The rich platform of SharePoint helps in the construction of web applications that are 'multi-tiered'. There are three characteristics that define this development platform- reliability which means its ability for consistent performance, extensibility which enables consolidation with other applications as well as systems and scalability which enables the proper handling of growing work amount. For web application development several frameworks, languages, tools as well as object models can be used. The person who is new to this platform may find it difficult to know what to implement and where. So a developer should first understand his choices and then select the options accordingly to meet his design and architectural goals.
Capabilities
The system of SharePoint Server is equipped with the following capabilities:
- Communities- Collaborating through blogs, wikis, etc.
- Sites- Websites both outside as well as inside the firewall.
- Search- The technologies as well as products include search engines that can be customized according to your needs.
- Content- Web content management, publishing along with enterprise content management systems.
- Composite applications- Includes infrastructure, processes, user interface as well as data access.
- Insights- Business intelligence.
Scalable architecture can be provided by the relevant technologies along with products making it absolutely perfect for several users like employees of a huge corporation. Flexible, scalable websites can be built by its virtue; they can be maintained with ease. When building applications you can customize several capabilities for specific vertical markets.
Role in Application development strategy
While considering the role, three basic strategies are there- enterprise portal, application and intranet along with application. Among these SharePoint viewed as application is the simplest approach. In this, deployment of SharePoint is as it is. Customizations are limited to either no-code customizations or configuring through web browser.
SharePoint may also be utilized as intranet platform as well as application. According to this model, the platform is used for building of intranet applications. This often includes remarkable customizations and partners can be included as well for initial deployment. After completing the deployment, in-house customizations can be limited to configuration through browser or no-code solutions with help of SharePoint Designer.
SharePoint can be adopted as an enterprise portal, acting as a core component of the application development strategy. This model will allow you to have an experienced as well as full-fledged software development team. You along with your development partner can also experience close relationship by virtue of this platform. Other considerations additionally associated with this approach are:
- Maintaining the skills necessary within the development team.
- Enforcement as well as development of coding standards specific to SharePoint for external development partners along with internal developers.
- Robust approach needs to be established for ALM or Application Lifecycle Management like defining the standards, process as well as procedures for creation of SharePoint solutions. They can then be moved through production environments, UAT, integration as well as development.
- In case of regional SharePoint farms engaged in global deployment, standards and efforts must be coordinated across diverse development teams.
Right applications for SharePoint
To use SharePoint for application development platform, you should try and determine when SharePoint can be used and when it cannot be used. Every problem can be solved by this platform but it may increase complexities in maintenance along with application development and cost as well. Things may become tricky in case of upgradation to SharePoint's latest release due to heavy customizations. So some key considerations are:
- Management of unstructured information is best suited by SharePoint.
- There is no point in using this if things like content, search, insights, communities, composites or sites are not used.
- It is best for creation of multiple examples of websites based on common templates.
Thus, in short this platform is not only great for enterprise level information sharing but for lots of features like file-sharing, web-publishing and collaborating, all under a single server. Business efficiency and productivity can be improved with the help of the easy to use and powerful infrastructure which boasts of capabilities for the development of websites, portals, content management systems, intranets and such other business intelligence implementations. You can hire developers from top SharePoint development company in India who can help you build mobile apps within allocated budgets and time schedules.
We provide SharePoint custom solutions development services. If you need to hire SharePoint developer from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.
When creating SharePoint team site, a home page is created which can be modified so that it meets the needs of the team better as well as looks great. The looking good aspect is also related to usability as a site must not compromise on user-friendly aspect when it is modified. The website can display announcements, calender items, tasks, etc or may be added with images or texts. To make any kind of changes to the site you have to be logged as a user with the necessary permissions for editing or modification of the pages. This means that the person must belong to the Members group of the site.
Some tips for better site
While designing new websites the top navigation should be consistent as well as concise. The navigation which is also known as global navigation should include something around top 5 elements which will be most essential for your needs along with usage. Some good examples are links to subsites or pages. In fact, navigation inheritance should be used from parent site unless it is a private site and it must be totally isolated. The links should not exceed nine as it will appear to be too confusing as well as cluttered.
Right or left scrolling should be avoided anyhow. Consistently scrolling back and forth for viewing or reading the website's contents can prove to be very frustrating for users. Extra wide parts can be moved into footer or header zones. While designing the website the varying screen resolutions should be kept in mind. Mostly in offices, the resolutions are set at 1280 x 1024 pixels while some laptops are wider so it should be tested in narrow windows to check if its working correctly or not.
The navigation at left could and must be changed according to your position at the website. The position is relative and top level sites can have links to calenders, discussion boards, custom lists, etc. The hyperlinks must be configured properly. You can force the links to open in new windows which will keep the main site open in background; users can easily return there simply by minimizing or closing the window.
The home page should be such that it catches attention as well as conveys meaning or purpose of the site. It is difficult but not impossible. For that you have to keep the content uncluttered and succinct. Important information should be placed “above the fold” or in the space of content which can be seen on screen before having to scroll down. Since screen resolutions of different browsers are different the placement can be tricky. Colors or effects and images should be effectively used so that attention is drawn to main content. Do not be too gaudy and use too many colors, text sizes and fonts.
How to edit
To edit or modify the home page you have to browse home page; click Page tab located in Ribbon which will display editing options. Click Edit and do all the changes that you want. Now the cursor needs to be placed anywhere inside the page body's rectangular boxes and the content can be edited and applied. Even styles can be applied. After that save the changes by clicking “Stop Editing”.
If you want to add links, web parts, images or tables to the home page then you have to follow these instructions:
- Click Edit button as mentioned previously to start the editing process.
- The Ribbon has an Insert tab which should be clicked. Place the cursor where the item needs to be inserted from Ribbon. The cursor should be inside the rectangular box in the body of the page.
- Click on the item that you want to add- whether it be table, web part, hyperlinks or image and select their variety accordingly.
- Click Edit; choose Stop Editing and your changes will be saved.
Remember that when a visitor enters the site it should be able to answer questions like what, why, what the site has and what can it give to the user. When you do custom sharepoint development, you get exactly the right thing which you precisely need.
We provide SharePoint 2010 development services. We have expert SharePoint team with 100% certification ratio. To hire SharePoint developer from us, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.
With the growth of technology, the world is getting smaller day by day. Bigger desktops becoming bulky laptops. And these bulky laptops changing to Notebooks. Then these stylish Notebooks became Ultra books. And now the trend is moving towards Smart phones and tablets. With this modern shift of electronic gadgets applications too are getting customized. Web applications becoming Apps, "Apps" are marketing strategy to increase use of SharePoint and other technologies in wider IT markets gaining its demand for development, deployment and usage. SharePoint was first launched in 2001 for both home and at work. Now with its customized features and advance versions catering the needs of customer today. SharePoint apps going mobile and are in huge demand across the globe.
Designing for mobile apps in SharePoint has evolved dramatically. Users now expect faster, pertaining longer to mobile experiences and catering to this is increasingly difficult. With the release of SharePoint 2013 a powerful tool has taken birth which deals with content, document and information management only when it is correctly used. SharePoint apps provide well-designed solution with its wide range of new features such as stronger search features, better cloud integration and some good developments in content and infrastructure management. The 2013 release is an important one as the 2007 version will no longer be supported, which means that users have to upgrade current versions for better use of applications and building it with more richer usability.
Richer Features of today's Mobile Apps
- End users can “share” files with others more simply.
- Better developer support.
- The overhead of versioned documents is reduced with the new database storage.
- With Office Web Apps can now edit documents on iOS devices.
- Much more flexibility around images.
- Video support improvements.
Design Tips for a successful Mobile App
1. Responsive Design: Presenting large amounts of information on the limited real estate of a mobile screen is difficult. While there are other more-detailed interface design techniques, such as responsive tables. SharePoint deploys applications in varied screen sizes with a better and responsive design.
2. Color theme: SharePoint designs apps with a consistent look and feel of any website or brand by choosing a matching color theme. Giving it a professional look with a logo image for app’s header rather than adding it as a text-based title. So that users should be able to recognize its brand at first glance of the app.
3. Splash screen: Splash screen gives users the first impression of classy apps with creative ideas. High-resolution images give applications that wow factor it deserves. It can all happen with this new SharePoint 2013 version. It gives life to its applications and satisfies customers by meeting what they crave for.
4. Home screen navigation: This platform offers four types of navigation. Experiment with different navigation settings until you find the most suitable one for background image and icons. For example, if background contains a special texture or image at the bottom and want to emphasize the icons a grid navigation helps to achieve that. Alternatively, if an image of a real person is there it should be placed in the on the right and list navigation must be used.
5. Mobile Social Networks: Social networking use mobile apps to allow a whole new platform of communication for example Facebook and Twitter have gone mobile. Thus SkyDrive Pro is cloud storage that organizations provides for employees as part of their SharePoint 2013 on-premises and/or Office 365 SharePoint Online deployments. SkyDrive Pro access is also a capability of the new Office Mobile for iPhone as well as Android phones. One can use these apps to create new documents and edit existing ones from any smartphone directly into SkyDrive Pro folder. SharePoint is all about building various business solutions and dynamic websites with its new out-of-the-box templates. The new SharePoint user interface gives higher usability with a clean experience with easy drag and drop, quicker page loads and a focus on true accessibility to make SharePoint understandable and operable.
6. New Push Notification Feature integration: SharePoint 2013 now supports the mobile apps that aid users to receive notifications from a SharePoint based website. Any number of events happening on the SharePoint site is notified on the mobile device with new Push notification feature. One time registration with the website is required by mobile device apps. The Push notification service can be started by which mobile users receive notifications directly from the server where the app is hosted for the registered mobile device app. Also, it is vital that the Push Notification feature is activated on the site automatically changing the settings.
7. Device Channels: Use of mobile devices is the most these days, they keep running on multiple mobile operating systems. SharePoint builds optimized websites which has rich readability and easily used on all mobile devices. With Device channels integrated in SharePoint 2013, mobile users can deliver a single website in multiple views by using different preferable designs that target different devices.
8. Location: SharePoint 2013 supports new Geolocation field type that can be used in a list particularly for mobile application development. Now, it is possible to create lists location aware and display latitude and longitude coordinates via Bing Maps. Its tools are useful for building enhanced customized mobile applications. Microsoft has included all useful mobile related features in SharePoint 2013 making it a mobile-friendly platform.
SharePoint 2013 has developed new capabilities in web hosting section with its new version comprises such as serving up pages to different electronic gadgets such as tablets and smartphones based on their characteristics. It also includes several features for search engine optimization, including XML based sitemaps, user-friendly URLs and robots.txt support to define out of bounds areas for search engine crawlers.
Tablets and Smartphones are here to stay and make our lives smarter and more mobile. SharePoint being the home for every sort of business, Microsoft has addressed the problem of the poor SharePoint experience for mobile devices in previous versions, very effectively. With the new SharePoint version HTML5 coded view known as the "contemporary" view that is optimized for speedy access across various smart devices and multiple browsers. SharePoint 2013 mobile development can work wonders for you – It can help you build apps to reach out and push a message to the mobile device based on various factors with its new push notification feature. Mobile Apps designed today are more convenient and easily portable and can suffice basic business needs.
We provide SharePoint portal development services. The entire 100% of our SharePoint team is certified by Microsoft. To hire SharePoint developer from us, please reach out to us at Mindfire Solutions.
The social tools of SharePoint have lately faced a lot of criticism from executives. It is a fact that these social tools are considered as a major distraction and well as productivity hindrance. Moreover, many executives might also believe that these tools can usher in the threats of loss of intellectual property, cyber-attacks as well as corporate embarrassment. From their point of view, these tools are probable disasters which should better be completely done away with.
Many of these concerns might be legitimate, but that should not be the reason to shun SP social tools totally. Globally acclaimed SharePoint expert Richard Harbridge, has worked with a number of companies helping them to cope up with this problem. According to him, once the executives' concerns are understood and acknowledged, ways to reduce the risks can be demonstrated.
Major concerns of executives and means to alleviate them
1. Fear of negative comments: One of the things that executives worry about most is the situation wherein a dissatisfied employee might say something negative on the blog. Such corporate embarrassment can be avoided by adopting certain simple measures such as the addition of an approval feature within the blogs. Here the main issue is that executive or other supporting staff might not properly understand how these features can be used effectively. In that case, some amount of education will help.
2. Fear of wrong information usage: With SharePoint's social tools, executives often dread the fact that information might fall in the wrong hands. In the executives' opinion, loss of trade secrets and intellectual property is a huge risk. This can be addressed by amending or appending the existing policies pertaining to intellectual property, that are present in employee agreements or employee manuals. Any social technology including the intranet should not be exempt from respectful and ethical employee behavior as well as acceptable technology use practices.
3. Fear of wastage of time: According to many executives, once SharePoint social tools are introduced, a large number of people would be wasting time on what can be called as a 'Corporate Facebook'. But it should be noted that the tools have some substantial business value which most executives do not know. For instance, each time a user shares, rates or tags a piece of content, the same is noted by SharePoint and its search relevancy is increased. This enables people to easily locate what they are looking for, thereby mitigating the risk of obsolete or incorrect content being used.
In case executives are still concerned about productivity loss, setting the employees' expectation that, like their web browser or email, this is also a work technology, can do the desired job. In order to make the use of these SP tools by employees more effective, guidance, training or illustrations may be given on the means to utilize the technology within a work setting. Often, making use of stories to elaborate this can help immensely, particularly if the stories revolve around corporate culture or things like any practical use of the tool specific to the business.
4. Fear of viruses and cyber-attacks: Many are of the opinion that using SP social tools will make the systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks and viruses. These can be conveniently reduced by implementation of an enterprise ready social technology. A plethora of them have constraints imposed for preventing people from adding scripts as an instance to discussion boards, tags, status updates or embedded in any other social content.
5. Fear of employee harassment: Many feel that enhanced collaboration paves the way to increased employee harassment. It is significant to consider the matter of employee harassment, hence ensure that you append or amend the existing policies related to sexual harassment within employee agreements or manuals. Moreover, so far as ethical employee behavior or acceptable technology use is concerned, all social technologies including the intranet should not be exempt from the same.
The concern of your executives is valid, and cannot be denied. However, once these concerns are addressed through implementation of effective and simple safeguards, these types of situations can be done away with. And once accepted with open arms, SharePoint application development would help you leverage the power of social media.
We provide SharePoint webparts development services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
A consistent increase is noted in the number of companies investing in SharePoint application development. However, each organization also explores option to optimize the performance of the SharePoint application. In addition to developing and deploying the application properly, it is also important for a company to provide consistent and quality support. If you are planning to outsource the SharePoint application support, it is important to select the right partner. Along with comparing the cost of support services, you also need to consider on a number of important points to ensure that your SharePoint application gets consistent and customized support.
How to Choose the Right SharePoint Support Partner?
1. Skills and Innovation: Similar to other tech support partners, your SharePoint support partner also needs to possess adequate knowledge, skills and platforms. At the same time, you must evaluate the nature and type of the services offered by the company to ensure that these are effective in optimizing the performance of your application. In addition to adding value to your existing team of developers, the company must be effective in providing fresh and innovative ideas to the overall IT functionality.
2. Solid Working Relationship: When you are hiring a SharePoint support partner, the company will work with your team over a longer period of time. Therefore, it is important to check the services offered by the company to ensure that a solid working relationship can be built. Along with checking the compatibility of the company with your existing team, you also need to check if the company is ready to offer customized support according to the needs and objectives of your organization.
3. Professional Accreditations: When you are outsourcing SharePoint support, it becomes essential to hire the best professionals. Along with the qualification and experience of the members of the support team, you also need to check if they are Microsoft certified. As each professional has to work hard to obtain Microsoft certification exam, the team consisting of such accredited developers can provide higher level of service by identifying your specific requirements.
4. Location of the Company: You have option to choose from several local and offshore SharePoint support service providers. Similar to other companies, you can avail high quality yet cost-effective support for your application by outsourcing the project. But the offshore company will require you to work with a distributed team. Also, there are chances that you have to implement a comprehensive strategy to overcome the constraints related to language and time zone. It is also a good idea to discuss with your in-house team about their willingness to work with an offshore company.
5. A Concrete Service Level Agreement: Once you decide to hire an offshore company, it becomes essential to ensure that it will assist your team in resolving any problem without causing any delay. At the same time, you must hire a service provider who agrees to sign a concrete service level agreement drafted according to your specific business needs. The service level agreement will make it easier for you to avail consistent and high quality SharePoint support, in addition to evaluating the service based on key performance indicators.
6. Credibility and Reputation of the Support Partner: The websites of the companies offering SharePoint support will help you in understanding the nature and type of services offered by them. However, you cannot hire a partner without checking his professional credibility and reputation. It is always a good idea to contact the existing clients of the company to gather information about the quality and promptness of the support service provided by the company. At the same time, you also need to evaluate the information gathered from various resources to ensure that the company has adequate manpower and financial strength to become a long-term support partner.
7. Cost: The hash economic conditions have made it essential for companies to avail high quality SharePoint support on a budget. So you must compare the prices charged by each shortlisted company. However, it is also important to do a cost and benefit analysis by keeping in mind the value the company will add to your existing IT system and functionality. As each service provider promises higher ROI, you can always ask the company to prove its claims. When a support partner agrees to deliver higher ROI, it will remain more committed to optimize the performance of your SharePoint application.
While selecting a SharePoint support partner, you cannot ignore the significance the feedback and recommendations of other users. It is a good idea to search the web to read the information shared by other companies related to the quality and reliability of SharePoint support provided by each of the shortlisted companies. If you are contemplating a SharePoint site migration project, you can put the points above into action to find a reliable development partner.
We provide SharePoint bespoke development services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
Each edition of Microsoft SharePoint comes with loads of innovative features and functionality. In addition to being a web publishing platform, SharePoint is also used widely by enterprises to manage content and documents stored on their intranet and the web. But each company has to make and implement a comprehensive strategy to migrate to SharePoint smoothly. An organization can easily migrate to the innovative content management system, if it does not have any paper record.
But the companies with loads of paper records must implement a comprehensive SharePoint scanning strategy. Along with scanning each documents, file and folder, the strategy also needs to consider how to sort and store the scanned records logically. At the same time, the strategy must consider a number of quality assurance steps to optimize SharePoint scanning.
SharePoint Scanning Best Practices
1. Automate the Scanning Process: Similar to other manual process, SharePoint scanning is also prone to several types of errors. So you must use innovative technologies to automate the collection and storing of data. You also have option to choose from a variety of tools like Database Lookups and Advanced Data Extractions to make the data collection and entry process flawless. Along with eliminating errors, the tools will further make it easier for you to store the data at a much faster pace.
2. Check the Scanning Hardware: The documents can be scanned using several types of scanning hardware available in the market. But you must check the hardware to ensure that it is designed with double feed detection feature. The feature will ensure that the each page is scanned by eliminating the chances of pages getting struck while going through the feeder. As you have option to choose from several scanners, it is important to pick the right device after evaluating the pros and cons of each system.
3. Make the Scanning Task Specific: Many professionals do not understand the requirements and significance of SharePoint scanning. So they often ignore to check the quality of the scanned images and documents. You can always improve the quality of scanning by making the entire process task specific. Instead of deploying a dedicated employee to scan all documents, you can divide the task among several employees. When the task is assigned to specific employees, they will scan the documents properly while checking the quality of both data and images.
4. Check the Quality of Image and Data: You can always optimize the SharePoint scanning by introducing a QA system. Under the QA system, each image and information will be checked by an independent person, before storing these in the database. As an alternative, you can even consider using an interface that is designed with dual view feature to see each side of a document, folder batch or image structure. At the same time, the interface will also use a spreadsheet to ensure that the all each document is scanned and sorted in an exact and logical way.
5. Use Count Validation: When you are converting existing business data stored on papers into digital format, you must remember that there are always chances that some documents, pages and folders may remain non-scanned. So you must use a validation interface to ensure that each page, document and folder is scanned and counted properly. In addition to physical to digital validation, the interface will further ensure that the prepped or poorly stacked papers are scanned without skipping any record.
6. Check the Way Documents are Stored: Along with scanning each paper record, you also need to ensure that the digitalized records are sorted and stored logically. When the information are sorted and stored in a logical order, it will be easier to access the details immediately in future. Similarly doing QA while scanning the documents, you can further consider introducing QA of the end resting place. The second level of QA will ensure that the data are stored in the right rules. Also, the data will be stored according to the right rules, and in right data fields.
7. Improve Quality through Reporting: Many enterprises use a dual stream output to optimize the scanning and storing of paper record. Along with storing the images and metadata in the repository, you must feed the data and scanning statistics into a reporting DB. The reporting DB will make it easier for you to track the entire scanning process, and ensure that all documents are digitalized. The reporting will further help you in identifying the missing documents and exceptions.
Many organizations outsource SharePoint scanning to save time, effort and money. If you are planning to outsource the project, it becomes essential to keep the above mentioned factors in mind. It is also important to hire a company that has adequate experience in scanning, classifying and storing a wide variety of business records using SharePoint. Custom SharePoint development teams with proper experience in scanning can help immensely in this.
We provide SharePoint webparts development services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
Incredulously, there are now well over 10,00,00,000 web users across the globe, around more than 500 companies using this multi-functional platform “SharePoint”. It’s one of Microsoft's large-scale enterprises and in past 5-6 years Microsoft sold over 36 million user licenses. It is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive enterprise search and content management, accelerating shared business processes and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Regardless of location and devices, we are able to log on to our collaborative, SharePoint-based environment to work with our colleagues on documents, projects or business processes.
SharePoint sites are quickly created and managed well by supporting specific content publishing, enterprise content management, records management and business intelligence needs. With Sharepoint one can conduct effective searches for people and documents, participate in forms-driven business processes. It even accesses and analyzes large business data. It offers a way for people to work together in a versatile way, working together in online and offline applications, in any location.
Capabilities of SharePoint Server
1. SharePoint sites deliver a single infrastructure to provide portal and collaboration capabilities across internet, intranet and extranet. It also brings all users together to share information and knowledge base across organizations.
2. Collaboration, Portal, Enterprise Search, Enterprise Content Management, Business Process and Forms, Business Intelligence and licensed for Internet/Extranet.
3. SharePoint search gives users the ability to find the people, content and information they need by combining an integrated, with enterprise search technology.
4. SharePoint communities empowers organization to work with people in ways that are most effective for them. Allow employees to collaborate in groups, share knowledge and ideas, connect with colleagues and find information and experts without difficulty.
5. SharePoint Insights enable users to access and act together with information across unstructured and structured data sources. It empowers users to discover the right people and expertise to make better and more accurate business decisions.
6. SharePoint Content enables users to participate in a governed, compliant content management lifecycle. SharePoint content makes it possible to skillfully balance user experience with organization policy and business process.
7. SharePoint Foundation is made for small business organizations or departments looking for a low-cost entry-level or a pilot solution for secure, Web-based portal.
8. An organization can use the SharePoint Foundation to coordinate schedules, share, organize documents and participate in discussions through team workspaces, blogs, wikis and knowledge base on the platform that is the underlying infrastructure for SharePoint Server.
9. It works perfectly with other technologies like MS Office, MS Unified Communications and MS Exchange Server. And it has centralized administration allows managers to access application management features, system settings, manage security settings, upgrade SharePoint, change general application settings etc.
10. It can customize application very easily and helps in organization branding. It also looks after the security issues, by managing permissions to sites, lists, folders, documents, web applications and more.
SharePoint Designer is a tool of choice, among developers, for rapid application development. With the help of SharePoint Designer, advanced users and developers can quickly create customized SharePoint solutions. Expert users can compose no-code solutions that encompass a variety of common scenarios, from many collaborative sites and web publishing to line-of-business data integration and business intelligence solutions.
These great solutions leverage the building blocks available in SharePoint in an easy-to-use environment. Additionally, developers can use SharePoint to get a rapid start on SharePoint application development projects. With its advanced features and tools, organizations can quickly respond to growing business needs by building ultimate effective solutions.
We provide SharePoint development services. If you would like to know more about our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.
