Jennifer Ann Mason

In this post I am going to walk you through the different settings and configurations you have to manage site collections within Office 365. To get stared log in with an account with appropriate permissions to the Admin page. Your screen should look similar to the image below. Keep in mind that your screen may look different because it is based on permissions, so you may not see all the links that I have.

Select the “Manage” link under SharePoint Online.

In this case we want to select the link to manage site collections. From this screen we can see our existing site collections, as well as you use the quick launch to easily reference the remaining configuration options:

From the Ribbon you can select to create a new site collection or you can manage an existing site collection. (To activate the remaining buttons in the Ribbon, select a site collection).

The following table describes some of the different options you have for managing your site collections:

One of the great things about Office 365 is how fast you can create sites for the organization. All of the rich features available to you from on-premise installations are still available to you with Office 365. One of these great features is the ability to publish Content Types across multiple site collections.

When you are configuring an on-premise SharePoint farm you have full control of the service applications and you can configure the location of the site collection that will be the hub for your managed metadata service application. With Office 365 this is configured for you. To access your content type hub you simply need to navigate to the site collection with the URL of http://domain.sharepoint.com/sites/ ContentTypeHub. You will notice that this site collection is based off of the team site template and looks very similar to other sites that you have created.

If you access the site collection features you will notice that the “Content Type Syndication Hub” feature has been activated.

This means that as you add content types to this site collection you will be able to select to publish them to the rest of the site collections you create within your Office 365 implementation.

Once you select the Publish option your Content Type will be added to the job that syncs content types across all site collections. I am not sure they have published official numbers of when this job runs for Office 365, but the default value for an on-premise installation is hourly. Once the job has completed you will be able to see the published content type from any site collection. To quickly see all published content types, access site settings, and then the Site Collection Administration link for Content Type publishing.

If you need to read up on the value of content types, here are some links to get you up to speed:

• Content Type and Workflow Planning : http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262735.aspx#section1
  
• Managing Content Type Publishing: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/manage-content-type-publishing-HA101631502.aspx?CTT=1
  

I have addressed this question several times in the past couple of weeks on the MSDN forums, so I thought it would be good to get a post started that I could refer people to. In this post I just want to provide a quick summary of what an impersonation workflow does for you. Let’s get started by reviewing some of the basics.

Workflows can be started 3 different ways –

1. When a New Item is Created
   
2. When an Item is Modified
   
3. Manually
   

When the workflow starts it will run under the identity of the user who kicked off the workflow. Why is this important? Because this means that the workflow is limited to only the actions that the current user can complete. Below are some scenarios where this might cause some issues for you:

• You have a collection of documents that are active; once a certain stage is reached they need to be moved to a library where they can only be read. This means in order to run the workflow the user must have permission to write to that library, which defeats the purpose of a ready only archive.
  
• You have content that needs to be submitted by employees, but only read and acted on by managers. In order to put the content in the location restricted to managers the user running the workflow must be able to access that area.
  

In SharePoint 2007, this limitation greatly reduced the effectiveness of workflows that you could build out of the box using SharePoint Designer. In SharePoint 2010, they provided a way for us to easily work through these scenarios. This new feature is called an Impersonation Step. Whenever you use one of these steps within a workflow, the workflow will run under the context of the user who authored the workflow.

Whenever you first create a workflow in SPD, a Step is generated for you:

Notice however, that in the ribbon there is an option to create an Impersonation Step. If you place your cursor below the current step the option will become available and you can insert the step into your workflow:

Now, take a look at the various actions available for use within each of the steps. You should notice that the impersonation step has some additional commands that aren’t available within the Step. These are mostly focused around setting and removing permissions.

• Step:
  

• Impersonation Step:
  

As you can see there are some additional actions available, but also remember that you can use this step to help complete your custom scenarios. So for instance in our scenarios above you could have an employee kick off a workflow that moves content to another list in the site where they don’t have access. As long as the author of the workflow has access and the workflow action is within an impersonation step, then the workflow will run without errors.

Hope this helps explain how the impersonation step can be used within your workflows. If you have any questions, post them to the comments!

I have addressed this question several times in the past couple of weeks on the MSDN forums, so I thought it would be good to get a post started that I could refer people to. In this post I just want to provide a quick summary of what an impersonation workflow does for you. Let’s get started by reviewing some of the basics.

Workflows can be started 3 different ways –

1. When a New Item is Created
   
2. When an Item is Modified
   
3. Manually
   

When the workflow starts it will run under the identity of the user who kicked off the workflow. Why is this important? Because this means that the workflow is limited to only the actions that the current user can complete. Below are some scenarios where this might cause some issues for you:

• You have a collection of documents that are active; once a certain stage is reached they need to be moved to a library where they can only be read. This means in order to run the workflow the user must have permission to write to that library, which defeats the purpose of a ready only archive.
  
• You have content that needs to be submitted by employees, but only read and acted on by managers. In order to put the content in the location restricted to managers the user running the workflow must be able to access that area.
  

In SharePoint 2007, this limitation greatly reduced the effectiveness of workflows that you could build out of the box using SharePoint Designer. In SharePoint 2010, they provided a way for us to easily work through these scenarios. This new feature is called an Impersonation Step. Whenever you use one of these steps within a workflow, the workflow will run under the context of the user who authored the workflow.

Whenever you first create a workflow in SPD, a Step is generated for you:

Notice however, that in the ribbon there is an option to create an Impersonation Step. If you place your cursor below the current step the option will become available and you can insert the step into your workflow:

Now, take a look at the various actions available for use within each of the steps. You should notice that the impersonation step has some additional commands that aren’t available within the Step. These are mostly focused around setting and removing permissions.

• Step:
  

• Impersonation Step:
  

As you can see there are some additional actions available, but also remember that you can use this step to help complete your custom scenarios. So for instance in our scenarios above you could have an employee kick off a workflow that moves content to another list in the site where they don’t have access. As long as the author of the workflow has access and the workflow action is within an impersonation step, then the workflow will run without errors.

Hope this helps explain how the impersonation step can be used within your workflows. If you have any questions, post them to the comments!

I found this feature today and I think it would be helpful to some, so I wanted to take a few quick minutes and blog about it.

Scenario: You want to control what groups are displayed by default when you access the People and Groups Page.

This can be controlled through the settings option on the group’s page. Follow the steps below to configure-

1. Open the People & Groups Page from the site settings page:

2. Select the Groups Heading to access the groups page (by default you access the first group on the drop down):

3. Select the settings drop down “Edit Group Quick Launch” menu item:

4. Add or remove the groups you want to have displayed by default:

I have been working with a managed metadata solution over the past couple of months and I wanted to share some of my experiences. I think highly of managed metadata and feel that it is a good product, when used within its boundaries. I hope that with future releases, that those boundaries however are removed  Just like most things in SharePoint, using managed metadata will give you some functionality, and then remove some other functionality. It is good to be aware of what the cost / benefits are so that you can choose the solution that best fits your needs.

I really believe that many business scenarios are unique, so each one should be evaluated and the best solution should be used for the problem at hand. In our case, at the end of the day using managed metadata won. The bottom line really comes down to you just knowing and understanding all the options and tradeoffs before jumping into any solution. Listed below are my ideas on when you should use managed metadata and then some of the functionality tradeoffs that you will need to be aware of.

As I continue to learn more about the managed metadata features and limitations, I will add to this blog post. I am curious to hear your comments as well, so please post your experiences as comments!

I have been working on a solution for a client that involves a couple of different InfoPath forms. One of the forms we want users to be able to open using a link and have it pre-populate with specific data. We can easily do this by using the parameter options when we publish the form to InfoPath. For this first blog post I just want to walk through the process of publishing the form with parameters. In a future blog post I will put together more of the solution pieces.

We are starting with a very simple form example. It contains a drop down where the user can select a color. I know, horrible example, but I just want to show the concept in this post 

So we start out with our InfoPath form:

We publish to a form library on our site:

Now this is the screen in the wizard that matters to us:

The first section allows us to take fields from our form and push them to a SharePoint library. This is the same feature that has been available in the past. The second section is where we identify what fields we want to use for parameters for web parts. We can select that the parameters are input, output or input / output. Since we have the new form web part this feature is what we are going to use to build out web part pages with connected web parts.

Here is what our configuration screen looks like for my example:

Once you finish the publishing wizard then we can use the form on a page. For my example I am going to add two web parts to my page:

1. Query String Filter
   
2. Form Web Part
   

This will allow me to pass a parameter from the query string and use that as a value for my form. Here are my two web parts on the page:

The first thing I do is configure my form web part to display my custom form. In my example we just need to connect with the form library and select to display the specific view that I want.

Here is a screenshot of my configuration-

Now we just need to configure the query filter web part and connect it to the form web part. For the query filter web part to work it is expecting that the URL that links to the page will have an added parameter. In our case, we will be using a parameter called “Color”. Parameters are included in the URL with the format of “?Parameter=Value”.

In the web part configuration we just need to name the query (name will be used later for connection) and the parameter.

Next we just need to configure the web part connection. From the Query web part select the options to connect web parts from the web part menu.

Select the parameter in the Form that connects to the query string:

Now when you load the page and the user has a parameter within their URL, the form will be pre-populated to match the query.

In a future blog post I hope to cover a more complex example where we use an SPD workflow to generate the URL for the user so that the form is prepopulated for them based on the actions in a previous workflow. For now, I just wanted to cover the concept so we could reference it in a future post.

I just wanted to post a follow up blog and let you know that I have selected the two winners for my book contest (Gene Vangampelaere & Nasir Naeem). Both have been notified by email and I will ship their copies by the end of the week. I have enjoyed reading all the comments posted, so I wanted to provide a quick summary so that you could see what others submitted. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did.

If you didn’t win this contest, you can still order the book on Amazon 

SharePoint is hosting a contest called SharePoint Journeys, to win this contest you are supposed to upload a video of your SharePoint Journey and then the community votes and picks their favorite (along with MS selecting their choice for winner). The winner receives a trip to the SharePoint conference and a chance to share their journey there.

I decided to go ahead and create a video that highlights my Journey. I started in early 2003 as an intern that was dedicated to learning all about SharePoint and how it could help our Project teams collaborate together. From there I moved onto consulting and I have been doing that full time for the past 5 years. I love the opportunities I have to work with many different organizations on many different projects. Most of what I learn onsite is converted to blog post that I hope you are finding helpful as you are working through your own SharePoint Journey! If you find my blogs helpful, I would love for you to go vote for my Journey Video! 50% of the award is based on community votes, and I would be honored to have yours!

In late December, our book “Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint” was released. I had such a great opportunity to work with some wonderful authors (Amanda Perran, Shane Perran & Laura Rogers) on the book and I am very pleased with the final outcome. This book covers everything that a user needs to understand to build powerful, out of the box solutions within SharePoint. If you are just getting started with SharePoint or if you are looking for a reference to keep on hand then this book is just what you need.

To celebrate the release, I am going to be giving away two books to my blog readers. To enter you just need to add a comment to this blog post and tell me your favorite new addition to SharePoint 2010 and why you like it. I will keep the contest open until 2/11/11 and will notify you by email if you win (be sure to include your email with your comment). Also since shipping costs can add up, I will only be able to send out copies to the US. Thanks and I look forward to reading your comments 