SharePoint offers Enterprise-Level Info Sharing Platform

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.

Why the Term Governance for SharePoint is Overhyped?

Sharepoint development can provide enormous facilities to enterprises with certain tools and solutions such as extranet, internet portals, business intelligence tools, corporate websites, document and file management systems, corporate search and social networks. In addition to this, SharePoint development can also facilitate enterprise or organization operations with process integration, system integration and work-flow automation. When you have a large organization to take care of, governance is something you can’t afford to ignore.

The term governance is being much talked about in the present age. Owing to its much-hyped popularity, a number of organizations have attempted implying SharePoint governance. However, most of the time it ends up as nothing more than a weak effort of writing a plan and storing it in the document library. Governance should never be considered just a one-time shot since it is generally an active process. With SharePoint extending deeper into diverse areas of an enterprise, the significance of existing governance is turning out to be greater. The odds of ownership and the position of SharePoint within an organization are quite common. It is to be remembered that governance can greatly affect adoption, in case the controls are too rigid. Governance relates to guidance, processes, consistent management, cohesive policies and decision-rights for a given area of responsibility. And SharePoint does governance at its best.

SharePoint is often a grassroots implementation to build customized as well as collaborative websites. One can easily develop websites with a quick SharePoint install, making it available to anyone be it in a team, department, committee, whoever wants to organize and collaborate around a specific set of information. It gives the capability to integrate itself with certain enterprise class applications such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management) applications. Being a web based model, SharePoint developed applications provides security, central governance and management controls to the administrator. The underlying principles of good governance are the same whether managing SharePoint or any other enterprise collaboration platform and those principles do not change whether that platform is on cloud, premises or might be on both. Governance is even more critical to hybrid environments to make collaboration a success due to its additional complexities but SharePoint makes it simpler.

With SharePoint, one can create a successful collaborative governance strategy for any SharePoint site migration project, across any platform and any set of tools. The fundamentals include managing the risks involved with the decisions one makes around its environment right from access controls, roles and responsibilities which leads to how secure is the data to data management such as document lifecycles, storage policies, information architecture compliance monitoring, metrics, and collaboration transparency. Everything is governed well.

7 steps of SharePoint Governance Plan which makes it more popular and much-hyped among its end users:

1. Executive Support: Rarely few initiatives move forward successfully without the support of someone from the leadership team — someone who will help you to clear out roadblocks and to push for necessary funding and resources. From a governance standpoint, executive sponsor may not be very involved in the operations of the team, but should be available when needed to review and approve difficult decisions, or to clarify corporate goals and direction.

2. End-User Involvement: One cannot plan a system that will be primarily for end users and then not have those end users involved. By involving end users give the best support and result to give a good feel to the websites with collaborative process. They are best known as SMEs subject matter experts, the owners of the data to be uploaded and the consumers of the data.

As decisions and compromises are the primary communication method to the rest of the company, sharing what is changing decisions taken is a must. They give best quality assurance to the decisions being made and it makes sure it meets its expectations.

3. A Consistent Change Management Model: The key to successful change management is to ensure that the process is communicated well often transparent and that employees know the priorities of their requests. The longer one takes to provide the features and capabilities end users need to be productive, the more difficult task is in keeping those users engaged. They will often find other collaborative solutions to get their work accomplished and rarely will those alternatives meet the organization’s long-term goals for supportability and scalability.

End users involved in governance body is vital, but one cannot assume that they will always communicate the right message at the right cadence. Make change management a priority and a well-documented process with clear outputs such as dashboards, reporting, process for resolving conflicts.

4. Using Your Established Project Methodology: Most organizations have an established project management methodology with documentation templates, inputs and outputs and defined stages. One should utilize this methodology as much as possible, as people are familiar with it and understand their roles within the system — their inputs, their ability to review and sign-off on designs and so forth.

5. Have a Shared Understanding of Your Business Requirements: A sound governance strategy requires some semblance of understanding and agreement to further benefit collaboration. Needs frequently change and it is obvious. It is all part of a healthy change management model which involves ongoing need to reaffirm alignment with business goals. At the end of the day, the goal of technology initiative is to increase and improve business capabilities and deploying best business needs. Always have a clear line of sight between the business need and technology solution.

6. Have Clearly Defined Metrics and Auditing Criteria: Designing the right metrics such as business requirements, may change over time, so one has to make it part of regular audits and strategy review to walk through current metrics. This ensures measuring the right data points and encouraging the right behaviors within the system. As new requirements are ratified, always review measurements to ensure that they still apply and capture the data by meeting the needs of the everyday business.

7. Continually Optimize: The Total Quality Management (TQM) is an approach to organizational management processes that improves products and solutions through continuous feedback. It optimizes the system with rigorous feedback and make it usable and refined. The need to continually question the plan, improve upon it and iterate. Governance is not a static activity, therefore, one must include in governance planning a system of regular renewal. A structured approach will help to identify whether the technology is even a match - and help identify the gaps that need to be filled when it is not a perfect fit.

SharePoint plans infrastructure with the help of messaging tools and stakeholders assembled to address the requirements around structure and architecture, policies and standards, ownership and accountability, measurement and reporting, as well as ongoing efforts to automate and improve collaboration efforts within any organization. Therefore where there is governance SharePoint has to be there and it is popular for its flexible governance capabilities.

We provide SharePoint deployment planning services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

Comparing SharePoint 2013 with previous versions

SharePoint can be an extremely powerful tool, a well-designed solution for content, document and information management - a well-designed solution. SharePoint 2013 is an excellent improvisation which is increasingly mobile, increasingly social and all that promotes a greater collaborative atmosphere within the organization. With SP2013, it is possible to integrate social capabilities, organize, share and synchronize content properly. Now users can share their ideas and opinion with their colleagues continuously. SharePoint has been very popular technology in the web world which can be beneficial for enterprises and excellent platform for sharing content with others.

With the release of SP2013, there is a wide range of new features at disposal such as stronger search features, better cloud integration and infrastructure as well as content management. The 2013 release is an important one as the 2007 edition will no longer be supported, users have been upgrading to 2010 or 2013 versions nowadays. The SharePoint Connector supports SharePoint 2007, SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013. SharePoint Connector 1.8 supports all the above three versions.

Microsoft thinking beyond 2013

Microsoft is happy about SharePoint 2013 to get a better understanding of what’s new. In developing the product, it has taken care of the main obstacles for organisations deploying the 2010 version. SP2013 is specially designed keeping in mind app scalability for large business enterprises. It has been targeting all knds of business sectors with its new features and functionalities.

Comparison with SharePoint 2010:

• No Internet Explorer 7 support.
• With the purchase of Yammer, there is more emphasis on social media.
• Licensing: Internet sites no longer require an expensive licence, the cheaper standard server licence means that customers can host their internet and intranet on the same platform, reducing costs and providing more flexibility.
• Records and document management: no real change.
• Greater adoption of internet and open standards, enabling broader device support and integration with other services.
• Users can have SharePoint on premise, in the cloud, or a hybrid of both.
• The core ‘Search’ capability, based on FAST technology, is much richer.

Striking Features of SharePoint2013 which makes it stand apart:

Support for mobile devices

Mobility adoption is increasing within organizations and it is the topmost trend. The new version of SharePoint offers a rich platform for mobile development. Contemporary view which is HTML coded view provides a quick access across various mobile platforms like iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Improved BI Capabilities

SharePoint 2013 offers extended capabilities to generate business intelligence reports. Its ability to provide big data reports and BI solutions has been expanded with the new version. Also, the integration between SharePoint and Excel has also been improved for a smooth functioning. It offers a better Power Pivot program that makes it possible to work with plenty of rows and columns in memory, making it convenient for use. It is used to generate extensive reports that reflect the organizations growth and provides insights into the business.

Cloud reality

SharePoint 2013 is geared for the cloud, which is great, but there are still a few things to watch for. Cloud apps reduce infrastructure costs and risks. Now users can spend more time in quality management and performance improvement. With this new version, it is easy for the users to keep a track of updated technologies. Now you can deal with complex and long programs quickly.

On premise

Running SharePoint onsite means that one can add more functionality or have better integration with other line of business systems. It also means that it has more flexibility over compliance features such as Public Records Act requirements.

Private cloud

Using a private cloud means that one can have predictable bandwidth and performance, but it also means that storage and disaster recovery costs are more obvious. This means that one can have a clear separation between infrastructure and application administration.

Search

Search on SharePoint 2013 is a real highlight. It is much richer than internet or Google-type results.It also provides a facility wherein it is possible to view the outline of a document while scanning through the search results. And the fact that Search has now been integrated with the ‘Term Store’, which helps standardise company language across documents, means one can now refine search results even more. Other great features include the ability to preview content whenever its hovered, meaning that one can preview a PowerPoint presentation without opening it. The ‘bad’ is that Search requires more server resources and requires an enterprise licence for certain advanced Search features.

New content features

The ability to drag and drop files into a webpage

• End users can “share” files with others more simply
• Better developer support
• New database storage reduces the overhead of versioned documents
• With Office Web Apps one can now edit documents on iOS devices
• Much more flexibility around images
• Video support improvements.

Infrastructure management

You can now take a more flexible approach to infrastructure management with SharePoint 2013. This means that you can take a hybrid on-premise and cloud approach. This is great for small to medium businesses that might not have the beefy bandwidth that you would need to run SharePoint completely over the internet, but by purchasing “Apps” hosted in the cloud these “Apps” will appear to be running on your server.

There are some technical traps to be aware of however:

• Most customers will want to virtualise the SharePoint servers but they are resource intensive so should not be run on over committed hosts
• Beware of remote access requirements, which can cause slow access
• There’s no need to keep scanned and read-only files in SharePoint – it’s an expensive form of storage – it’s better to have a link to these resources in SharePoint
• Don’t underestimate the technical skills that SharePoint needs.
• Some of the SharePoint features require that other infrastructure and client components are all on the 2013 version. Fortunately SharePoint 2013 still allows to run 2010 sites, which means that one can leverage some new features like search, while continuing to use 2010 document libraries for Office 2010 users. This ability to run both in parallel is a key feature introduced in 2013 to help reduce the upgrade pain.
  

The new version SharePoint 2013 customizations helps control and manage all the different aspects of the web portals in a splendid way. SharePoint webparts enables to add dynamic functionality to the site, and enables to create different layouts for the mobile platform. Microsoft has already started receiving good vibes about SharePoint 2013 because businesses have started adopting to the new version. Custom SharePoint development teams are can help you migrate from older versions of SharePoint to SP2013 within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide SharePoint 2013 development services. We are glad to share that all our SharePoint developers are Microsoft certified. If you would like to talk to one of our developers before you take the decision to hire SharePoint developers from us, we would be glad to assist you at Mindfire Solutions.

15 free SharePoint tools to make IT admins smile

SharePoint is a rich tool and offers extensive features for a better, customized and organized work flow. It enables to make processes easier and swift that enables organizations to make the best out of their employees. It is the best CMS that enables to manage huge amount of content effectively.

We live in a competitive world and latest technologies emerge to enable to deliver the best results possible. SharePoint is Microsoft's tool that enables to build richer attractive websites. It is considered to be the most popular collaborative tool that provides all the necessary tools to manage people and content effectively. This platform makes it easy for employees of an organization to share ideas and engage smoothly in knowledge sharing activities.

Some of the free tools which helps admins while customizing their websites are as follows:

1. Microsoft's SharePoint Administration Toolkit 2.0 (for 2010 and 2007 versions)

Microsoft bakes a bunch of nice things into this little add-on, including a kit that generates test loads to check how well any SharePoint deployment runs. It includes another important addon for the Security Configuration Wizard so one can harden the profile of deployment through Windows Server 2008. The SPDiag 3.0 utility is most useful. It grabs a heap of statistics from all the servers in a SharePoint farm, interprets them and presents them in a very neat and customized report.

2. ManageEngine's Free SharePoint Health Monitor Tool

For smaller SharePoint deployment, this lightweight tool gives just an overall rollup of SharePoint farm's health status at a glance. The ManageEngine Free SharePoint Health Monitor fits this bill nicely, giving a conveniently efficient dashboard view where one can see the details about the memory, CPU and disk space usage for each server running SharePoint. It can be drilled down into the SharePoint workload itself to see the response time, service status, Web server (Internet Information Services) process details and even SQL Server details such as buffer cache hit ratio, cache memory and free pages.

3. IntLock's CardioLog Analytics Free Edition

If systems have a quarter of a million page views or fewer per month, one can use this free tool to help which finds out the sites employees are using, how long they are typically engrosed with those websites and what areas of those websites are most used. It installs quickly and is compatible with all kinds of versions of SharePoint, even the latest new SharePoint 2013. One can easily upgrade to the paid version where the free edition has all of the same features, with the only differences being the page view tracking limit and allowing for web-based support.

4. Microsoft's SharePoint Designer (for 2007, 2010 and 2013)

Designer is like the FrontPage web design tool of the SharePoint world. One can use it to customize the look and feel of SharePoint websites, create and modify simple workflows and personalize a SharePoint deployment at ease. If one have a large SharePoint deployment with multiple versions running at the same time, one must use the Designer version specific to the particular SharePoint edition.

5. Idera's Free SharePoint Admin Toolset

This is a combination of seven tools in one, a site monitor is present to check up on any SharePoint sites one manages, a space trends report to track using disk space on deployment for folders, libraries and websites, a handy accelerator that essentially rebuilds the database indexes on the SQL Server instance managing SharePoint deployment, a clean report to show how much SQL database space deployment is consuming, a permissions analyzer to show what users can access which specific websites and libraries, a smart tool to compare the configurations of site collections to see where they are different and a quick admin tool that brings together most frequently used links to SharePoint Central Administration. A very smart tool set to make tasks easier and smart way to deal with.

6. Idera's Free SharePoint Performance Monitor

To have a detailed information at what is happening under the hood of any SharePoint farm, this great tool Idera's Free SharePoint Performance Monitor is used. This tool gives a holistic overview of the performance statistics and metrics for SharePoint itself, the SQL Server instance on any given server and information about the host's operating system and memory configuration. The tool also can be configured to send simple e-mail alerts when one of the performance indicators does not work. One can also monitor multiple websites at a time for their deployments and one can generate nifty graphs and charts about connections, requests, response time, pages, disk usage and many more.

7. McAfee's Network Discovery for Microsoft SharePoint

It is a good SharePoint-specific inventory tool. If one has overall responsibility for a network, one might not even know if one of departments has deployed a SharePoint server. The McAfee Network Discovery Tool for Microsoft SharePoint will scan the network to find SharePoint 2003, 2007 and 2010 environments and then display the results of its scan in a nice neat HTML report that shows in detail which servers have been deployed and what version they're running.

8. Axceler's ViewPoint for SharePoint

This is a great tool for visualizing in a convenient table form exactly which users have what permissions on any given site. This could be very useful in an auditing scenario or any environment where permissions can tighten without granting full access to users needlessly. One can choose to work from the graphical dashboard, to run and print reports to provide to management or to work through with any administrative tools. It works with both SharePoint 2010 as well as SharePoint 2013 deployments. It even requires full SharePoint administrator permissions to do its job properly.

9. Quest's Server Administrator for SharePoint

This great tool is suitable on SharePoint 2007 and 2010. It lets to see which parts of farm configuration are affecting the security, performance and availability of deployment. It helps to build PowerShell scripts to maintain environment. It also helps with a migration to SharePoint 2010 from 2007, required to get to SharePoint 2013 as well, by showing which parts of deployment are ready for the upgrade and which are not. And it provides an intelligent rating to show what is most important to upgrade before one begin against what would simply be "nice to have."

10. SharePoint SUSHI

SharePoint SUSHI is an open source project hosted on CodePlex that essentially takes the most common administrative tasks and puts them in one convenient tool. SUSHI, which bills itself as a "Swiss army knife for SharePoint," stands for SharePoint Utilities with a smart and useful interface. One can view the lists and sites of any given user can access, which is really helpful for looking at effective permissions, upload user photos as profile images, back up and restore sites; apply a theme to a group of sites with one click and much more.

11. Clockwork Software

It is SharePoint Migration Tool, reliable migration of documents from old ECMS to SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013. From any SQL Server based ECMS (EDRMS, DMS, CMS) with files stored on a network drive or share. ECMSs such as Hummingbird DM6, DOCs Open, Worksite, FileNet etc. Migrate all versions and metadata (including managed metadata).

- Migrate to SharePoint libraries and folders
- Apply document level security if desired
- Currently in use on migration projects totalling about 2 million documents
- Good for small migrations with a cost effective pricing scheme.

12. Metalogix

It can migrate content into SharePoint from just about any source system. From one SharePoint version to another (2003, 2007, 2010, WSSv2 or WSSv3), from various Enterprise Content Management systems (eRoom, Stellent, Livelink) and from file systems, exchange public folders, blogs and websites.

13. PCVITA Express Migrator

It is SharePoint comprehensive too designed for enterprise to migrate content to SharePoint as part of SharePoint migration strategy that goes above and beyond other traditional SharePoint migration software, thereby allowing to have visually architected migration. It provides an effective and simple solution for enterprise to migrate their business-critical data from different repositories (Lotus Notes, File Share, File System, Public Folder and SharePoint etc) to Microsoft SharePoint Server. The SharePoint migration product granularly migrates content while keeping all the associated metadata & permission intact.

14. Vyapin

A powerful tool for developing SharePoint application for migrating documents, NTFS permissions, data and their associated metadata properties from network file shares, file servers and local hard drives to Microsoft SharePoint 2013, Office 365 (SharePoint Online), SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2007. Here are the list of functions it provides such as migrate folders and files into SharePoint libraries from various file servers and network shares. Carry forward default file properties, including custom Office document properties to the respective documents in SharePoint. Automate entire migration process, with the ability to correct and rectify migration errors using the pre-migration validation tool. Migrate content from file shares to on-premise SharePoint servers and SharePoint Online in Office 365 (Standard) environment using a single application.

15. Tzunami

This Deployer tool offers a cost-effective solution for migrating and consolidating multiple content sources into SharePoint. It supports almost all versions of SharePoint, from SPS 2001 to SharePoint 2013. Automating the entire process of migrating unstructured content. SharePoint offers multiple benefits for enterprises big and small. It is for this reason that enterprises are stressing on this particular technology for enabling them to function optimally. It enables to increase employee productivity and enables them to remain more focused with their work. It can function as an effective content management system, document management tool and collaborative platform. Businesses have profited much more with this awesome tool and it has enabled to enhance business initiatives. To get maximum benefits of Sharepoint, you may consider hiring services of a certified SharePoint development company to assist you in your development needs.

We provide SharePoint site migration services. If you would like to talk to one of our certified SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

Why Executives Are Resisting SharePoint's Social Tools?

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.

Interoperability between Java and SharePoint 2013

Every time a software company brings out a new technology or product in the market, the focus is directed towards the endeavor of catering to the demands of users/customers concerning a specific functionality. Owing to such a need, companies often take route to creating an all – inclusive administrative solutions with the aim of selling a complete package. However, it must be noted that all documents and data created within the system often holds onto an importance, which reaches beyond commercial lifetime of a particular application of creation.

The importance of documents and data often surpasses the actual scope of parent or main application. For instance, documents that have been created in a proprietary system of document management might require an access from a corporate intranet or data present within system of custom relationship management might serve as an input to process of business documents creation.

Now, introduction of SharePoint 2013 has brought into fore the prospect of an effortless integration between a particular application and other external systems that has been implemented within technologies that are not of Microsoft. Well, in such a scenario, the RESTfull web service of SharePoint API increases communication with web application of Java. The chrome control of SharePoint enables the web application of Java to feature a similar kind of styling to that of hosted website.

The Layer of Communication with SharePoint

The web application of Java communicates to a car list in the hosted web, which is referred to as the Interopl and the data list is named as the Cars. The list features columns referring to the model, bran, and price. This particular application is named the Cars App and here is a quick look at the dependencies of the same within Java implementation.

• json-lib 2.4 – helper classes influencing Json objects
• resteasy-jaxrs 2.2.1.GA – RESTEasy enabled an easy access of the RESTfull SharePoint API
• commons-httpclient 3.1- dependent on RESTEasy
• httpclient 4.1.1 - dependent on RESTEasy
• spring-web 2.5.6
• spring-core 2.5.6
• spring-webmvc 2.5.6
• commons-logging 1.1.1

The Car service has been defined in order to write and read into Cars list featuring declaration file CarService.java. The implementation of Cars service features a member variable, which define parameters of authentication along with web service URIs endpoints pertaining to SharePoint and Cars list field names.

The particular service also incorporates a number of helper methods. The callRestEasyService helper methods read the data by conducting a HTTP Get as against the RESTfull API of SharePoint. The URI that is given in the req parameter defines just what is being recovered and retrieved. It strictly follows the protocol syntax of OData. In this particular scenario, it would refer to the items of the Car list.

To go for object creation in SharePoint through the RESTfull API, which refers to the Cars list items, it is required to provide a Form Digest, which can easily accessible via a POST To the hosted web endpoint “/_api/contextinfo”. The addRestEasyRetrieveDigest helper conducts the posts and goes through Form Digest. The actual definition of URI is given in the urlDigest of the variable.

The addRestEasyPost helper enables object creation in SharePoint through POSTs as mentioned in the protocol of OData. This particular method helps adding cars to the particular list. The parameter req features the URI of object creation, which refers to the Cars list here. Another detail that is often regarded while creating objects is the need of stating the type. In the particular list, the items refer to the SP.Data.CarsListItem type, which follows the convention SP.Data.<ListName>ListItem.

The parseJsonDigestValue helper method integrates the JSON response from the “/_api/contextinfo” endpoint recovering the form digest.

The parseJson helper translates the response of the JSON to the payload class of Cars retrieving the list.The Cars service explains the method getCars to read the items; whereas, the technique insertCar is used to write the items.

Custom SharePoint development teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide Java and SharePoint Integration services. If you would like to talk to one of our expert SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.

SharePoint nuke complete integration - 10 Things you should not miss

DotNetNuke Corporation, a premier provider of adaptive web software which keeps the online presence of a business effective and relevant, came up with the availability of an improved SharePoint integration in the year 2012. This new SharePoint Connector is capable of rendering support to SharePoint 2007 as well as the 2010 version. It offers seamless integration between outstanding document management and web content management solution of DotNetNuke. Here we bring to you certain best practices which you must consider for proper integration.

1. Document Management: SharePoint is the finest document management system that is applicable for all businesses irrespective of the size. Utilizing this system, which is built within the cloud in order to make room for maximum accessibility and storage, group members are able to collaborate and share an apparently unlimited quantity of data and documents. It effectively integrates with Outlook and makes use of social tools for amplifying the organized, collaborative, atmosphere. It also facilitates transformation of raw data into interactive, beautiful reports by team members.

2. Integration with SharePoint: Automatic integration of DotNetNuke is possible, which implies that if the system is operated, no additional work is needed. But, when it comes to DNN Community, it can also integrate quite comfortably through custom modules. The goal is to develop a system which enables SharePoint to go for effective communication from behind firewalls with the public-facing website. This indicates that you will be capable of pushing documents towards a portal efficiently as well as safely on your DNN website. Filter rules can also be designed in order to find out where individual documents are going.

3. The DNN Enterprise: For those utilizing SharePoint as the document management system, and wishing to integrate the same into their website, the Nuke Enterprise edition is a good choice. With the help of this edition, custom integration is possible at a highly affordable cost. Through the connector, firewall issues can be bypassed and the content can be kept fresh, while publishing directly from the Document Library. Every document that is published is offered protection by the DNN role-oriented security network.

4. Avoidance of Firewall: Many companies make use of SharePoint as the document library and DNN as the public-facing website. In most cases this implies that the SharePoint server resides within the trusted zone while the DNN is made available to the public. All communications that take place between the two servers begin from the SharePoint server. This feature can be used without making any kind of modifications to the security policy.

5. Leveraging filtering views: The built-in views provided by document management system for filtering facilitate the use of the Create View UI. The views that have already been created can be used without the requirement for maintenance of two distinct filter sets. More time can be spent for development of core features as the time spent on development of filtering and associated UI features is reduced to a great extent.

6. Extended web application: When there is already a SharePoint web application making use of Active Directory for authentication, the same can be extended to support users from DotNetNuke. For this a DNS or hosts file entry needs to be created for the upcoming SharePoint site.

7. Modification of web.config files: A number of changes need to be considered within the web.config file in the SharePoint application. Before making any kind of modifications, it is advisable to create a backup.

8. Taking care of file size: With respect to the file size, DotNetNuke possesses an option beneath the host settings which limits the file size on the website. The files are compared against that number by the Connector. Files bigger than the stipulated limits of the website are not published.

9. Deletion from the document management system: In case “propagate deletions” is selected, the file that is deleted from the document management system also gets deleted from DNN. However, if the deleted file possesses references from a module, it will reveal broken links.

10. Handling permissions: Remember that permissions from a SharePoint to a DNN site are managed by DNN’s security model. It is not possible to manage permissions across SharePoint and DNN. This in because, in a number of cases, users and roles are different when it comes to the intranet and the public website.

Seamless integration, when effectively accomplished, empowers organizations to securely and effectively publish documents directly from SharePoint into their respective exterior-facing websites. Custom SharePoint development teams can help you build projects within allocated budgets and time schedules.

We provide SharePoint application development services. If you would like to talk to one of our expert SharePoint developers, please get in touch with us at Mindfire Solutions.