Jennifer Ann Mason

One of the great features of Office 365 is the ability to easily and quickly work with a team across different applications. While SharePoint is the most convenient place to store and share documents, sometimes you still need to send an email and sometimes you just need to chat with someone. With Lync integration all of these tasks are very easy! You should notice that wherever you have a person column in SharePoint you can see a user’s presence indicator. This indicator is really just the user’s current online status from link:

You will notice from the screenshot above that my status is displayed as a small green icon. But did you also know that you can hover over my name and see additional options for quickly contacting me, along with my current status message from Lync?

Since this is connected with Lync, it means that if I am busy in Lync, I will show as busy in SharePoint:

From the menu you can email, start a chat or even call directly using the Lync client. As an example, when you click the link to start a chat, the Lync window will be displayed and I can immediately start my conversation.

But there is still more- Maybe you don’t really need to talk to someone immediately, but instead need to schedule a future meeting with them. This is easy with the presence integration. If you select the more option you will be able to access these extra options:

Selecting the option to Schedule a Meeting will open my calendar in Outlook and show a meeting request:

Remember, these features are available wherever the person field is used within SharePoint. This means that you have a way to quickly access your team members and quickly start to communicate with them. Here are some simple examples for you of how you could use this within your environment:

• If you have a quick question about a task list, you can easily start a chat with the person the task has been assigned to.
  
• If you are working on a wiki page and have a question you can share your screen with another user and show them the content you are working on.
  
• If you have a discussion that needs additional information you can quickly access another user’s calendar and schedule a discussion.
  

These features can often be overlooked, so be sure to add this to your training plan. You want to get the most out of Office 365, so be sure you show your users how easy it can be to quickly work together.

Web Analytics is one of those hidden gems included in SharePoint 2010 that I don’t think many people are taking advantage of. We spend a lot of time building solutions, but if we don’t maintain them and really understand how they are being used then we are missing out on a lot of great information. In SharePoint 2010 we have some great features that make this monitoring process easy. Huge improvements have been made since 2007, but I think many people don’t realize the impact. In the rest of this blog we are going to look at the new features that allow us to configure alerts and reports via a site workflow. By taking advantage of these features we can be automatically notified when our sites meet certain criteria. Using these reports we can become very proactive in the management of our solutions.

SharePoint On-Premise Only

The first thing that we want to note about this is that these features are not available in the Office 365 offering. Hopefully, over time as the offering matures we will be given access to these features, but as of the current release these features are not available.

Site Web vs Site Collection

The next thing we want to note is that there are two types of reports we can look at, the Web (subsite) or the Site Collection. When we look at the site collection we will get additional information such as search statistics. When you generate reports and alerts you will need to select the scope to be either the current site you are working on or the site collection.

Here is a screenshots of the Site Collection summary page:

There are a few things to notice on this page:

1. You can use the option in the Ribbon to modify the date range.
   
2. You can see the previous value as well as the trend over time.
   

Notice that whenever you choose to change the settings that you also have an option to Schedule Alerts or Reports. When you click this option you are taken to a page that you can use to configure a site workflow. You have two options available:

1. Reports- this will email you an excel file with a status report on the items you select.
   
2. Alerts- this will email you an alert when a certain condition has been fulfilled (ie- page views greater than 5,000)
   

Below is a screenshot for configuring an alert:

And now, here is a screenshot of the alert that is generated. The condition for mine was if the page views are greater than zero, send me an alert.

Below is a screenshot for configuring a scheduled report:

And here is the email that is generated for the reports. Notice that if no data is included for the report that a note is added to the message.

Here is one of the reports that are attached with the email:

So as you can see we have two ways that we can configure our site collections to notify us about usage. It is very likely that we don’t have the bandwidth to go in and review each of our solutions usage statistics, but with these reports we can have them configured to notify us when we need to take action. If you aren’t using these features yet, I highly recommend them!

This past week at SPSTCDC I gave a session on the different roles that are required when building your SharePoint team. We spent a bit of time looking at all the different roles and also discussed how to best fill the roles within the team. You can find a copy of my slides here and there is even some recording of the session here. One of the biggest questions that came up was how to hire for the role of the Business Analyst. This analyst is the one that really is the glue on the SharePoint team and really keeps the business and the technology in alignment. They have to know the business enough to understand the issues and they have to know the technology enough that they can build the solutions. In the session I was specifically asked if I would be able to put together what I would consider would be the job requirements of this role. I agreed to follow up with a blog post, so here goes. Keep in mind that what I am providing is a general summary that isn’t all inclusive. You will want to take this and update it and customize it to meet your specific organization’s needs.

SharePoint Business Analyst

The SharePoint Business System Analyst position requires experience as a business analyst with experience in project management.  This position will translate business needs into solutions utilizing the Microsoft SharePoint Server and third-party components.  The role’s primary focus is on collecting user requirements, planning delivery of those requirements and leading and coordinating with technical team members on delivery and testing.  The role requires someone who can assist in the design of a comprehensive user experience with broad categories of information. 

Essential Functions:

• Facilitate user meetings to define opportunities, needs and issues
  
• Use best practices in business analysis and process modeling to analyze define and document business processes, work flows and system requirements
  
• Define roll out strategies and change management
  
• Create mockups/wireframes of key user interface components
  
• Provide guidance to the development team in their design/development approach
  
• Represent the client user’s needs and goals during development and in review meetings
  
• Recommend changes to business operations to promote successful integration
  
• Assist in the development of a business case for projects
  
• Responsible for documenting business scenarios and use cases for testing and validation of solutions
  
• Alignment of Internal Projects with the overall Strategic SharePoint goals of the Organization
  
• Acts as a liaison between the users of the organization and the team that is in place to support the SharePoint environment
  

Essentials Skills:

• Understanding of SharePoint Server and the Solutions that can be developed using the Out of the Box Features
  
• Experience with SharePoint Designer, InfoPath, Visio, Excel Services and Access Services
  
• Limited experience with the Central Administrative functions within SharePoint. While this resource will likely not be responsible for directly configuring the settings they should be aware of the possible configurations and settings
  

I hope this helps those that were in my session. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to post them in the comments section.

I was recently asked what I would do if I could give someone some 5 step guidance on getting started with Office 365. Since I spend most of my time dealing with SharePoint I am going to put my focus on getting ready for SharePoint online. So here are my “5 Steps for Readiness”.

Step 1: Know What It Is

The first thing is to really understand the features that are available with SharePoint Online. You should definitely take some time to become familiar with the features that are included. The best place for this is really dig into the different service offerings documentation for both Enterprise and Small Business offerings. As you are reading through these it will identify the features that you can utilize (and any limitations). If you are reading through the doc and run across something that you don’t recognize, then you should head over here and do a search to get more detailed information.

This documentation is going to answer all of the common questions for you concerning items like:

• How much Data can I have?
  
• How many site collections can I have?
  
• What file types can be uploaded to SharePoint?
  
• What file types are indexed?
  

Step 2: Know What It Isn’t

Once you know what it is, then you should also have a good idea of what it isn’t. Some great examples of this include the restrictions around Custom Development and Business Connectivity Services. There are so many great features in SharePoint Online but there are also still some great features that are only available when you are using SharePoint On-Premise (or hosted where you have full server control). The time to know what features are available is before you get started. You don’t want to have expectations that you can achieve things that aren’t currently supported. Instead you want to be sure to address any items that you don’t have access to and build a plan to deal with them with requests come up. It is definitely better to have a plan before you even get started.

Step 3: Know what you Want

As soon as you know all of the features available then you should build a plan for what you would like to deploy. SharePoint is a huge platform so you need to understand how you want to be using it internally. Some of the most common things I have worked with include:

• Corporate Intranet
  
• Public Website
  
• Internal Collaboration Sites
  
• Corporate FAQ & Knowledge Base
  
• Document Approval Process
  
• Project Sites
  
• Collaboration with Partners and Vendors
  
• Corporate Blogs & Message Boards
  

By taking the time to really identify how you want to utilize SharePoint within the organization you will be able to build a long term vision. I like to tell people to “Think Big, Start Small and Keep Growing”. This part of the process is the “Think Big” step. Where you look at SharePoint as a tool and identify the specific ways you want to utilize it within the organization.

Step 4: Know what is Realistic

Once you have worked out the overall vision it is important to start small. You need to identify what projects can be completed realistically given the timeline, resources and culture. SharePoint is a great tool, but it requires that users adopt it and really use it. In order to get this adoption it is important to build a plan that allows you to work at a pace that matches the organization. Typically this means that you work on implementing items in phases. Maybe we start with a corporate intranet and then once we complete that we start looking at building team site for collaboration. Or maybe we start by just implementing one process with workflows into SharePoint. We really have a lot of options!

Step 5: Start Moving

Then once we get started we just need to keep moving! Is it likely that you will get it all right the first time, no! But the beauty of it is that you can adjust your approach with the next project. We can start small and get people used to working with SharePoint and then really start to take advantage of the other features available. Implementing a tool like SharePoint is a process. So we would want to create small steps that allow us to keep conquering the small wins and getting at the low hanging fruit.

So that is my 5 point checklist to look at when you are considering moving to Office 365. The beauty of SharePoint is that it can be many different things to many different people. So to get started you really need to take some time to figure out what it will be for you. Once you do that you can build a small measurable plan and then get started with the process. This approach has worked in many different environments I have been in, so I definitely encourage you to give it a try!

One of the features in SharePoint is the ability to grant users access to different parts of the site. Once you do this however, it can become difficult to manage. Thankfully there are some great quick tools that are included that allow us to quickly identify the site permissions structure.

The first feature is the notification that some of the content in the site is uniquely secured. This is displayed on the site permissions page in a yellow menu bar. If you don’t see this menu it means that all the content in your site inherits permissions from its parent:

When you click this link, another screen opens and shows you what lists have had unique permissions applied.

The other feature I found helpful, was the Check Permissions option. When you select this you are able to enter a username and it will display for you if that user has been added directly to the site or if they have been placed in a group.

Here is one for a user that was added directly to an item:

These features will allow you to quickly identify content within your site that has been uniquely secured. You can also use these tools to find the current permissions for any given user. This is definitely the first place you should look if you have any issues with users accessing your site.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been asked a few times to point users in a good direction when they are just getting started with SharePoint. I love these types of questions because it gives me an opportunity to share with others what I have learned along the way. Since I have been asked so much lately, I figured it was time to create a blog post that I could reference in the future. So in this post we will be covering steps a beginner can take to get up to speed with SharePoint:

Understand the Business Problem

First and foremost I would encourage everyone that is learning SharePoint to see SharePoint as a tool. It is simply a tool that we can use to solve a business problem. Since it is likely that your business problems are different from other organizations it is also likely that how you use SharePoint to solve them will be different as well. It is important to learn new functionality and new ways to use SharePoint, but you must always look back to the business problem at hand. If you begin to focus more on the tool and what you can do with it you have the risk of over-engineering your solution.

Start with the Basics

I got my “remember the business” soapbox out of the way, so now I will encourage you to start with the basics.

Licensing

Do you understand what level of licensing you have for your environment? Do you know what tools you have available? This is important because as you are searching for content you will need to be aware of what applies specifically to your environment. If you have any questions on licensing you can check out the link below or even pose a question to the team on twitter.

General Out of the Box Functionality

Next we want to really focus on getting up to speed with the basic out of the box SharePoint functionality. The table below represents some of the key areas that I think would be a good place to start, as well as some links to get you started.

In addition, it is important to get an understanding of other tools that you can use to further configure SharePoint. I still consider these tools to be out of the box configurations. You would become familiar with them so that you know what all can be done within SharePoint.

There are so many links that I could references here, so I just picked the highlights. This should be enough though to get you started and as you are reading them should help you identify additional areas that you should dig into.

Combine the Basics into Solutions

Once you have a grasp on the basic functionality in SharePoint, it would be good to start looking at creative ways to combine the functionality into complete solutions. An example of this might be creating a list, creating some custom views and then configuring different web parts to display the custom views you created.

Here are some examples of blog posts that I have done that show combining features into solutions:

• A Simple FAQ Example: http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=18
  
• Filtering a List Web Part by Selecting a Shape in a Visio Document: http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=74
  
• Linking Shapes to SharePoint Data and Displaying Data Graphics (KPI Status) in Visio : http://blogs.sharepoint911.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=79
  

Continue to Learn and Join the Community!

There are also many great resources out there for the community by the community that can really help you get a good jump start on building solutions. One that is very well known is the Nothing But SharePoint for End Users site https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/Pages/default.aspx

You can also learn a lot from people on twitter who are focused on information worker content, listed below are some of people I follow.

*if I missed you or someone you recommend, leave a comment and I will update my table

There are MANY more people that I could keep adding to this list, but start with these and you will have some good people to follow! I also follow several of the Microsoft Twitter accounts because it gives me good information on things they have in the works. It also gives me a channel to ask questions. In fact not once have I posed a question to one of them that they haven’t responded with the answers I needed.

Some specific MS accounts that I follow include:

Now once you start building solutions you should share them with the community. You can do this through blog posts, twitter or involvement in local community user groups. Hope to see you in the community soon!

Recently there was a comment on my blog post, asking if you could use the calendar overlay to show different items from the same list using different colors. I thought it was a great question, so I wanted to follow up with a blog post on how you could achieve it. In my example, I have a task list and I want to use the calendar overlay to show the list in 3 different ways – show a different color for each tasks status – Not Started, In Progress and Completed. The first thing that I will need to do is to create the tasks list with the three different calendar views. An example of this is shown below:

Now, I will just need to configure my calendar overlay to display the 3 list views. To do this, I select the Calendar overlay option in the Calendar ribbon.

I will need to add 3 overlays to the Calendar, one for each view I have created. An example of the configuration screen is shown below. Notice I can select the display color, List, List View

When my calendar is displayed I can now see all three views represented with different colors using one calendar overlay.

Since this is triggered by views, I could get pretty creative. As another example, I could show all overdue tasks in one color and task due today in another color. Really the only limitation is that you are limited to 10 overlays. I personally don’t think of this as a limitation, but instead a safeguard. More than 10 would probably make for a very busy calendar! Hope this post has been helpful!

I wanted to do a quick blog post that covers some of the functionality that is provided out of the box within Lists & Libraries that I think is often overlooked. One of the features I am referring to is the use of the out of the box view styles that can be configured. In my example below I will be looking at a task list and the different view styles that can be configured for this list. Most lists have the same styles available, so while my post is dealing with a task list it in theory applies to all list types and libraries.

To get started, I will be showing screenshots of the different styles available out of the box. From there we will review the easiest way to create a view that uses the pre-defined styles.

Basic Table

This style is probably the one that is most familiar to you, as it is the default style for many lists. This style will display the items in rows and columns based on the columns you have selected to be displayed. Here is a screenshot of this view for our task list:

Boxed No Labels

This style is going to take all of your list data and display it in a small box. Each data item will be placed in order based on the columns displayed across the top (what columns and what order can be configured in each view).

This style gives you the ability to visually display small groups of data. For information that is lengthy or contains many columns this would be a good alternative to scrolling across vertically to see all of the columns of data.

Boxed

This style gives you the ability to visually display small groups of data and displays the column headers next to the information (unlike Boxed No Labels).

Newsletter

This style is going to display the content in a combination of rows and columns. The organization is based on the amount of data you have to be displayed, the types of fields and the order. If you are unhappy with how it is displayed, try switching up the column ordering or columns displayed to get a slightly different look.

Newsletter No Lines

This is the same style as Newsletter; however the horizontal line between each item is not displayed. Instead, every other item is slightly shaded.

Shaded

This view is the same as the Basic table view, however every other item in the view is shaded. The color used in the shading is based on the colors selected in the theme. This style really helps draw the user’s attention to the different line items.

Preview

This style allows you to select a title of an item in the list and then the corresponding fields are displayed in a preview pane. This is a create view to use when building a contact list or an FAQ site.

Putting It to Use

Now that you have seen some of the styles, let’s look at how you might be able to put them to use. Below are some examples of different views in action. Notice how they don’t really change any functionality; they just add some nice usability to the site.

A Directory

Using the preview pane on a list provides a great way for users to quickly find information about different users. In my example I have a list of offices and details about that office. For the preview pane as a user scrolls over the Office name they will see information about the person who is in that office. Without leaving the page, users will be able to access the detailed information they are looking for.

Dashboard

In this example we have 3 lists on the page, connected using Web Part Connections. The first web part is using the Newsletter Style. The middle web part is using the Box style and the right web part is using the Newsletter no line style. Using the different views will help the users easily see and process the data on the page.

If you haven’t really done much using the default styles, I would encourage you to try them out. You will likely find that your users appreciate the different views and the styles that can be used. Just a few small things that you can change on the web parts to really add some additional value to the users.

Yesterday I had the awesome opportunity to attend the Office 365 press release, where Steve Ballmer and Kirk Koeningsbauer did a presentation on the new features of Office 365 and how they relate to the business. The event was a large networking event, with a press release in the middle. This gave the attendees an opportunity to really interact with others and then also to interact with many different representatives from Microsoft. Several demo stations were set up to show off the new features and several customers who were using the new features were on hand to give firsthand accounts of how they are working with Office 365. For anyone who missed the press release you can still access it online.

The event seemed to focus mostly on providing small – medium organizations the same tools and solutions that are available to larger, enterprise organizations. The goal is providing them first in class tools for productivity and efficiency for use within the workplace. Office 365 does just that. With very little upfront investment and configuration they can immediately start using the full benefits of Office 365, which includes Outlook, Lync and SharePoint Online. Steve Ballmer repeatedly commented on how the experience working with Office 365 should be the same experience that a user has with the existing Office suite, the idea being to give them another tool that is similar to the existing tools that they already use in day to day operations.

The best example from the day, that I personally had the opportunity to hear about, was the 2 employee team from Beau’s insurance. They are a husband / wife insurance company located in Ohio. They are using Office 365 to remove paper from their process and to streamline the services they provide. When I asked Kerri her favorite feature from Office 365 she replied with a laugh about how much paper had been reduced and how much it simplified her day to day activities. They are about as small as you come when it comes to an organization and they found out quickly how much they could do with Office 365. Jeffery has been working with the beta since early on and is pretty excited to dig in and learn even more about the functionality available in SharePoint Online. I of course was ready to chat all about SharePoint with them  If you want to read more about their story, check out their case study on the Microsoft website.

So many different organizations now have the opportunity to really take advantage of some tools that otherwise might not have been as easily available to them. And now that Office 365 is available in production, it is time to dig in and get started! Listed below are just some of the resources to help you as you get started:

• Office 365 Website
  
• Office 365 Plans
  
• Office 365 Community
  
• Office 365 Forums – Don’t know how to do something? Search here to see if the answer exists, if not ask it. If you have a question, others likely have the same one!
  
• Office 365 SharePoint Online Forums – I spend lots of time here answering SharePoint specific questions.
  
• Office 365 Grid Blog – Look here for Posts from Community Contributors
  
• Office 365 Online Training & Support – Look for “Applies to SharePoint Online”
  
• Office 365 Case Studies – Read about what others are doing and get some ideas of your own.
  

I have been working with the beta for a while now and I can personally say that I am really excited about the future of Office 365 and the impact that it will have on small and medium business. It will be great to see all of the new stories that result from new companies doing things that they weren’t able to do before. Makes me think back a few years to when people were just getting started with SharePoint and how much of a game changer it was to the organization.

Here are some of the other shots from the event, all in all it was a great event and I was very happy to be included and hear firsthand about Office 365.

I really think that Visio Services is very under used in SharePoint 2010. I think this is mostly due to the fact that people don’t understand the powerful solutions that can be built just using the out of the box tools. Working with Visio really takes the whole “No Code Required” to the next level. I recently did a session at SPTechCon about it and I was surprised to see how little people knew of what could be configured.

There is nothing too special about this post, in fact you may look at it and not really see much value or see some other way you could have accomplished the same thing. That is fine and expected J I just wanted to start with a simple example so it was easy to understand and relate to. I assume that as you look at these features you will build more complex charts, diagram and reports.

As a quick summary, here is the business issue we are looking at: Our team manages a small number of projects. We want a way to be able to quickly see visually the status of the different projects. The projects summary information is stored in a list.

To get started, we need to first create our SharePoint list to store our project data. I have created a custom SharePoint list that has a few different columns:

1. Title (default column)
   
2. Description (multi-line of text column)
   
3. Project Manager (person)
   
4. Status (multiple choice)
   

Below is a screenshot of the default view of my list.

Now, I am going to open Visio and create the diagram that I want to use to show the project status visually. Since I know I am going to be publishing to a SharePoint site I will be using Visio Premium. For my example I am keeping things very simple. I basically have configured a shape for each project. Below is a screenshot of my simple diagram. To add a little style I used the background settings in combination with the design themes. I also applied some effects. In case you are new to Visio, in the diagram below I have highlighted some of the different menu structures you may want to spend some time exploring.

The next step I need to do is to configure my connection in the diagram back to the SharePoint list data. I am going to do this through the Data ribbon.

When I select the option to Link Data to Shapes I am able to connect back to my SharePoint list using the connection wizard. Below are the screenshots that map out the process.

Once the connection is created, a new menu is displayed on the bottom of my drawing. Here I can see the values for the different items in my list.

Now I need to tell Visio what list data needs to be associated with which shape. This is done by simple selecting the item from the list and dragging in to a shape. As I do this I will see a link icon next to each item and I will see data from the list on the drawing.

As you can see, Visio has attempted to configure the diagram to show the data that makes the most sense. This in my case is too much data for my diagram. I can easily update this however by accessing the Edit Data Graphic…. Menu item on Data Graphics menu located in the Data ribbon.

Here I can add, edit or remove items.

In my example, I have removed the description field and edited the title fields Position. Here is a screenshot of my updated diagram.

Now the fun part  The next step is adding the data graphics so that we can display an icon based on the values in the SharePoint list. For our example we are using the values in the status column. We do this from the Data ribbon using the Data Graphics menu option. We will add a new data graphic to our existing items (where we set the title above).

For my example I am going to use an Icon set that is associated with the stop light concept. This will provide a visual queue for people to know the overall status of the project.

Finally, as a finishing touch I want to add a data legend so they understand what the icon values represent. I can do this through the Data ribbon we have already been working with. Also, don’t be surprised if adding the legend causes you to need to resize or move your diagram around. Should be pretty easy to manage though. Here is a screenshot of my diagram.

Now I am finally ready to publish this diagram to my SharePoint site and display it in a web part. I will start by saving the file as a web drawing to my SharePoint site.

Once I do this, I can add the Visio web part to any page and configure it to display my document. I have added some screenshots from the process below.

Adding the Visio web part:

Configure the web part to point to the document you published:

The finished view: