Viewpoint

Quick Tip: Checking all sub-items in a TreeView of checkboxes

srousopoulos — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:19:31 GMT

For a project I'm working on, I had to have a tree view of checkboxes in order to facilitate filtering some search results. No big deal, that's what the ASP.Net TreeView control is for. However, I also needed a way to let selecting a checkbox at one node modify all of its children's checkboxes. And this is why I love JQuery:

$(".AdvancedFilter input:checkbox").click(function(){

$(this).closest("table").next("div").find("input:checkbox").attr("checked", $(this).attr("checked"));

});

Done!

Get This: Title Icon in Web Part

Kathryn Ciaralli — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:55:00 GMT

On many occasions I have needed to use an image icon within the title of a given web part; this dresses up the web part and adds visual appeal. Historically, I have addressed this either using styles (with an image background) or a content editor web part (and setting the chrome to none on the web part in question) to get the desired effect. This has always been somewhat painful and I was surprised that Microsoft hadn't addressed this. Well, they had - I just didn't know it. :)

On a project last summer I stumbled upon the Title Icon in web parts...I had never noticed it before!! For those of you that had, to some degree, ignored the Advanced settings of a web part - this is where you will find the Title Icon (and yes - this is super duper easy).

Navigate to the page where the web part is located
Modify Shared Web Part
1. Expand the "Advanced" section
2. In the "Title Icon Image" URL field - enter the URL of the icon to be displayed
3. ...and voila - the image is resized on the fly and sits nicely in line with the web part title:

Get This: Search Stemming in MOSS 2007

Kathryn Ciaralli — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:39:00 GMT

How many times have you searched for something in SharePoint that you KNOW is out there and has been crawled, but it doesn't come up in your search results? Then it hits you like a bolt of lightning...you searched for the singular version of a term but the term that's out there is the plural version. Why didn't it come up in your search results? Do you really need a best bet for that? Nope. You just need to enable Search Stemming, which btw is native to MOSS 2007. Here's how:

Navigate to the search results page
Edit the page
Modify the "Search Core Results" web part
1. Expand the "Results Query Options" section
2. Check "Enable Search Term Stemming"

Yep - that's all there is to it. Now - why isn't this enabled by default? Apparently this is not supported in all languages, thus it's disabled by default. Now if you can just remember to do this with every implementation you would be all set. :)

SharePoint 2007 Search Administration: Scheduling and the UI

Jeremy Williams — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:40:00 GMT

As an SSP administrator, one can control and tweak the many aspects of SharePoint Search. One piece of the puzzle an admin can configure is a content source. For the uninitiated, a content source is simply a location where SharePoint Search is going to go out and look for files. Some examples of content sources could be all of your SharePoint sites, a file share, or even your public website. When configuring a content source, an administrator must choose how often that source will be crawled.

There are two types of crawls, a full crawl and an incremental crawl. While there is an (almost) infinite number of schedules one could set up for their content source, I often see a full crawl happening relatively infrequently (once a week or month, depending on content size), and incremental crawls happening quite frequently (every 5-60 minutes). Why? Let’s say a user uploads a file to SharePoint and tells their buddy, “Hey, I just uploaded the document about Client ABC to SharePoint, go check it out!” Their buddy (since he doesn’t know where the file is located) goes right to his trusty SharePoint search box and searches for “Client ABC”. If an incremental crawl hasn’t run since the file was uploaded, then it won’t appear in the results. This in turn makes for frustrated users, and an all around ‘bad’ SharePoint experience [but alas, I digress..]

Back to the point, when scheduling an incremental crawl, here’s a fairly typical starting point (picture below):

Everything seems to make sense in there, except for the last two text boxes. One way to interpret that section is, “Repeat the incremental crawl every 15 minutes and allow it to run for 1440 minutes”. Based on this interpretation, one may be lead to believe that an incremental crawl could start and run as long as 1440 minutes (that’s 1 full day). Well, as an SSP admin, I would hate for there to (potentially) be 1 crawl each day, so I’m going to change that 1440 to 20. Great, I’ve got crawl set up and my users should always be able to find their files (relatively) quickly, right?

Sadly, the answer is No. That text is actually interpreted as, “Repeat the incremental crawl every 15 minutes, and continue crawling every 15 minutes for 1440 minutes.” So, in my example above, the text becomes, “Repeat the incremental crawl every 15 minutes continue crawling every 15 minutes for 20 minutes.” This will yield you exactly 2 incremental crawls everyday, one around midnight, and the other around 12:15…After that, you’ll have to wait until midnight rolls around again.

For some users, this might have been a “duh” type of post because they interpreted the text and control in the manner Microsoft intended. However, other users may have incorrectly interpreted the text/controls as my example pointed out…

MySites and Quotas: The Nuances

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:15:00 GMT

Site Quotas in SharePoint 2007 are a great tool, but they can sometimes be misunderstood. One of the most common confusions with quotas comes with their interaction with MySites. MySites (IMHO) are a great feature of SharePoint 2007, and are only getting better in SharePoint 2010. However, the adoption of MySites in many organizations is organic and unplanned. Right around the time that MySites near critical mass, the desire to wrap some additional governance around the sites crops up. Arguably, one of the most obvious governance tools for MySites is a Site Quota. So the governance committee decides on some thresholds and passes the implementation down to their Farm Administrators…

Let’s put on our ‘Farm Administrator’ hat…

I need to enforce a Personal Site quota on my users, so I’ll just set up the thresholds on the Personal Site quota template, and apply that to MySites. After that, everyone now has that quota, right? Wrong!

Okay, so that didn’t work and now I’m getting yelled at because users are uploading their personal photo and music collections to their MySites, thereby eating up all the space on our SAN. Since editing the quota template didn’t do the trick, let’s go ahead and create a new template and apply that to MySites. Alright, now everyone has that quota right? Wrong Again! [Aside: Remember, you can always block certain file extensions from ever being uploaded to SharePoint in Central Administration.]

Darn it SharePoint, you’re really raining on my parade, what am I doing wrong?!?!

Like many really annoying problems, this boils down to semantics…Quotas are called ‘Quota Templates’ for a reason, they are a template, and act just like a site template would. After applying a template, if I make a change to the template, all new sites using the template will take the new values; but the old sites will remain static. Here’s a laundry list of nuances, and a quick demo/proof of this behavior:

To reliably change the quotas of MySites, don’t create a new template, you’ll just want to edit the Personal Site Template. I’m not saying that you can’t create your own templates, but why work harder if you can work smarter?
Quotas act like site templates; they’re a snapshot…So if I make site A when personal site quota = 10/8; then I change the quota to 50/40 and create site B, site B quota = 50/40, site A quota = 10/8
Don’t always rely on Central Admin to tell you the truth about site quotas and what a particular collection’s quota is; instead use the stsadm –o enumsites command. Screen-cap below:

- Administrator was a manually set quota
- Test1 was using the initial Personal Site Template Quota
- Then I changed the Personal Site Template Quota, did an iisreset for good measure, and made test2’s MySite.
- So Test 1 and Test 2 used the same template, however they have different values since the template was different during each site’s respective build-time.

At the end of the day, the best approach is to properly plan for MySites and enact a reasonable quota template right from the beginning. If that isn’t an option, you can customize (or search for other’s customizations/extension) stsadm.exe to iterate through MySites and manually apply your new template.

2010: Year of the Social Intranet

jwillinger — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:41:00 GMT

Is your intranet ‘social’? Or is it antiquated? I recently read a blog post from Toby Ward who writes for Intranetblog.com and having been in living in SharePoint for the past three years, I am what you would call an evangelist for all things social within the four walls and outside the 4 walls.

Social media on the intranet (Intranet 2.0) are present on about half of all intranets (in the Western World). Once a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream – although not to all employees.

Despite the low cost of entry, most intranet 2.0 tools are merely experiments, pilots or limited to a very small audience. Social media has only been deployed at the enterprise level in about 25% of organizations (see the results of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey Intranet 2.0 becomes mainstream).

Intranet wikis, for example, are increasingly popular: as of last year, employee wikis were present in 45% of all organizations (regardless of size), but only 17% of organizations had deployed them enterprise wide. The results for intranet blogs are similar: only 13% of organizations had deployed them at the enterprise level.

Many of the experiments and pilots, the department and team level tools will be rolled-out to the rest (or most of the rest) of the enterprise in 2010. Still, more organizations that are sleeping through the social media revolution will jump on the bandwagon. 2010 will be the year of the social intranet.

All social intranets are not necessarily built on SharePoint but it certainly helps. SharePoint 2010 has a robust social feature.

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Usability is Like Cooking

jwillinger — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:25:00 GMT

I love this from Jakob Nielsen. I get asked daily what is UX and UI all about, and does it really help my website to pay a company to assist with usability or can I just do it myself…We have an expanding usability practice at Rightpoint and wondered why become a Certified Usability Analyst?

Anybody Can Do Usability

Summary:
Usability is like cooking: everybody needs the results, anybody can do it reasonably well with a bit of training, and yet it takes a master to produce a gourmet outcome.

One of the discount usability movement's basic tenets is that we need a drastic expansion in the amount of usability work done in the world, and to make this happen we need more people to take on usability assignments.

This goal is perfectly feasible for several reasons:

Designers and developers are capable of performing basic usability activities such as user testing. Small projects can cope without the benefit of dedicated usability experts.
Simplified usability (e.g., testing 5 users) can be cheap and easily integrates with Agile development and other fast-moving projects.
The most important usability methods are easy to learn. For example, we teach design teams how to do user testing in a 3-day learning-by-doing workshop, where we take them through a fast test of their own design with a few of their own customers.

Honestly, it takes only 3 days to complete a small usability project:

Day 1: Plan the study and write the test tasks.
Day 2: Test 5 users for about 1 hour each (cleaning up between sessions).
Day 3: Analyze the findings and write up the top recommended design improvements.

Even the fastest-moving project should be able to set aside 3 days to improve the user experience. There's no excuse for unleashing your design on the unsuspecting public without at least one round of user testing.

Usability's ROI is huge: if you've never done any testing, you can typically at least double your conversion rate or other key business metrics.

When Usability Experts Can Help

I run a company that makes 1/3 of its money from usability consulting (the other 2/3 comes from publishing independent user research reports and hosting regular usability conferences.) How can I say that anybody can do usability? Have I just written myself out of a job? No.

Usability is like cooking dinner:

Everybody needs the outcome: As with your need to eat, your company needs to meet its business goals, which it can do much better if the design has been improved through usability.
Anybody can perform the most basic activities: Most anyone can fry a chicken, cook potatoes, run a quick test with 5 customers, or score a design for compliance with a checklist of usability guidelines.
Anyone can learn these basics pretty quickly: They're not all that difficult.
There's a level of excellence beyond the basics: Going to a fancy restaurant and eating a meal cooked by a master chef is vastly different than eating something you throw together yourself in 20 minutes. Similarly, a usability expert will give you insights into your users' needs and your possible design directions that are much deeper than advice you'd get from someone whose main job is in a different field.
Skill levels form a continuum from beginner to expert; it's not a dichotomy. Every time you learn something, your performance improves. Usability and cooking are particularly suited for continuing education, because anything you learn will remain useful for many years to come. This is why I place so much emphasis on usability training: you get better results for every extra bit you learn.

The cooking analogy stretches even further:

Although multi-star gourmet restaurants are wonderful, there's also a place in the world for modest neighborhood restaurants. Similarly, you should sometimes hire a second-tier usability firm or even a third-tier local consultant instead of bringing in a world-class usability firm. Most design projects include many workman-like, everyday usability activities that the lower-end guys can do well enough.
Even if you can afford it, you shouldn't eat out every day. Your waistline benefits from getting more modest meals most of the week. Similarly, it's good for your project if many day-to-day usability activities are performed by the designers and developers themselves. The more usability guidelines these people know, the fewer design mistakes they'll make, and the less rework you'll have to do after discovering how people really use your product.
Variety is the spice of life. Mexican, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, French. All great cuisines. Why pick only one? Similarly, combining many usability methods — such as user testing, guideline reviews, analysis by independent experts, analytics or A/B testing, and field studies — offers the best insights into optimal design. Experienced usability professionals have a very rich toolbox that goes beyond the simpler methods that anyone can use after a few days' training.
Sometimes it's nice to have others do the work. Much as I love Indian food, I never cook it. Too much work to mix and roast the spices. And I don't have a tandoor oven. The people who specialize in these things can do it faster and already have the right tool for the job.
There's value to being an outsider who's not restrained by corporate politics or "the way things are usually done." In cooking, sometimes you want the chicken done differently than your grandmother's sacred recipe demands. In usability, the person who takes a fresh view can see new things and can say things that insiders would be fired for even contemplating. (Maybe the VP's big, beloved animation shouldn't really be on the homepage. Feel free to blame me if you want to get rid of it.)

It's really a matter of balance. Yes, experts add value in usability, as in other walks of life. Yes, an expert can go beyond most peoples' accomplishments. But no, that doesn't mean that usability should be the responsibility of the experts alone. Everybody on the team needs to take responsibility for improving the user experience. And anybody can do usability; the basic methods are simple enough.

Fixing SharePoint Search that is down due to error 1000

Jeremy Williams — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 20:53:00 GMT

Situation: A SharePoint server experienced some really nasty search errors (error #1000, 5214, 6398, 6482, 7888, 10036). The most annoying of all these (and one I hadn’t seen before was the error 1000, shown below). A quick internet search turns up a number of blog posts and threads regarding general SharePoint search troubleshooting (ranging in recommendations from the classic multi-threaded IIS issue w/available hotfix, to full-blown SharePoint reinstall). At the end of it all, it seems that a hybrid approach helped me to solve the issue.

[Screenshot clipped to protect the innocent (servers)J].

Solution (In the form of those old pick-your-own adventure books): The short of it is that SharePoint was pretty busted up by search; and I’m (unfortunately) still unsure what caused it to blow up. As always, before you start really messing with Central Administration, be sure that you have a good SQL backup of your SharePoint content. I cannot stress this enough, if you don’t have a backup, you’re asking for trouble. Alright, now that the necessary disclaimer is out of the way, the solution involved the following steps:

1. Ensure your install user account has full access to SQL (takes some permission issues out of the equation).

2. Attempt to stop then restart Office SharePoint Server search (net stop osearch, net stop osearch in a command prompt).

a. Did that fix the issue? If yes, go out and buy a ‘That was easy!’ button

b. If it didn’t fix it, Continue to 3 (Unless you’ve been here already, then go to 5).

3. Restart the SharePoint Server box/boxes; if you’re really paranoid, you’d want to restart SQL too.

4. Repeat step 2.

5. Okay, things are bad, but there’s still hope. Read On!

6. Run the SharePoint Configuration wizard; leave the farm attached. (Basically, we just want SharePoint to ‘repair’ any of its configurations that may have been corrupted). When the configuration wizard finishes, run an iisrest for good measure.

a. Did that fix the issue? If yes, be thankful you aren’t like the other guys having to read on...

b. If that didn’t fix it, don’t give up yet; there are still a few more things we can try, read on to 7.

7. Wow, SharePoint is really broken here. Before we bring out the big guns, let’s try running that configuration wizard again. This time, you’re going to detach your server from the farm. You will lose all of your configuration settings, so before you click the ‘Destroy’ button, be sure you’re comfortable rebuilding SharePoint’s configuration. Detach SharePoint from the farm and restart your MOSS box. Once the server comes back up, you’ll want to run the Configuration Wizard again (it will look just like a new SharePoint install). Remember, all your old configuration databases are still on SQL’s file system, so you’ll either have to remove/rename the old files or rename your new configuration databases.

a. Once you get a new SSP spun up, does search work? If yes, see 8a.

b. Didn’t work? Let’s go for broke in step 8.

8. You’re going to repair your SharePoint installation now. Detach SharePoint from the farm again (instructions in step 7, but don’t reattach this time). Go to Control PanelàAdd/Remove Programs (<=Server 2003) OR Programs and Features (>=Server 2008). Find the SharePoint line item and select the ‘Repair’ option. This is (effectively) going to reinstall your SharePoint bits and bytes. Once the repair has finished, go ahead and reattach and reattach your farm’s major content databases. Set up the new SSP and verify that SharePoint search is now functioning.

a. If yes, I recommend a congratulatory beverage.

b. Still nothing? Check out the ‘Things to look for…Antivirus’ below.

Things to look for…Antivirus

If these steps still don’t fix search, take a look at the antivirus running on your SharePoint box. Certain AV products don’t ‘play nice’ with SharePoint, especially if the AV product isnt’ specifically designed for servers like SharePoint. If you happen to discover some antivirus that isn’t SharePoint specific, see this Microsoft article for paths that you should exclude from the A/V scan: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952167

Once you’ve done that, try a restart and go through the troubleshooting steps again.

Why you can’t afford to ignore your users.

Melissa Federoff — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:37:00 GMT

‘Usability’ is a big buzz word these days in software and website development. Everyone says they want to have it, but in the end – they don’t want to spend the time or money required to do it right. Usability is often the number one stated goal of a redesign, and then the first thing to get cut when budgets and timelines run short.

You’re right – usability isn’t a necessity in order to get something out in the world. But if you want something that your users will love, it is a requirement.

Here's my favorite analogy to explain what usability is and why it is valuable: Usability is to design as quality assurance is to code. I have used this analogy to explain usability to many software developers. You would never send your code out in the world without testing it and fixing bugs. Why would you send your design out without testing it and fixing it too? Without testing it you are just guessing and guessing leads to expensive mistakes (and more redesigns down the road).

Most people think they can look at a design and judge whether other people will be able to use it or not. I've personally run hundreds of usability tests along side of world-class designers and I can tell you honestly that I've never run a usability session where we didn't discover a problem that we didn't know existed. Typically it's not just one problem either, it's tens or hundreds.

Here are a few truths:

(1) No one, no matter how savvy they are at design, can perfectly predict how actual users will use a site

(2) If you designed it, it will always seem intuitive to you even if it doesn't work for anyone else

(3) Just because you are a user of the internet doesn’t make you a user of the site you are actually building

So now that I've hopefully convinced you that you need to do this thing, you may be wondering how to go about doing it. The best approach is to validate your assumptions and designs all along the way. Talk directly to users to find out what they need and what their problems are before you even start designing. Show concepts to users to see if you are headed in the right direction. Then run usability sessions to find out if your design is intuitive and easy to use (and iterate until you get there).

It is a process, it does require design and research experts, but it works. And the love and loyalty you will gain from your customers will be well worth it.

Living in the Social Media Age: Are You?

jwillinger — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 22:20:00 GMT

Living in the Social Media Age: Are You?

More than 56% of marketers plan to incorporate social media into their businesses next year, according to a recent survey by the Center for Media Research.

With so many social media channel options to choose from, which one do you use for your marketing communications strategy?

In July 2009, Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law study of national business leaders highlighted that the most popular social media channels were the following:

Facebook (80%)
Twitter (66%)
YouTube (55%)
LinkedIn (49%)
Blogs (43%)

In my first blog post, my audience confirmed that Facebook and Twitter were the most popular social media platforms. So, as a marketer, should I use the most popular social media channel or a combination of both? Well, the short answer is that it depends. Since each tool works in a different way and with the social media landscape changing everyday, the key is to find out what your targeted audience likes to use.

The bottom line is that you need to be a part of A conversation because these conversations are happening, whether you are in the social media game or not. My next post will be focused more around SharePoint as that platform for an enterprise to build that social computing platform upon.

5 Steps For Creating An Effective Digital Marketing Plan

rfreedman — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:59:00 GMT

I believe every organization today needs a digital marketing plan to be successful. And while they may be able to maintain or even grow their revenue without one, their customers are gradually moving to the Internet to make buying decisions. Companies without a strong digital marketing plan aren’t only leaving money on the table, they are loosing customers to those companies that do have a digital marketing strategy and plan.

The following 5 steps outline how you can guide you and your organization through creating a simple, but effective digital marketing plan to compete in today’s digital marketplace.

Step 1: Define your Target Audience

One effective method to define your target audience is to create Personas. A Persona is a description of a specific person who is a target buyer of a particular set of services. The persona typically includes a fictitious buyer’s demographic information, needs, preferences, biographical information, and a photo or illustration. Typically, multiple Personas are developed in the early stages of a Digital Marketing Plan that represent the spectrum of the target audience.

Step 2: Conduct Competitive Analysis

I typically recommend putting together a spreadsheet of your top competitors and conducting some research to see how they are using digital marketing channels to reach your current and prospective customers. Once you have your spreadsheet created, try impersonating your prospective customer and try to find your (and your competitor’s) products or services online. Did you find theirs first, or yours? If you find theirs first, try to uncover what they are doing within the digital channel to make a connection with you online. Document each connection you make with your competitor in the spreadsheet. This competitive analysis will be used as input as you prioritize your digital channels in Step 3 (below).

Step 3: Prioritize Your Digital Channels

Below is a list of the most popular digital channels that exist today. I always recommend force-ranking these according to value and effort. In other words, look at each channel individually and try to determine the value that channel could bring to your organization. Value can be defined in many ways, including: # of new visitors, # of new leads, increase (%) in average deal size, lower cost ($) of sale, etc. Then, independent of the value, look at the effort required to implement your plan across each digital marketing channel. The value-effort score will show you which channels represent “quick wins”. I always recommend starting with quick wins.

· Blogging

· Microblogging

· Search engine optimization

· Social network participation (Facebook, LinkedIn)

· Email marketing

· Social media monitoring & outreach

· Pay per click

· Blogger relations

· Video marketing

· Social media advertising

· Online/digital public relations

· Affiliate marketing

· Corporate web site

· Viral marketing

· Free content (eBooks, white papers)

· Online communities/forums

· Branded microsites

· Webinars

· Podcasts

Step 4: Define Success Criteria

Make sure that success criteria is quantifiable and measurable. Examples of measurable and quantifiable objectives are increase online sales by 20% from x to y. Reduce cost per acquisition by 5%, increase revenue by 10% and organic search traffic by 20%.

Step 5: Test Your Plan

Today it is very easy to determine whether or not marketing campaigns are successful by tracking your previously defined success criteria. For example, you can use A/B tests and see where potential customers are exiting your sites. This is how you will judge how well your digital marketing is performing.

Get Ready for HTML5

dpiening — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:07:00 GMT

HTML5 is the next major revision of HTML (the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML). HTML5 aims to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX. HTML5 has been met with excitement by some, loathing by others and confusion/fear by everyone else. Love it or hate it, HTML5 will soon define how you build websites.

APIs

HTML5 includes several new APIs that are integrated with some of the new HTML5 elements. Here’s the complete list from W3.org:

2D drawing API which can be used with the new canvas element.
API for playing of video and audio which can be used with the new video and audio elements.
An API that enables offline Web applications.
An API that allows a Web application to register itself for certain protocols or media types.
Editing API in combination with a new global contenteditable attribute.
Drag & drop API in combination with a draggable attribute.
API that exposes the history and allows pages to add to it to prevent breaking the back button.
Cross-document messaging.

The principal purpose of these APIs is to facilitate web application creation. Notice the third API enables offline web apps. This is excellent news for users and programmers alike because it enables the use of rich, internet-driven applications in an offline environment. You can expect to see many of your favorite applications follow Gmail in introducing offline access.

New Elements

HTML5 introduces several new elements (source: w3schools):

<article> Defines an article
<aside> Defines some content aside from the article it is placed in
<audio> Defines sound, such as music or other audio streams
<canvas> Defines graphic, such as graphs or other images
<command> Defines a command button, like a radiobutton, a checkbox, or a button
<datalist> Defines a dropdown list.
<details> Defines details of an element, which the user can see, and click to hide
<dialog> Defines a dialog, such as a conversation
<embed> Defines external interactive content or plugin
<figure> Defines a group of media content, and their caption
<footer> Defines the footer of a section or document. Typically contains the name of the author, the date the document was written and/or contact information
<header> Defines the header of a section or page
<hgroup> Defines information about a section in a document
<keygen> Defines a generated key in a form
<mark> Defines marked text. Use the <mark> tag if you want to highlight parts of your text
<meter> Defines measurement within a predefined range
<nav> Defines navigation links
<output> Defines different types of output, such as output written by a script
<progress> Defines progress of a task of any kind. Use the progress element to display the progress of a time consuming function in JavaScript
<rp> Used in ruby annotations to define what to show browsers that to not support the ruby element.
<ruby> Defines ruby annotations.
<section> Defines a section, such as chapters, headers, footers, or any other sections of the document
<source> Defines media resources
<time> Defines a date/time
<video> Defines a video, such as a movie clip or other video streams

Structural Changes

This is the part that should fundamentally change the way you structure your sites. Included in the list above are six new structural elements that will help bring consistency to the basic frame of sites all across the web. These six elements are:

1. <nav>
2. <section>
3. <article>
4. <header>
5. <footer>
6. <aside>

Think of these as the replacement for many of the DIVs that you currently use to structure your site. So instead of “<div class=”header”>,” you will simply have “<header>.”

What does this mean to you?

As many of you already know, all the major web browsers still differ (some are worse than others) on support for HTML4.01 and XHTML 1.0. Now imagine what that means for a change as big and new as HTML5. Even though some say we will see major changes this year (Opera Predicts 2010 The Year of HTML 5) and mega-developers like Google are pushing along the acceptance of HTML5, it won’t be supported across the board for some time. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t begin preparing for the big switch today, and it certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t clever tricks out there to enable you to start playing with HTML5 now.

401 Reasons Why SharePoint Web Services Don't Work Anonymously

Chris Domino — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 06:43:00 GMT

<RANT>

I am always weary of using third party controls in my solutions. I feel that the risk of slightly reinventing the wheel is much less severe than that of getting to the end of project and realizing that some minor requirement that the control in use doesn't support will become a show stopper. When you don't have 100% control over your functionality (or the time/budget to customize open source code) then you had better make damn sure your third party components either FIT PERFECTLY or that your client won't mind cutting features.

That's why when I party with SharePoint, it's always "first party." Who wants to go to a third party when the first party is way cooler?

</RANT>

That said, I ran into such an issue in my last project. We were using a third party tool that, at the 11th hour (or, more accurately, around 9:45) immediately failed when we were informed that its SharePoint site had to be anonymous. Now our client probably pushed this requirement to the back burner because the functionality of this component had nothing to do with authorization. (I am purposely not going to share which component it is, because, well, I'm not a douche.)

The problem is that OOTB SharePoint web services, at least the ones this web part was calling, do not support anonymous access. The two in question here are SiteData.asmx and List.asmx. However, the depth of this unsupportedness far exceeded my expectations - as you'll see.

The client first noticed the problem when "random pages" would challenge for credentials exactly twice, which is of course two more times than an anonymous site should challenge anyone. These random pages were of course the ones containing the web part in question. So I fired up Fiddler and immediately saw the two 401s resulting from calls to the aforementioned web services.

"Easy fix," I thought as I remoted into the server and fired up IIS. Once there, I navigated to the web site corresponding to the web app in question, expanded it, and set the _vti_bin virtual directory to anonymous, using the app pool identity for impersonation.

And shazzam, no more challenges!

Now the next day, heading to the status meeting, I prepared myself for praise and glory resulting from my victory over yet another third party control's nonsensical way of doing things. I mean, come on! This is a web part; this is server side code. ALWAYS. Why call the web services? Why not just use the API? If this was our code, I could just fix it, or at least have an arch-to-arch heart-to-heart and inquire as to why this was the chosen method, as there could have been some weird requirement or dependency of doing things that way.

But I'm a consultant. Every project is an edge case in some way. That's why third party controls fail me so often.

So I sat down at the meeting, and was immediately informed that, despite the lack of challenges, there was still "something wrong" with the web part. It was scarcely noticeable, but still not right. So I went back to Fiddler, and indeed saw that 401s were still being returned. Looking into the raw HTTP, I noticed that only one line of text was being returned: "401 UNAUTHORIZED."

I then flipped _vti_bin back to Windows auth, and saw the challenges again. Back in Fiddler - and here's the interesting part - I saw the familiar markup of IE's default 401 error page! This makes sense; IIS wants windows credentials, IE didn't give it any, so it returns a 401, and the web service call fails and dies quietly.

But when anonymous is set, we get that one line message: "401 UNAUTHORIZED." Obviously, this is not coming from IIS. My only guess, after going through the trouble of Reflecting what I could of Microsoft.SharePoint.dll, is that code inside the web method sends this response if the current user is not authenticated, regardless if it's virtual directory is set to be anonymous. Here's what I dug up in Reflector:

Note: I couldn't get the actual web service code loaded into Reflector, so I can't be sure about this assumption. I tried OWSSVR.dll, which lives in the ISAPI folder in the SharePoint hive, but Reflector couldn't load it since it does not contain a CLI header.

So that's a dead end: it appears as though the OOTB SharePoint web services explicitly send 401 responses even if their virtual directory is set to be anonymous. This is certainly, IMHO, another knock against using them for anything server side. Maybe that's why it was so hard to get them to work in InfoPath 2003...

However, SharePoint 2010 is upon us! Next step: see if this is still an issue in the new product.

Stay tuned!

5 of the 10 Best Intranets in the World Run SharePoint

jwillinger — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:07:00 GMT

Jakob Nielsen, the world's leading expert on Web usability has listed his best in class intranets. It is no surprise that half of the sites were developed in SharePoint, which i live and breathe daily.

SharePoint 2010 is the business collaboration platform that enables you to connect and empower people through formal and informal business communities, within the enterprise and beyond, and to manage content throughout the information lifecycle. Whether deployed on-premises or as hosted services, SharePoint’s integrated capabilities are enhanced by search technologies and enable you to rapidly respond to changing business needs by making data-driven decisions and by deploying customized solutions quickly and securely. The consolidation of collaboration solutions onto SharePoint 2010 makes it possible to cut costs by lowering training and maintenance expenses and increasing IT productivity, all within a governable and compliant platform.

10 Best Intranets of 2009

Summary:
Intranets are getting more strategic, with increased collaboration support. Team size is growing by 12% per year, and platforms are becoming integrated, with a strong showing for SharePoint. Improving usability increased use by 106% on average.

The winners of the award for 10 best-designed intranets for 2009 are:

Altran, a large engineering and innovation consultancy (France)
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), a developer of computer and graphics processors (USA)
BASF SE, the world's leading chemical manufacturing company (Germany)
COWI Group A/S, a consulting group focusing on engineering, environmental science, and economics (Denmark)
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT), a global professional services network providing audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services (a Global member organization)
Environmental Resources Management (ERM), one of the world's leading providers of environmental consulting services (Global)
HSBC Bank Brazil (Brazil)
Kaupthing Bank (Iceland)
L.L.Bean, a vendor of apparel and outdoor equipment (USA)
McKesson Corporation, a large provider of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health care information technologies (USA)

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also won in 2002 for its Australian member firm's intranet; this year, DTT's worldwide intranet is the winner. As such, DTT joins a very small, elite group of companies that has won the award twice: Cisco Systems is the only other member.

As we've seen every year, great intranets are found around the world and in all industries. This year, we have our first winner from Latin America. We also have the first winners from Denmark, France, and Iceland; Germany and the U.S. have both provided many winners in the past. We have one other first this year: In a sign of ongoing globalization trends, we have winners that are not headquartered in any individual country.

The consulting sector is this year's best-represented industry, with 3 winners. Given the knowledge-intensive nature of consulting and this year's trend toward more collaboration-focused intranets, this fact makes sense.

Bigger Intranet Budgets

As we've seen the last few years, large companies dominate among the winners. Among this year's winners, the average organization has 37,500 employees. Even so, fairly small companies like Kaupthing Bank with 3,200 employees can still win. Good user experience doesn't require size or humongous budgets; it requires talent and emphasis on meeting the users' needs.

One of the strongest trends over the years that we've run this design competition is that intranet teams have been getting bigger. As the following chart shows, when we started honoring intranet projects in 2001, the average winning team had 6 members; today, the average team size is 14.

The long-term trend is toward bigger intranet teams, with a growth rate of 12% per year.

Still, what holds for company size also holds for the size of teams: You don't have to be big to win. This year's winners include one team with 5 members and another team with 6 members. In earlier years, we've honored winners with 1- or 2-person teams.

Even this year's average team size of 14 is fairly small when it comes to providing a key work tool for organizations with 37,500 employees on average. One way to leverage intranet staff is to call on external resources as appropriate. Today, the predominant approach to running intranet design projects is to engage one or more consultants and external agencies to contribute parts — and only parts — of the design, while keeping overall control inside the company itself.

This year, 6 of the 10 winners were designed by some combination of in-house and outside resources. The remaining 4 projects were done completely by the company's own staff. None of the winning intranets were designed exclusively by an external agency, even though this was a fairly common approach in earlier years.

It's a healthy trend for companies to take more ownership of their intranets and devote resources to building sufficiently large intranet teams. In so doing, they gain in-house expertise in the main areas of intranet user experience. Not all companies can afford intranet teams that are big enough to do everything on their own, however. And, in any case, there are at least three reasons to periodically engage outsiders:

To get a fresh, independent perspective. People who work on the same project for years can become too accustomed to a certain way of doing things. (Disclaimer: Because Nielsen Norman Group sometimes serves this role through impartial usability reviews or unbiased user testing, we might certainly be too sympathetic to the value of an outside perspective.)
To provide deep expertise or a narrow skill set that the intranet team cannot justify adding to their permanent, full-time headcount.
To alleviate workload during crunch times, particularly during large redesign projects or rollouts.

Strategic Intranets

Bigger intranet teams and increasing internal ownership of the intranet user experience both reflect the intranet's growing strategic role in supporting work processes.

Intranets today do much more than simply host the company phone book and HR manuals — though these components remain critically important, and teams are continuing to improve them. COWI, for example, supplemented employee profiles with a feature that highlights commonalities between directory users and the profiled employees they view (an interesting combination of personalization, social networking, and the traditional staff directory.)

Nonetheless, with bigger teams and budgets and increased respect and strategic recognition, intranet functionality is expanding beyond such basic features. A simple statistic to quantify this trend is the fact that, at 473 pages, this year's Intranet Design Annual is the most voluminous ever (326% longer than the first Design Annual in 2001, and 31% longer than last year's report). As intranet teams accomplish more, more space is required to document the winning designs.

Another indication of the intranet's growing strategic importance is the fact that ERM is the first winning team that reports directly to the company chairman. As in past years, most other winners report to either Corporate Communications or IT, and having teams report to the top isn't likely to become commonplace. But this year does show dramatically increased executive visibility for the intranet in many of the winning organizations. This executive involvement typically results from companies viewing the intranet as a collaboration tool and appreciating the increased business efficiency that a good intranet brings.

Collaboration Features

This year's winners showed a substantial increase in both collaboration support and social networking features. Although inspired by the open Internet's "Web 2.0" sites, these features often have a much stronger business model within the enterprise, simply because they're more useful and less subject to noise and information pollution by bozos.

The most symbolic instantiation of this trend might be at Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, where employees can add their own videos to the corporate TV network. Quite the enterprise YouTube.

Teams are also adding Facebook-like features to employee directories to enrich the profiles. That said, the designs are for a work environment — not for commenting on personal photos or supporting teenage dating behaviors. So, while it's appropriate to be inspired by popular social networking websites, your actual user interface and features must be freshly designed specifically for the intranet. Internal blogs — whether by employees, department heads, or company leaders — were also thicker on the ground than in previous years.

The vast majority of our winning intranets feature CEO blogs. This is not new; we've seen some CEO blogs in earlier years. Indeed, HSBC Bank Brazil's CEO blog started in 2005 and has since been viewed more than 2 million times and accumulated 8,000 employee comments. These statistics imply about 1 comment for every 250 employee viewings of the CEO blog, a level that's consistent with other research on user participation in online communities. You can use this level as a rough benchmark to assess whether your own CEO blog is sufficiently inviting of employee participation.

Clearly, it's a well-established feature. What's new this year is the sheer prevalence of this communications tool; we now have enough good examples to specify 9 guidelines for an intranet CEO blog.

Another example of a striking social feature is ERM's interactive forum. This tool has achieved mission-critical status in allowing consultants to post urgent requests for advice from their colleagues around the world. The forum has virtually eliminated panicky broadcast emails at ERM, thus improving the productivity of the many knowledge workers who are no longer interrupted by requests that they might have no qualifications or experience to solve. Even more important, this community feature often helps the company quickly construct better proposals for key clients on short deadlines.

Personalization and Customization

As many of this year's winners show, intranet personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated. The leading application of personalization is to provide each employee with news updates focused on their job role and personal interests. If intranets show everyone everything, information overload ensues and people either ignore the news area or squander their time reading irrelevant stories.

Simple customization can often generate sizeable productivity wins. For example, at McKesson, sales people can create a My Product List and My Favorite Reports, freeing them from having to wade through the much longer lists of all available options. Much appreciated when you're on the phone with a customer and would prefer to focus your mental resources on closing the sale, rather than navigating the intranet.

At AMD, users can customize links directly in the main menu bar, which integrates the user's personal favorites much more tightly with the intranet navigation than the traditionally separate Quick Links feature.

Multilingual intranets also make good use of personalization to increase usability by presenting pages in the user's preferred language as much as possible. BASF's main user interface elements are available in 13 different languages, and several other winners also have internationalization and localization support that goes far beyond what we see in most Internet websites.

Technology Platform: Unification Begins

In all previous years, the only conclusion regarding technology was that there was no universal platform for designing good intranets. Winners typically used an extraordinarily wide diversity of implementation packages.

Although this conclusion continues to hold this year, it is less pronounced.

Among the winning intranets, many are built on a single intranet platform that integrates most of the supporting features they need — including a content management system (CMS) and search. Some winners supplement their main platform with a few selected tools for specialized purposes — mainly Web analytics. If we were to hazard a prediction, it would be that traffic statistics, search log analysis, and other analytics tools will be substantially beefed up and integrated in future releases of the main intranet software platforms.

In total, the 10 winners were built on 26 different products — substantially fewer than the 41 used in 2008 or the 49 used in 2007. Most impressively, fully half of the winning intranets used SharePoint, especially the recent MOSS platform (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007). As the following chart shows, SharePoint use has grown dramatically in recent years. This is particularly impressive given that, from 2003–2006, the winning intranets didn't use earlier versions of SharePoint at all.

Microsoft SharePoint has seen substantially increased use among well-designed intranets in recent years.
(In 2007, Microsoft's own intranet was a winner, and they obviously used their own software, so the 2007 dot should be a notch lower if you consider only third-party projects.)

Despite this big growth in SharePoint use among the best intranets, the contest is far from over for intranet software platforms. Many other good enterprise software vendors offer widely used solutions. This year, for example, multiple winners used Autonomy, Google Search, and WebTrends.

Usability Growth

Over our intranet award's 9-year history, we've seen a steady increase in user-centered design. The following chart shows the proportion of winning intranets that employed various methods across three different 3-year periods. The use of all methods has substantially increased; it's particularly gratifying to see the extent to which designers are embracing paper prototyping and other low-cost testing methods.

The percent of winning intranets that employed some of the main usability methods in their design process.

To assess the ROI of intranet redesigns, teams primarily relied on usage metrics in terms of users, visits, or page views. Across this year's winners, the average increase in intranet use was 106%. This is about the same as we've seen in previous years: The average usage increase in the 2005–2008 winners was 110%. So, roughly speaking, improving an intranet's usability will double its use.

L.L.Bean conducted a benchmark study comparing their old and new designs. The old intranet had a success rate of 67% and an average time-on-task of 1 minute and 52 seconds. The new intranet has a success rate of 88% and users require only 54 seconds on average to perform the same tasks. In other words, users can perform more than twice as many tasks per hour with the new design. This improvement is somewhat more than the average across our intranet usability metrics benchmarks, but then L.L.Bean does have an award-winning intranet.

I am Director of Business Development and Marketing at Rightpoint, the country's premier SharePoint knowledge repository with end to end solutions around everything SharePoint. You can reach me at jwillinger@rightpoint.com

I know what the best Business Intelligence tool is!

dwaldron — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:12:00 GMT

Oh yes, I went there!

But before I answer what the best BI tool is, I'd like to rant about this topic for a moment since many from the Chicago user group, LinkedIn, and Twitter have asked me. Hang with me through the following rumblings...

I've always wanted to drive a Ferrari, but I can't afford it and where would I find a mechanic since I live in Timbuktu? I'm too tall to drive a Mini Cooper. I have a 1973 Corvette in my garage which has 62K original miles on it, and I've only put 500 miles on it in 18 years. I let my neighbor take it to prom 5 years ago and he blew-up the motor (but that is another story). I sure would like to upgrade to a 2010 Z06 Corvette, but where would I put the kids? Trunk, maybe? Plus, I can play weekend mechanic with my 1973 verses having to take any of my other dream cars into the dealership to have it worked on since it would void my warranty.

Wait, who am I kidding? I'm a true Midwest redneck. I like a big truck, so I drive a 2007 Chevy Avalance. It's the perfect vehicle for ME and meets MY requirements:

I can afford the payments and fuel charges
It can tow my boat, put my motorcycle in the truck bed, and go 4-wheeling
It seats 5 so I don't have to strap my kids to a luggage rack
I can go to Home Depot and bring things home
I know when the gas needle shows exactly empty
I sit up high enough that I can look down at people on the highway
My vehicle is just big enough so that jerk trying to merge into my lane is scared.
My vehicle has the right amount of door dings so that same jerk trying to merge knows I'm not worried about bumping his car to keep my place...
My warranty is good until 100,000 miles
I'm a redneck (redundant) and proud of it. I have a Calvin & Hobbes sticker in my window and you know what he is doing...

What was I talking about? Oh yeah (focus, Dennis).

My requirements + my constraints were equal to or less than my budget.

The best BI tool is really based upon more than reports. It's the complete package of formulated requirements. I am the MacGyver of data. I can deliver an analytical cube with data that resides in Excel, SQLServer, DB2, Oracle, and 3 colors of Post-It's on multiple desks on 3 floors with a match, an empty Starbucks cup, and a paper clip. But most people probably are just looking for the following capabilities:

Operational reporting
Analytical reporting
MDM capabilities
SLA
The sharpness of my data consumers
The brilliance of my data architects
The audacity of my DBA's.
The staunchness of my Data Governance Council and stewards
The celebrity of my dashboard capabilities
The pocketbooks of my project sponsor
The outstanding interoperable relationships of all the above technologies and synergies within my organization

I have many more, but I'm making a point here.

So the absolute best BI tool that I just can't be without it is....

It depends...