoft’s simple yet elegant note taking application. Formerly, you had to purchase OneNote separately making it a special software request inside many corporations and not standard issue. Now that it comes with all versions of Office 2010, my first hope is that it helps slay the useless tradition of taking meeting minutes, but before that comes collaborating with OneNote.

OneNote can serve as an effective backchannel for collaborative note taking, whiteboard session captures, and capturing the myriad of bits and bytes that comes with running a technology project.

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Saving & Sending Word 2010 Documents

There is more to sharing Word documents than the ancient tradition of attaching them to an Outlook email. Now Word 2010 makes it easy to share your Word documents over the web or SharePoint without you having to leave the application and creating too many steps between your documents and their recipients

Click File. The BackStage View appears. Click Save & Send to access Save & Send options. Here is a breakdown of options that are available:

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Book Review: SharePoint 2010 for Project Management by Dux Raymond Sy (O’Reilly Media)

SharePoint 2010 for Project ManagementI’ ve long been a believer that project teams can get a lot more out of SharePoint team sites if organizations decentralized SharePoint team site development and management to the team level.   SharePoint 2010 for Project Management  by Dux Raymond Sy is just such a book a must read for project managers and team leads who want to centralize their project information.

The book leads readers very methodically through building a Project Management Information System (PMIS) from SharePoint 2010 right out of the box without the need for third party add-ins much less a professional services agreement. The steps that Dux Raymond Sy lays out in the chapters of the book only require your IT/IS group to set you up with the appropriate roles and privileges and then following the steps in the book can take you to PMIS nirvana. He goes into enough detail where even first time and novice SharePoint users can get a PMIS up and running.

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Does Microsoft Office Need A Champion Inside Your Organization?

Often Microsoft Office suffers from a lack of credit (and support) despite the fact that it is the underpinnings to many a business process. It’s easy to brush it off as just being Office but its important to consider that Microsoft Office as an application suite continues to undergo such a metamorphosis from its inauspicious beginning as a bunch of bundled desktop applications to a front end into how a business operates complete with collaboration, communications, and a potential interface into corporate backend applications.

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Word 2010 Document Security And The Single Technical Writer

There is more to document security than just locking down documents on a SharePoint site where it is only accessible to users with the appropriate security privileges. Microsoft Word documents can hold many secrets that have embarrassed both corporations and United States Federal government agencies in the past. Technical writers should be the ones taking the lead when it comes to securing the documents they produce.

Here are some tips for adding Word document security to your writing and document release processes:

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Book Review: MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Word

After having a great experience reading the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint, my next read was the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Word. Microsoft Word has always been a bread and butter application for me as both a technical writer and freelance writer. Things have been a bit slow lately, so I am taking advantage of the time to shore up some old skills and learn new ones.

The book’s tendency to overlap screen captures became a bit annoying after the first 100 pages. To a novice Word 2010 user, this space saving move could lead to a minor bit of confusion. Take the screen captures on page 143 of 317 (iBook edition) which borders on abstract art not clear and concise communications. While I am on the subject of screen shots, fading out the bottom and right sides of them while certainly a special effect made it almost look like a rendering issue on the screen. There were also a few places in the text where the pagination would cut into the middle of a procedure that was also a bit disappointing considering the state of epublishing tools today. These lapses in production detracted from the overall writing of the manuscript and exercises.

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Book Review: MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint

Part of my 2012 learning plan is to build up my SharePoint 2010 skills. It’s a popular platform in my local employment marketplace. I’ve worked with it a lot in the past with a lot of OJT learning. Besides, I am a believer in SharePoint and hope to see it play a part of my near to mid-term professional future. I purchased the MOS 2010 Study Guide for Microsoft Office SharePoint by Geoff Evelyn from iTunes Bookstore to get the SharePoint fun started.

Using Office 365, I went to work through the exercises in the book using SharePoint Online to help sharpen my skills and learn some features like tuning the site search. While I know this book is written as a study guide for the SharePoint MOS, I am disappointed to see only a bare minimum of coverage on planning a SharePoint site. In my travels, I’ve seen multiple SharePoint implementations suffer from lack of planning and the planning issues drifted across all levels of the project including the stakeholders who were to manage the sites.

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