June 2006 - Posts

• Hosted SharePoint options: Quite the bang for your buck for small companies or solo entrepreneurs

  When most small companies read about SharePoint Services and all it can do for them, they may be wondering how they can afford such a great tool. After all, small companies (even ones with a single person) need to collaborate with team members, partners, customers, etc. just as much as larger companies do. Usually, they don't have the kind of infrastructure in-house that's needed. They may not even have a server, depending on the size of the company. That's where SharePoint hosting companies come in. For an incredibly affordable $20 a month ( a typical price, but you'll need to shop around ), the small company and solo entrepreneur can get a SharePoint Services site with unlimited users, unlimited sub-sites, and 1GB of space. These specs and prices will vary between the different hosting companies, so again...shop around. In a nutshell, a hosted SharePoint Services site is a rented SharePoint space on someone else's server. Your data will be there and not in-house. If you are OK with that, then it's a great solution for the majority of folks out there needing this type of functionality. Many hosting companies offer several package options. There are limitations administratively. For example, you will not be able to install 99% of the web parts out there, free or otherwise, as the majority of web part installation usually requires installation on the server...and it's standard that you will not have permission to do this. The hosting company that I use has already installed over 60 custom web parts for us to play with and use. They have also already installed a ton of custom templates to utilize. If you have a problem, you'll submit a help ticket, so you will want to make sure that whatever hosting company you select has a nice support system in place for their users. I found a nice list of SharePoint hosting companies listed at http://wss.collutions.com/pages/VII%20-%20Documents%20and%20Web%20Sites.aspx. Look at FAQ 03 for the list. It's not all encompassing, but it's a great start. You might want to google "sharepoint hosting" to find more. Just because you're small, doesn't mean you have to miss out on the type of functionality that SharePoint Services can offer. The resources are out there...just waiting for you. Andrea Kalli Posted Jun 21 2006, 04:06 PM by Unclaimed Blog with no comments

• Here's some free articles in Advisor Guide to Microsoft SharePoint

  For even more great articles, they have a subscription service.  For example, there's a killer article called: Integrate with Partner SharePoint Portal Server Sites Free articles from http://mssharepoint.advisorguide.com/ 1) Top 10 SharePoint Myths Improve your SharePoint project's chances of success by dispelling these common SharePoint myths. 2) Integrate Business Processes with Microsoft Office Systems Information workers can use Microsoft Office to access and interact with business applications and create more fluid processes 3) Prepare for Downtime Downtime can cause huge losses for any organization. Find out how to identify your most critical servers, and some guidelines for determining the potential costs of downtime. Posted Jun 20 2006, 12:35 AM by Unclaimed Blog with no comments

• Continuing topic: Trumba Calendar in SharePoint site = Event Registration in a SharePoint environment

  This is a continuation of : Trumba Calendar in a SharePoint site = Event registration functionality within SharePoint environment http://www.sharepointblogs.com/akalli/archive/2006/06/08/8232.aspx I've had more time to explore how this is going to work for us, and the subject came up as to how we might be able to tie the event payment process in with the Trumba event calendar and our SharePoint site. Trumba doesn't offer the ability to take payments from people who sign up for your events. I mean, why would they? I wouldn't expect them to. In the spirit of keeping it simple, here's what we did to work around the whole payment thing...we created customized paypal buttons for each event using the paypal button wizard on paypals website. We put those buttons next to each event description on our website and bookmarked them. We put the url (including the bookmark) into the Ticket Web Link field on the trumba form (we use the Education template) for the corresponding event item. This process seems to work like a charm. ************** The user clicks on an event item in the calendar that is displayed on our SharePoint site, they click RSVP to sign up for the event, they click the link in the Ticket Web Link field which opens a new window and takes them directly to a PayPal button on our website, when they click the PayPal button it has all the information for the event already there (name of event, cost of event, etc. ), they finish the PayPal process, they close the window and they are still on our Trumba calendar item. They get a reciept for thier payment from PayPal, they can put the event item on thier calendar, we get notification of registration from Trumba and of payment from PayPal. We are very happy with how this works! ***************** For this kind of functionality in a free service, I don't know how it could get any easier. Plus it has the added bonus of bringing visitors to our website. I hope some of this helps those looking for a simple event registration system with a round-about way to incorporate event payments. Andrea Kalli Posted Jun 17 2006, 08:36 PM by Unclaimed Blog with no comments

• Implementing a video library on a SharePoint site

  Now, I'm not sure if this is the absolute best way to handle this, but so far it has worked great for me and others that I have set this up for. If anyone has a better idea, I am all ears. I create video tutorials using a program called Camtasia Studio. Then I produce them in a format best suited for viewing via the web. I didn't want just anyone to have access to these videos, only people that I gave permission to. So, what I did was create a Web Part Page and added links to each section of video tutorials into a Content Editor Web Part. I've included a document with a screen shot with this posting (hope that works) so you can see what it looks like. I had to upload all the video files to my SharePoint site (which is a hosted site btw) using FrontPage 2003. Once you get going with the process it's really easy to do. Based on how Camtasia Studio produces the videos for web viewing by creating several files, to include a flash file, and an html file that pulls from the flash file. You set the hyperlink in the CEWP to point to the html file, and voila! Anyway, this keeps users from downloading the video tutorials and they can only be displayed when they have access to the SharePoint site. Andrea Posted Jun 08 2006, 07:46 PM by Unclaimed Blog with no comments

• Combine Outlook Contact Activities with SharePoint

  Since my background is in customizing Outlook in the Exchange world, I'm always interested in integration points, especially with SharePoint these days. In case you didn't already know... ...once you link a SharePoint contact list with Outlook, you can take it one step further and set up the Activities tab in the linked folder to your mailbox or personal folder items. For example, if you have been emailing, setting up calendar items, creating journal entries, tasks items etc. for your contacts, you will be able to see all these when you set up Activities in your SharePoint contacts within Outlook.  To set up Activities, right-click on the SharePoint list within your Outlook, go to Properties, click on the Activities tab, click on the New button, give the group a name like "All Associated Items" and click the upper-most checkbox for your mailbox or personal folder. Repeat these steps for any Archive folders you have. With careful planning you can keep a long history of emails you have sent to and recieved from the contact by moving the emails out of your mailbox or personal folder and into your Archive folders. You will also be able to see the other items such as appointments, tasks, and journal entries. It's driven by the email address that both the SharePoint contact list contains and the email address in the Outlook items. Play with this and see how you might be able to use it. Andrea   Posted Jun 08 2006, 05:22 PM by Unclaimed Blog with 1 comment(s)