Amazing Sharepoint Publishing Sites

Thanks to Joel Oleson and Michael Gannotti for publicizing this today, http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=202. These are amazing Sharepoint WCM sites for top companies. These are jaw dropping and show what a great platform Sharepoint is with great graphics artists banging out killer designs.

While our newly rebranded intranet portal does not look this flashy, I’m hopeful that our upcoming CMS review that it tentatively tabled, will let me promote the possibilities for a forward facing web page for our environment.

The more I’m enveloped in Sharepoint the more I love it!

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Blocking Sharepoint Designer – Highlevel Overview

There’s been a lot of buzz going around that Sharepoint Designer will be free in April.  This got me a bit worried as an administrator for our Sharepoint environment.  I’d like to have this user restricted as it can be potentially dangerous if permissions are not properly set.

I was talking with a technician about what would be done to block Sharepoint Designer from running.  Here is a high level view of how we would do it if we proceed down this path.

What would be done is a Group Policy would be created to block the exe or hash from running.  We run a blacklist of malware exes, so SPD would be added to that list.  We then would create an OU in Active Directory that would not inherit this group policy.  This would allow us to create a list of users in AD that should have access to the software.  This would allow us to have strict control over who can use it for design purposes.

We are still discussing whether or not we are going to implement this in our environment.  I am definately for it until we have an idea of the numbers of people interested in using it.

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10 new themes WSP

I’ve seen this bouncing around still. Since Microsoft didn’t release the 10 new Sharepoint themes as a WSP package, it took Daniel Brown to create a WSP for easy installation. See his blog article at http://www.danielbrown.id.au/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=256 for information on how to get the file and how to install it.

Note on install, don’t activate all the features at one time. Wait a few minutes between feature activation on the farm or they will not all deploy.

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Sharepoint ads

There was some buzz on twitter today about a new site geared at placing Sharepoint related ads within your blog for revenue. The site is www.sharepointads.com. I was hesitant to enroll initially since the site was asking for a SSN on the signup form with no SSL cert on the site. A quick email to Inna and she removed the SSN from the form, and I was signed up.

I was never a fan of Google ads so I never thought twice of adding these into my site. Their results seemed nonsensical most times. I enjoy working with Sharepoint on a daily basis. Since these ads are directed solely at that, I feel it’s something I can get on board with.

With other bloggers like Joel Oleson dropping Google ads for this, I can only imagine that I’m doing the right thing. Will I become a millionaire from this? Not likely, but it may pay the hosting bill once in a blue moon.

If they become too obtrusive in I’ll take them down. Should have them up this weekend.

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Mini vacation

Tomorrow we are heading back to Ohio for a mini-vacation. It’ll be nice to catch up with friends and family that we haven’t seen since Christmas. We’ll be hanging out at Playmakers on Sunday evening for those who wish to stop by and say hi.

Going to be good times with good food, can’t wait for Quaker Steak on Saturday and some Chipotle!

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Interesting survey results

We recently participated in a survey about employee opinions on options to help ease the budget issues we are all facing in the UNC system. The survey results were posted today and I am pretty shocked at the results.

My take on the data is people would rather see friends and co-workers get potentially laid off than take voluntary leave based on the data presented. What I don’t understand is if given the option people would take a voluntary leave of up to 5 days but would be against the same measure if it was mandated.

Some of the demographics on the survey were surprising as well, the majority of respondents were in the 46-55 age bracket but yet over 40% had less than 5 years of service.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the figures. This is totally contradictory to something I read on Twitter last week, linked by LLiu.

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Design vs. Brand Loyalty

I had a post sitting in draft mode for a couple days but I hadn’t posted it, obviously. After reading it, it sounded more like a rant and that wasn’t my intent. So instead I’d like to know what people’s opinions are for internal applications in terms of brand consistency.

It seems to me that internal applications and sites should have a looser policy on the company’s brand. Brand consistency is important to the pubic so consumers can easily and routinely identify your product or company. Are internal programs required to follow the same standards?

I’d be interested in hearing other people’s opinions on the matter.

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Base CSS for a Vertical master page modification

So I finally completed a newly branded master page for our internal portal.  After a few mockups prior to our migration to MOSS, this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve done this.  The most frustrating thing about this is the styling that’s used.  Firebug and IE Developer toolbar help nailing these down.  When stylizing this new portal, I chose to override the Vertical and Core styles I did not like.  My base master page I chose to brand off of was the Blue Vertical master page, making a copy of the original course.

For my sanity’s sake, I have created a base CSS template that can be used to get most of the styling done.  It doesn’t include a few custom styles for headers, footer, and custom search controls that I used.  It also does not include the drop shadow styles, as I removed those in the design. Enjoy!

ericsbasecssoverrides

eric

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The post that started it all

Over the last few weeks I’ve become more involved as a moderator at www.endusersharepoint.com/STP.  A question was poised where someone wanted to be able to show a video to a certain IP address.

After just completing this requiremnet for an interanl project, I authored my first post for EndUserSharepoint.com as a guest author.  If you’d like to see how it’s done, head over to http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?cat=584 and check it out.

eric

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Left Nav Arrow change

I was branding a publishing site for our intranet portal and thought it would look better if I replaced the black flyout arrow in the Blue Vertical master page.  I wasn’t sure exactly how to do this but I knew it could probably be scripted out.  I had my collegue Tony Miller assist me with this since he’s pretty adept at JQuery.

Using FireBug, I could see the web server call to the image file I wanted to replace, _layouts/images/largearrowright.gif.  I uploaded my file to my custom image location.

We created the following JQuery script to replace the default arrow with my own:

$("img[src='/_layouts/images/largearrowright.gif']").attr('src', 'https://MySPURL/Style%20Library/Images/Branded_Images/largearrowright.png')


From a looks point of view, it didn’t work so I reverted the change until I create a new arrow file.

This was discussed at http://www.endusersharepoint.com/STP/topic/left-nav-arrow-replacement-on-a-publishing-site

eric

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