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SharePoint 4 Biz - Setting up Expense/Purchase Register

Very often we need somewhere to register purchases or expenses. There can be various reasons for that, but the main are: - store all expenses in one register to categorize, approve, review, report etc. - ability to upload scanned receipts for future claims, reimbursements, warranties etc. So here's how it can be done in SharePoint 2013 or SharePoint Online / Office 365. Start with creating a content type - in our case it is Receipt: 1. Go to Site settings: 2. Select Site content types: 3. Click "Create": 4. Provide content type details. We suggest to create a new Group for it and inherit from Document content type: 5. Add site columns to the content type. We think the most important would be Purchase Category (Travel, Food, Activities etc.), Vendor, Amount, Purchase Date and Warranty Date: Then we create a document library: 6. Go to Add an app:  7. Select Document Library: 8. Provide a name (Receipts in our case):  9. Go to Librar

Major issues with SharePoint implementations

According to the recent AIIM's Market Watch Report, SharePoint: Clouding the Issues  the biggest of the biggest ongoing issues with SharePoint are: Persuading users to manage and share their content in SharePoint and not elsewhere Expanding the use of SharePoint for more business processes Aligning governance, security and usage policies with other enterprise apps Achieving uniformity of classification and metadata structures

SharePoint consultant price

There is an interesting tweet I responded to today: I think the price doesn't matter at all in the SharePoint industry. I have got customers who were provided with assistance from a highest level - price-wise - consultants who could deliver what they promised or when their work required further re-engineering. Also there are good specialists on the market who wouldn't charge a fortune, but still are capable of delivering high-end quality solutions. As we all know very well, the price of any good or service consists of rent of the assets, cost of labor and profit. In today's rush for diminution of asset prices and cost of labor the major portion of the price is profit for the service provider which is nothing to deal with quality of service. There is another problem - not too many highly-skilled people on the SharePoint services market. However the price for the consultants is still considerably high.

Visio (.vsd) and Outlook (.msg) files - on upload don't allow to edit custom content type metadata

Have got an issue in SharePoint 2010 - when Visio (.vsd) or Outlook (.msg) files are being uploaded to the document library with custom content type, the edit form don't show any custom content type metadata, just the filename. i.e. I have got a content type associated with the library: but when I upload a Visio document, or Outlook file - the only editable part is file name: I have done some research and found that if there is no content type, but just custom columns added to the library - they are displayed in edit form: Also with the custom content type, for some reason SharePoint sets the content type of .vsd or .msg files to "Folder" not the content type of the library: Submitted a question on TechNet forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneralprevious/thread/13ba15f4-b8e0-40ea-b302-279997bd1075/#13ba15f4-b8e0-40ea-b302-279997bd1075 UPDATE: Found the following article explaining partially why that may

SharePoint 4 Biz - Viewing Document Versions

One of the most common questions I hear from business users and information workers - can versions of the document be viewed in SharePoint? When document version history is enabled for the document library in SharePoint then all versions of the document and it's corresponding metadata can be viewed at any time. Here's how it happens. 1. The document was created and added to the document library as version 1.0: 2. Then at some stage the text of the document has been modified: and became version 2.0: 3. Now if we want to view the previous versions we go to Version History for the document: We can see all versions and what metadata values were changed at each stage. 5. To see the actual document in certain version, hover the mouse over the Modified column value for the selected version and click the hyperlink that appears: The version of the document will be opened in a corresponding application: 6. To see the metadata values, hover

SharePoint 2013 project went live!

Massive SharePoint 2013 project that I worked on as part of excellent professionals team - went live! It has been a crunchy time recently, but now it's over and hundreds of users rushed to enjoy the new shiny highly customized SharePoint 2013 experience. What's on: - Feature rich user interface that has been built up to the best standards of usability - Single Sign On interface and integration with multiple financial systems - User Profiles synchronization with multiple data sources - Multilingual interface - Efficient leverage of improved and enhanced features of SharePoint search - Managed metadata usage across sites and site collections - Custom intelligent navigation That's only the top of an iceberg. It has been a great effort and a great achievement! Looking forward to future challenges.

SharePoint 4 Biz - Sync Office 365 Email with iPhone

More and more people are getting aboard Office 365  platform. Sometimes there is a situation when it's required to synchronize your email account with iPhone (iPhone 4 in this case). Here's the step-by-step guide that could either be used personally or forwarded to your system administrator for implementation: 1. First we have to confirm the email server details. 1.1. Open your Office 365 home page and click "Options" menu item under "Outlook"section: 1.2. On the appeared account information page follow the "Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access..." link: 1.3. Leave the settings page opened or make a note of the following details:  2. Synchronize your email account with iPhone. 2.1. On the phone, go to "Settings" -> "Mail, Contacts, Calendars": 2.2. Select "Add Account...": 2.3. Select "Other": 2.4. Select "Add Mail Account": 2.5. Provide summary of your

SharePoint 4 Biz - Saving Office Documents Directly to SharePoint

One of the quick options to save Office documents (such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint) to SharePoint is as follows: 1. Go to the SharePoint Web site, open the document library that you want to save your document to and copy the library URL to the Clipboard (Ctrl+C): 2. In the Office application - i.e. Excel - on document Save, paste the URL of the document library into the "File name" box of the file save dialog: Click "Save" button. 3. In the appeared document library browser just click "Save" to save the document into the library directly or choose a folder within the library and then click "Save": That's it.

#SharePoint 2013 Workshop

Facilitated another workshop with  Ark Group  today. This time it was Best Practice SharePoint Intranets 2013 . Great audience, interactive conversations and high level event organisation - as usual! Moments during preparation before it started:

Google search for SharePoint training sydney

On Google page 1 search results for "sharepoint training sydney architecture" - a colleague has pointed out today :)

Office for Windows Vs Office for Mac

I have been using Office for Mac 2011 for a couple of years so far. It is missing some features that I'd like to have in comparison to the proper Office suite for Windows. But it is alright for daily office related tasks. However, today something very interesting was brought to my attention. I suddenly looked at the file size change after I opened the files in Office for Windows (Word 2007 to be precise) that were created in Office for Mac, changed two sentences in one file and one word in another and saved both: 1. Files created on Mac 2. Same files saved in Office after very insignificant update So the Windows version of Office compress the files more efficiently. Something to consider when you choose the working platform.

SharePoint 2013 Development and Consulting - Laptop & Conferencing Experience with Lync

Have just jumped on a brand new SharePoint 2013 massive Intranet project and because of specific working conditions have found some items that required addressing almost immediately in order to continue the job. Maybe this will be interesting to someone else who is about to start SharePoint 2013 development to have an idea of what might be necessary. I started working with SharePoint using my own infrastructure in 2009. I used iMac with 320GB HDD and 4GB RAM running VMWare Fusion to virtualise Windows  environment ( SQL Server 2008, standalone SharePoint 2007, Visual Studio 2008, Office 2007). It was all-in-one virtual machine. A bit slow, but enough for any SharePoint work that I had at that time. For communication with colleagues and partners we used GoToMeeting . Great tool that worked (and still works) without any problems. Voice, video, screen-sharing - all worked well using built-in audio/video hardware. In 2010 I got a MacBook Pro  with 500GB HDD and 8GB RAM. Same