Employee Training Comments

Michael Gannotti posted the video that we shot at Sharepoint Saturday Charlotte. If you have any specific questions or comments on how I did something, leave a comment and I’ll get back with you.

I am hoping to release an updated STP of the template soon.

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Sharepoint Saturday Recap

Wow what an amazing day in Charlotte! There were so many great sessions to choose from. Some time blocks had 3 sessions of interest so picking 1 was very difficult. If you have not been to a Sharepoint Saturday in your area, I highly encourage you to participate in one. Lots of great, free, information divided between various topics.

Check out the Sharepoint Saturday website for upcoming events in your area. You can also view all the slide decks from the presenters.

The added bonus of this Sharepoint Saturday was making the personal connections of the social network that’s been evolving on Twitter and Facebook. A lot of great Sharepoint talent in the Carolinas. I’d start to list off everyone but that’d be a long list. I also did a video piece on the Employee Training template with Michael Gannotti so look for that in the upcoming days.

Also a great announcement from Avepoint about a Press release coming about product information. I won’t say what it is, but trust me, you’ll want to visit their site to grab it. Check their web site for the upcoming press release.

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Why I love Sharepoint

I came to an epiphany last night while randomly walking up the stairs. I was going to blog about this aforementioned realization today but was easily distracted with other things.

All through high school and summers during college, I always worked for a subsidary of the Sauder corporation. They have an old time craft village, make tables and chairs, and are a market leader in ready to assemble furniture. One of my great joys in life is when we bring home a piece of prefab furniture that I get to put together. It means it’s time to bust out the screwdriver and get to work.

Because of this, I realized Sharepoint is pretty similar. You get a clean slate every provisioned site or site collection to solve business problems. Sometimes you don’t need a lot of tools, sometimes you need more tools like data view web parts and jQuery. The materials, work and tools make the process of problem solving fun, although we all know it can be frustrating at times.

I like trying to solve people’s problems using the Sharepiont platform. It’s so flexible to use and leverage. I love getting my hands dirty and figuring out how to solve the problems that people bring to me. I find myself wanting to do it for them most often instead of being in my consulting role. I want to get in there and do the work.

I thought I’d share what gets me excited about Sharepoint. What do you like about it?

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Business as usual

Not much to report on the home front. Business is going as usual. I’ll be trying a new test of my registration template soon. If all goes well, I’ll have a copy available for download.

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Leveraging Google Appliance in Sharepoint

Yesterday Mike (@next_connect) blogged about Sharepoint Search. A few back and forths about other benefits like federated search and indexing file shares, I found out he is using a Google appliance as are we. In our portal redesign, I had created a custom search box to leverage this. There might be better, more elegant ways to incorporate the Google into Sharepoint, but this is what I did.

As a recap, I took the BlueVerticle.master as the base for our site. I’m working off a copy of that for the customizations.

First I moved the search control to the hidden ASP Panel.

Then I built my new search input area,

		Choose a Search Engine
		Sharepoint
		ECU Website
		Google
	

		
	
	
	

Now the Javascript to make this work. This goes in the Head section of the master page.

That’s it in a nut shell. This is a basic implementation and just redirects the user to the search results page of the scope that is selected from the drop down list. I’m sure there are more advanced ways to do this, but I’ve found this to be a good solution to leverage our Google Mini. If you’ve got custom Sharepoint scopes created, they can be incorporated as well.

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Folders and metadata rehashed

My article about folders vs metadata has been posted on Enduser Sharepoint, visit http://www.endusersharepoint.com/?p=1707 for the article.

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