Webinar Video – Driving business productivity with PowerApps, Microsoft Teams and SharePoint
Watch our webinar video where we show you case studies and discuss the art of the possible with PowerApps, Teams and SP.
Watch our webinar video where we show you case studies and discuss the art of the possible with PowerApps, Teams and SP.
Should you adopt SharePoint Online’s new modern user interface and sacrifice control over the branding?
SharePoint 2013 does not provide a great experience for content publishers out-of-the-box. This is something that we need to address in nearly every intranet project we deliver. There are two main approaches that can be taken: Add some custom editing elements that simplify the experience, but are hyper-focused on a few key editing tasks. Use a third party add-in to provide a better user experience across a broader set of features and content types. Custom editing elements Content publishers can click an onscreen element like this one. The editor can then add information to the page by filling in a simple form. This avoids any of the out-of-the-box SharePoint interfaces which can be confusing and overwhelming. We have provided a demo video that shows an example page content editing task. See video below: Advantages Disadvantages Drastically improves the experience for content publishers Reduces or completely removes the need for training No on-going licence fees Restricted to a small number of important areas (otherwise costs can quickly add up) Requires additional budget to maintain and enhance these features over time Third party add-ins There are many options when it comes to third party add ins for SharePoint. Some are aimed at enhancing every aspect of SharePoint like Wizdom intranet-in-a-box. Others are aimed at enhancing things like page editing and design. A good example of this type of product is ShortPoint. Products like these still require some training for content editors, but offer an improved experience and greater flexibility when maintaining intranet content. Advantages Disadvantages Improves the experience for content publishers Reduces the need for training Has a wide ranging set of features (depending on the product) On-going licence fees (often fairly significant ones) You may be paying for features you dont need Requires support from the product vendor or consultancy Summary Improving SharePoints content editing interfaces is not easy and comes at a cost regardless if you take the custom or prebuilt route. Therefore, it is important to identify and prioritise the areas where you want to give a lot of control to content editors. Typically more options for ways and styles of publishing = greater cost. By limiting the control given to content owners and making things as template driven as possible, you can keep costs more reasonable. A positive side effect of a template driven approach is often a cleaner, more simplified experience for your intranets end users. More recently, a significant way to improve the user and editor experience for SharePoint is to move to SharePoint Online as part of Office 365. SharePoint Online has a completely refreshed interface which makes things a lot easier for editors.
Microsoft have revealed the roadmap for Office 365, SharePoint and OneDrive for the next year at #MSIgnite – take a look to see what they have promised here.
If you’re considering Wizdom for your SharePoint intranet and want to find out what existing Wizdom customers think about it you should just ask them yourself! Come to the Wizdom Conference on 15th and 16th March 2017 which will be attended by 150-200 delegates many of whom will be Wizdom customers.
===update 27th May 2016=== With the demise of Yammer Conversations what looked like quite a cool initiative to bring Yammer comments into Office Docs and vice versa you might be forgiven for thinking that there’s not been much progress in integrating Yammer into the wider Office 365 suite. I just returned from a Future of SharePoint session held at Microsoft’s London office for SharePoint consultancies. The talk was hosted by Jeff Teper, VP of SharePoint and One Drive. He’s the man with the vision when it comes to SharePoint. In the last month we’ve seen some really quite exciting announcements about SharePoint – it seems Microsoft is starting to really invest in this tool. However, what was surprising about this talk is that there was zero mention of Yammer. I went and spoke to the host at the end and asked him what are the plans for integrating SharePoint with Yammer. First, I was assured by the SharePoint team that Microsoft is not going to kill Yammer and that they are actively investing in it. Before any serious out-of-the-box Yammer integration can go ahead the team are rebuilding the back end of the application. This is so that it can be hosted in Microsoft’s various Office 365 data centres around the world. Once this is done they are going to look at hooking the two tools together. For example, we can expect to see a ‘share on Yammer’ button next to files in SharePoint and OneDrive. In the meantime, we are going to have to continue working with custom integrations and the Yammer app all mentioned in our original post from August 2014 below. Dan Hawtrey ====== Microsoft is working tirelessly to integrate Yammer with SharePoint 2013. We take a look at the features you can expect very soon that will make your intranet more social.
The intranet is no longer one thing. While the intranet may be the foundation of the digital workplace, it is made up of several platforms and tools. If SharePoint has always been your focus, prepare for the new wave of Microsoft tools to enhance your ways of working.
As someone who has been focusing on Enterprise Search in SharePoint for years, I can say I now know it inside out. There are things I like a lot, there are others I dont like too much. In this blog post, I decided to collect 10 new or improved features that are my top favorites and that make SharePoint 2013 Search a real enterprise solution. 1 One, Integrated Enterprise Search Core In SharePoint 2010, there was a Search Engine (a.k.a. SharePoint Search), but we also had the opportunity to install FAST Search for SharePoint (a.k.a. FS4SP) in order to get real, enterprise level features. FS4SP had to get licensed and installed as a separate product, as a separate farm, and then we could integrate it with SP2010. In SharePoint 2013, the whole story is much easier: the big FAST Search engine got 100% integrated into SharePoint, therefore no separate installation and maintenance is needed. As soon as you install SharePoint 2013, you get the big engine instantly. 2 Content Processing, Entity Extraction Content Processor is a component that sits in between the Crawler and the Indexer. It is responsible for processing the crawled content. It does all sorts of clever stuff including language detection, extracting security descriptions (to determine who in your organization is allowed to see the content), parsing, linguistic processing (to understand the real meaning of the content), entity and metadata extraction, etc. There are two things Id like to highlight here. First is the Web Service Callout step. This option is very useful if you need to perform custom operations on the crawled items before they are processed further. The second step to highlight is the Custom Entity Extraction. Most organisations have specific terms (a.k.a entities) that are commonly used in everyday business. Its useful to tell the search engine to look out for some of these words because they carry particular significance for that company . For example, product names or regions where the company operates. The Custom Entity Extraction process extracts words (entities) from the content and use them as metadata in the index. This metadata can be used for filtering, ordering as well as facets on the Refinement Panel. The entities are pre-defined in a dictionary which is created by the organisation. See below an screengrab which shows how custom entities can be useful on the search results page to help the user zero in on what he is looking for. Both Web Service Callouts and Entity Extraction work on any type of Content Source, therefore can be used to unify and standardize the metadata in the index. 3 Continuous Crawl Besides Full and Incremental Crawl, theres a new option in SharePoint 2013 called Continuous Crawl. This is a very dynamic and agile way of crawling that uses SharePoints change log to pick up the changes and enumerate the items which have to get crawled. One of its biggest benefits is in its flexibility and agility: the new and changed items can get indexed in minutes or even seconds, therefore we get a good basis for real, always up-to-date Search Based Applications. Second, Continuous Crawl can rut at the same time as Full Crawl, therefore it can be used to keep the index refreshed or up-to-date, even if the Full Crawl takes a long time (days or weeks). Continuous Crawl is available on SharePoint content sources only. 4 Search Administration on Multiple Levels Due to the complexity of Search in SharePoint 2013, search administrators have complex tasks and responsibilities. Delegating some of these tasks might become essential. In SharePoint 2013, search administration tasks can be delegated to Site Collection administrators and even to Site administrators. 5 Troubleshooting Enhancements As Murphys Law says, If anything can go wrong, it will. Enterprise Search is really complex, and any of its components can go wrong. The better troubleshooting tools we have, the easier to fix these issues. In SharePoint 2013, we have enhanced logs and reports on the server-side that can be used to debug and identify the causes of issue. The enhanced Developer Dashboard can be also used for debugging, and despite its name, its not for developers only. 6 PowerShell PowerShell is Microsofts scripting technology that has modules for SharePoint administration and automation, too. A huge improvement in SharePoint 2013 is that we have more than 150 commands for Enterprise Search management, including setup and deployment, topology management, crawling, query processing, metadata, etc. 7 UI Enhancements One of the most important UI enhancements is the new Hover Panel, where the search results metadata and related actions can be displayed, as well as its outline and preview if the result is a document. Besides the Hover Panel, I also like how easy it is to customize the way search results are displayed: Display Templates are responsible for the display of the results, the Hover Panel and the refiners. Display Templates are simple HTML and JavaScript files, with structures that are easy to understand. Customization is easier than ever. 8 Result Sources Result Sources are used to define the index to be used in our queries (is it a local SharePoint index or a remote one from a separate content source such as Lotus Notes?). They also describe the subset of results to retrieve (these were called search scopes in SharePoint 2010). Results Sources can be very useful to define verticals for our Search and ultimately help the user focus her search. 9 Query Rules Query Rules help us to define rules that are based on the users intent when searching. For example if I search for Harrods department store there is a high likelihood that I want to know the location or see a map; view opening and closing times; or to get a link to their online store. Technically speaking, Query Rules contain conditions and actions. A condition can be based on the query itself (contains one or more specific keywords, matches terms defined in a Managed Metadata Term Set, etc.) or on the
Most people are eager to update to the latest version of their favourite app, but its just not possible to press an update button with SharePoint. The wise intranet manager will have a certain amount of trepidation as they embark along the SharePoint migration path.
You might be most concerned with making sure site collections (Team Sites, My Sites) get upgraded to SharePoint 2013 smoothly; find out what to watch out for as you hit the metaphorical update button.
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